Strange Engineering http://www.strangeengineering.net/ located in Morton Grove, IL manufacturers drive line and suspension products for drag racing recently purchased a wireless CIMCO DNC system from Machinery Systems.

Most of our customers were thrilled when their newer machines began to be delivered with extended memory.  This gave them an opportunity to load their machines with many part programs.  However, as John McGivern, General Manager of Strange Engineering, stated, “We found ourselves setting up the same job to run on several machines, depending on what machine was available, and then as we went to rerun the job we were never really sure which machine memory held the most current part program.  Sometimes we were half way through the job when we realized the cycle time wasn’t what we expected only to find out that we were running the wrong part program." 

Now, all of this data will be managed and transferred electronically.  The machine running the part will always have the latest part program.  Set-up instructions will be stored electronically with complete and accurate part descriptions along with photographic documentation of the set-up and fixtures.  They will also include the most recent cycle time in the electronic file.  With their new system only a few staff members will be authorized to change anything.  They will always know who made the change, when and why.

Ron Melton, Manufacturing Manager, told us a real manufacturing horror story. Somebody started throwing out set-up sheets from their manual files just because they thought that was the right thing to do… a simple but costly error.  Things like this are not possible with the DNC system.  When asked if the shop ever failed to make a part under the old manual system.  He said, “No, we always managed to make the part to print, but sometimes it just took a long time to gather all the data and to check if it was current.”   When asked how much time he expects to save with the new DNC system, he said he wasn’t sure yet, but at a very minimum ten minutes just from walking to and from the office to get the set-up file.

Another benefit is daily safe backup of all part program data.  The potential plant nightmare of occasionally losing all machine memory is, of course, eliminated.  The DNC system will be backed up daily by the company’s mainframe.  As Chris Sieber, Manufacturing Manager, said, “It was really scary to keep the programs in the machine and depend upon that as our primary source of correct part information.  Also, we were tying a person up carrying programs to the machines via laptop and then requiring the operators to search out set-up sheets in a separate manual file located in the shop office.  This was very inefficient.”

Finally, we asked John why they chose Machinery Systems as their DNC vendor.  "Because we have comfort in your expertise and knowledge.  We wanted to know what you recommend in this area because we have confidence in what you say."