No matter the industry, businesses always want to stay ahead of emerging trends. Be it shifts in technology, labor or customer expectations, these trends ultimately dictate where businesses invest their money. In the manufacturing industry, the lack of labor has incited a flood of automation investments – so much so that robots and storage towers are no longer a rarity for mid-size or even small fabricators.
But the skills gap persists, which means that investments in automation are trending in new directions. Fabricators need more than standalone automation; they need fully integrated systems.
At the same time, another growing trend is causing businesses to re-evaluate the way their parts are processed: Rising laser power levels allow fabricators to work with increasingly thicker materials, which lays a heavy burden on staff that are already spread thin.
Equipment manufacturers are in the business of staying ahead of trends, as well. As fabricators are increasingly assessing the process of cutting heavy plate and moving it downstream to produce finished parts, OEMs like Mazak Optonics Corp. are combining cutting, drilling, tapping and other machining processes into a single automated workflow.
Heavy-duty workflow
Over the years, fabricators have become quite adept at using their flatbed fiber laser cutting machines. In addition to cutting, they can perform a whole slew of light operations on thin-gauge materials. But, when material thicknesses increase, tasks like countersinking end up being too time consuming, making them impractical on the laser. Staff, therefore, must move the heavy material from the laser to a dedicated machining operation to free up the laser for more efficient cutting jobs.
But physically transferring heavy material is also inefficient and rough on employees. As an alternative, the Smart Driller from Mazak closes the gap between 2-D laser cutting and machining operations. Rather than slowing down the laser with secondary processes, Mazak designed the Smart Driller as an automated module that works in conjunction with the company’s Ez Compact Tower system. Seamlessly and without manual labor, thick parts move from laser cutting to drilling, tapping and light milling – creating a heavy-duty smart factory of sorts.
“The Smart Driller is an attachment module for our Ez Compact Tower solution, which has been available for a few years,” says Jacob Fogarty, installation engineer at Mazak. “With the additional module, pre-cut material from the laser is transferred to a machining station for drilling, tapping, countersinking, counterboring and light milling features. Because this is all accomplished outside of the laser, any machining that’s required won’t slow down or interfere with cut time on the laser.
“We’re a laser cutting company first,” he adds, “so our goal is to keep beam on-time as high as possible.”
Because the Smart Driller is an attachment module for the Ez Compact Tower, it can’t be purchased as a standalone drilling machine. However, pre-existing Mazak laser machine customers that are ready to scale up can build onto their laser machines. When the time is ready, they can invest in a tower and then add the Smart Driller later. Or, customers can purchase the complete cell, which includes the laser cutter, tower and Smart Driller machining station.
“We have a lot of customers that start with a single laser, add a tower later and then add the Smart Driller after that,” Fogarty says. “That being said, we sold the entire system that we exhibited at Fabtech and actually just finished installing it at the customer site.”
Regardless of the route to get there, the Smart Driller relieves shops of the old, manual way of machining a part. With the tower acting as the bridge between laser cutting and machining, gone are the days of dragging heavy parts to a separate machining center or table for manual drilling. Customers achieve reductions in material handling and the potential for human error as well as major boosts to accuracy and throughput. The setup delivers a plethora of benefits – proving yet again why the industry has been trending toward fully integrated manufacturing.
Opening doors
The trend toward higher laser power levels is allowing fabricators to cut thicker plate and is, in turn, opening the door to an entirely new set of customers in structural, agricultural and heavy machinery applications. To properly service these new customers while not overburdening staff, the Smart Driller is especially helpful.
“The integrated workflow allows parts to move from the laser to the next process, perhaps welding or painting, without the additional step of being transferred to a machining center or doing it by hand, which is even more labor intensive,” Fogarty says. “We see it all the time in these heavy industries where you have some guy over in the corner tapping holes into big plates with a manual driller arm. It doesn’t look like a lot of fun.”
Clearly, automation is central to the Smart Driller’s value proposition. The tower acts as a buffer between the laser and the machining station managing material flow and enabling lights-out production. Not every part needs secondary machining at the Smart Driller, though, which is when the tower system flexes its traditional duties: automatically routing parts where they need to go.
In terms of programming, customers can also rely on Mazak’s legacy software to flex its traditional duties. As has been true for their laser cutting operations, the software uses real-time monitoring on the Smart Driller to track tool wear and flag issues for the operator to address.
“Customers can expect the same quality and accuracy they’ve always received from Mazak because everything is accomplished inside of the same software suite,” Fogarty explains. “The cutting and machining – as well as the material handling – is happening within the same system and is all originating from the same part files. That also means that customers don’t have to worry about the common mistakes that come from manual work.”
