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Building a Better Machine Not every manufacturing company upgrades for strategic reasons. Some, like $5-million BG Fuel Systems, which makes custom carburetors, fuel pumps, and fuel-injection systems, are simply looking to improve quality and productivity. BG Fuel, which is based in Dahlonega, Ga., got what it was after -- boosting sales significantly in the process -- by replacing manual design and manual tooling with CAD/CAM and CNC machines.
A former heavy-truck mechanic and weekend car racer, Barry Grant launched BG Fuel 10 years ago with a $2,000 investment. Working in an unheated shop without running water, Grant and one employee manually measured and removed imperfections in stock Holley carburetors. They sold the finished products to racers looking for an edge from improved flow rates.
But the company's cash flow couldn't keep pace. At one point money was so tight that Grant and his wife rented out their house and moved into the shop for six months. In an attempt to turn the business around, Grant took what he'd read about CNC machines and applied it to his business, figuring that the machines could remove from carburetors variations no wider than a hair. To educate himself further, he started going to machine-shop shows. But despite all the book learning, Grant's initial forays into high-tech manufacturing were just short of disastrous.
Take his first big purchase: a CNC machine he took out a seven-year bank note to buy. The $150,000 unit was supposed to improve precision and productivity, but Grant's wife, Aleta, was skeptical. Her reaction: "It looks like a dumpster." That turned out to be a fairly apt description. Grant had to threaten to have the machine hauled off before the vendor got it to work.
But whatever buyer's remorse Grant had was short-lived. Today he owns four CNC machines (two from Mazak, 606-727-5700, a Mazak Machining Center V515 and a Mazak Mill/Turning Center Superquick Turn 18 MS Mark II; and two from Fadal Engineering, 818-407-1400, a three-axis machining center model VMC 4020 and a five-axis machining center model VMC 6030 with TR 65), and his company has nearly $1.5 million invested in CNC and CAD/CAM equipment. BG Fuel's employees now use a digital probe to measure carburetor castings. The data are fed directly into the company's CAD system, Pro/Engineer. After a new casting is designed, sans imperfections, an engineer loads the design specs into one of two CAM packages, SurfCAM (from SurfWare, 800-787-3927) or TekSoft (from TekSoft, 602-942-4982), which writes the CNC program. To keep track of its numerous machine-control programs, BG Fuel uses a package called Applied CIM, part of the M-Ware manufacturing execution system from Applied Statistics (612-481-0202). Between machining carburetors -- the system allows the shop's 50 employees to produce 6,000 carburetors a year -- and making fuel pumps and regulators, BG Fuel's CNC machines are running 24 hours a day. Grant's only regret: "We should have brought in the technology sooner," he says. "We would have been that much further ahead."
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Taking Control Machine shops aren't the only businesses that can benefit from better shop-floor technology. Consider Seattle-based Pacific Coast Feather Co. (PCF), an $86-million manufacturer of pillows and comforters that was able to pursue a new marketing strategy -- and slash labor costs by about 30% -- by adding new process-control systems to its feather-processing plant, in Marysville, Wash.
The small company had never been able to compete on price with larger manufacturers of down and feather products. So to earn the business of customers such as JC Penney and Kmart, it decided to focus on quality and on customizing its designs for retailers. "The problem was that we couldn't charge any more for those advantages," says Joff Hanauer, vice-president of manufacturing. "We needed them just to get our foot in the door."
One obstacle to the company's pursuit of quality was the relatively crude process control at Marysville. Bales of compressed feathers and down, some of them weighing up to 1,000 pounds, arrive every couple of days from overseas for cleaning and sorting. After being loaded into huge washers and doused with cleaning chemicals, the feathers are washed and dried, and then transferred to 30-foot-high separating machines. There, circulating air blows the lighter down clusters and the heavier feathers into different chambers, from which they are packed into 50-pound bags. The separation process is especially important because low-grade feathers sell for just 50¢ a pound, while top-grade down clusters go for nearly 100 times that.
Until 1992, PCF's German-made Lorch feather-processing machines were mostly controlled by plastic punch cards and timers. Adjusting a machine meant making a whole new card -- a difficult process. By replacing the mechanical controls with programmable logic controllers (PLCs) from Siemens AG of Germany (212-258-4000) and electronic meters, the plant was able to better control cleaning and drying. The old method blindly advanced a load from drying to separating based on time. The PLCs wait until the humidity drops to a specified level before advancing the load.
There is a drawback to PLCs: they must be programmed by experts. Hanauer says PCF solved the problem by installing man-machine interface (MMI) software from Wonderware Corp. (714-727-3200). The software, InTouch, runs on a PC located on the factory floor and connected to the plant's PLCs. It provides on-screen graphical representations of the devices used to control the processing equipment and sets off audio alarms when problems crop up.
Hanauer puts the price of upgrading at close to $150,000. That figure doesn't include the three weeks of downtime it took to install and debug the equipment -- another $100,000 by his estimate. "The capital requirements of this technology aren't huge," Hanauer says, "but deploying it can be costly."
