Level 3 – Increase flexibility and lights-out time with shared tools
Difficult to cut materials, a high number of cutting tools or machines, expensive tools, short tool lives – if you recognize any of these in your machine shop, you might want to learn about how tool automation could improve your business. Our previous cutting tool post touched on improving quality and reducing scrap by integrating a tool presetter with the production control system. In this post we go into tool automation!
In simple terms, the idea of tool automation is to schedule and share tools between multiple machines in order to:
- improve machine tool utilization and lights-out production time,
- invest less in sister tools and large machine tool magazines,
- reduce the manual work around tool transfers, and
- remove tool mix-up errors.
How does it work in practice? Read the full blog post and learn more about the third step in implementing best practice in tool management. Read how you can achieve a machine utilisation of around 90% and also how you can reduce your investment in expensive sister tools and machine magazines.