Those common mistakes could be as simple as rotating a part the wrong way when transferring it from the laser to the machining station. If it’s placed on a table upside down and the counter bore is placed on the wrong side of the part, recutting it is costly from both a material and time standpoint.
The seamless integration of the Smart Driller solves a range of common issues and is made possible in part due to Mazak’s pre-existing equipment offerings. Mazak was uniquely positioned to develop the Smart Driller because of its deep roots in both laser cutting and machining. With more than 100 years as a global leader in CNC machinery, Yamazaki Mazak Corp. has long understood both sides of the manufacturing equation.
“Mazak’s divisions – Optonics and Machining – are both integrated under the global Mazak brand,” Fogarty says. “As the largest producer of machine tools in the world, machining has long been the bread and butter in that division of the company. Understanding how customers were using that equipment was what prompted the development of the Smart Driller. We have plenty of customers that would cut plate on their Mazak laser and then move it over to their Mazak mill. We saw an opportunity to streamline the process.”
Saving space
In terms of the space that’s required, the complete laser–tower–machining station cell inherently saves a fabricator space when compared to the traditional setup of disconnected machines spread across a shop floor. When fully configured around a Mazak 3015 fiber laser cutting machine, Ez Compact Tower and Smart Driller, the system occupies about 2,000 sq. ft.
“The system we took to Fabtech measured 42 ft. by 52 ft.,” Fogarty says, “which is big, but not unmanageable.”
And that, of course, includes the laser, the tower and the machining station that are working together. Because the flow of material is centralized, there’s no need for staging areas or extra space to separate the standalone pieces of equipment.
“A lot of space gets eaten up with the laser and the machining center plus the pile of plates stacked up on a pallet over there or the other material on a set of racks over there,” Fogarty says. “Add in the fact that you need to have enough room for a forklift to maneuver around everything, and that, actually, could require more space.”
While 42-ft.-by-52-ft. may sound substantial, the comparison isn’t simply machine-to-machine; it’s one workcell versus a scattered, spread-out workflow. On top of that, Fogarty adds that the tower was originally designed with saving space in mind.
“We call our tower the Ez Compact for a reason,” he says. “We want to keep everything as contained as possible.”
Right rationale
As is true with its laser and machining equipment, Mazak’s experience with tower storage systems is also deep-rooted. Fogarty says that Mazak started offering storage towers almost as soon as the company first introduced its laser systems.
“With the ever-persistent labor issue, we are seeing a lot more sales of automation systems with our lasers,” he says. “When I started eight years ago, about 20 to 25 percent of our laser sales came with automation. Now, we’re looking at 50 or 60 percent.”
As has been the case with automation, some trends eventually become the norm. The same is happening with thick material cutting. Over the past few years, fiber laser technologies, such as dynamic beam modification capabilities, have improved thick material cutting. Now, higher power levels are facilitating that, as well.
“A lot of focus has been placed on optimizing thick plate cutting,” Fogarty says. “It’s become so easy to cut the thin stuff, but now we’re finally able to tap into the structural, heavy machinery side of the industry. It’s exciting to be able to give them the kind of quality that they need in their parts, but at a much more reduced cost and higher speed than what they’re used to.”
Breaking into those new markets often requires additional equipment investments. But Fogarty says that for the Smart Driller, the path to a fast ROI comes through the reduction or elimination of manual operator interventions alongside increased accuracy and decreased rework.
“The people you employ have better things to do than lug heavy parts around,” he says. “They’re way more valuable than that. We want operators operating machines, making sure everything is running smoothly and checking quality. We don’t want them loading heavy material, unloading heavy parts and then loading more heavy material again. That becomes very labor intensive and very tiring. And it certainly isn’t fun for the employees. You see high turnover rates when that kind of work is involved.”
Beyond the labor and material savings that are inherent to automation ROI, Mazak’s software was developed to keep costs down, as well. It can help customers track the progress of parts, calculate the time it takes to produce them and estimate the cost of inputs involved to properly quote their work.
“There’s a lot of good knowledge in the industry, but it’s a lot of tribal knowledge that’s hard to teach and expensive to acquire,” Fogarty says. “So, while the veterans in the shop probably know exactly how long it takes to make a specific part, they won’t always be there.”
In the end, the fabricators that get ahead of emerging trends and expand their operations into thicker materials and more complex work, will benefit. But the question for them isn’t whether to automate; It’s how far to take it.
Structural steel work is an exciting area for fabricators to explore. As laid out in this article, however, there are tools that can make the work easier and better. To explore more of those tools, Techgen Media has an archive of structural articles to check out.
