Case Study: Low Quantity Manufacturing

With today’s emphasis on small production runs, less inventory and just in time delivery, there has been a paradigm shift in the Metal Stamping Business where more work is being fabricated on Laser and Punching Equipment and formed on Press Breaks and less work is being done on the OBI Punch Presses with Progressive Dies.

When material requirements are the same on different parts, this allows us to nest parts on a single sheet of material 5’ X 10’. Our special software can put multiples of different shapes on one sheet, keeping the cost to a minimum and actually make parts for different customers at the same time. We have two Laser cutters: one 3500 Watt, and one 4000 Watt. These two machines are automatically fed sheets of material from a tower which can hold ten different types of material. This allows the two machines to run 24/7 with the "program" calling for the material to be used as needed and the finished sheets deposited in a stack for parts removable at a later time.

When the situation requires, we combine using our Turret Punching Machines to pierce clean holes, and then transfer the sheets to our Lasers to cut out the different shapes from one sheet of material. It is important to be able to combine both the punching and the cutting operations in order to satisfy many of our customer's quality requirements.

We constantly monitor the cost of manufacturing, and should the customer's quantities build to where it would be more cost effective to build a progressive die and run the parts on a press where you would get a completed part with each stroke of the press, we recommend that to our customer.