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In 1885, James Trane, a Norwegian immigrant, opened a plumbing workshop in La Crosse (Wisconsin) that quickly became very successful. In 1913, he created "The Trane Company" and invented the convector and a steam low-pressure heating system. From then on, with his son Reuben, he entered the air-conditioning market and in the following decades, launched several technological innovations that propelled the small company among the biggest names of the industry: first air-conditioning unit in 1931, first semi air-tight centrifuge machine in 1938, during World War II, creation of a new technique allowing the manufacturing of smaller and lighter heat exchangers… The introduction of the absorption iced water generator in 1959 enabled Trane to develop the three basic systems for cooling devices. Trane now offers a very large range of products manufactured in its plants located in twenty countries. Founded in 1965 and in the 70’s, the Golbey / Epinal and Charmes sites in the Vosges region now employ 1,200 persons. The Charmes plant manufactures the large air-conditioning and cooling units (from 200 to 1,500 kW) that can reach 14 m in length, whereas Golbey’s five assembly lines mainly produce small and medium air-conditioning units (under 4 m long). In 2003 a project was launched to centralize the sheet-metal production facilities of both plants on the Golbey site, that is to say around 25 punching-nibbling machines and press brakes. Objective: to standardize the material in order to orientate folding, to manage the flows by thickness for better balance of production loads, to rationalize the work in process by using orders and no longer non-flexible ranges. This is why the company chose act/cut to pilot all Trumpf and Amada punching-nibbling machines in replacement of the software installed in Charmes and the Lantek system used in Golbey since 2001. act/cut has been preferred to this system for its higher performance in automatic nesting, its capacity of operating in integral batch mode and using CAD/CAM data to group parts together for launches. The ergonomics and user friendliness of Alma’s system were also appreciated by the users. The implementation of act/cut started in March 2003 with the programming of a new Trumpf T2020R machine equipped with a "Sheetmaster" system for the loading of sheets and the unloading of nestings cut in micro-junctions. In January 2004, after the definitive move of sheet-metal working to Golbey, the scope of the software was extended to a Trumpf 500R machine coming from Charmes and two Amada Pega machines. Three other Trumpf punching machines (models T190 and T260) will soon be integrated to act/cut. The following operations, DXF import of part geometries from CAD, automatic and semi-automatic allocation of tools, import of manufacturing orders from the Management system and creation of launching files after automatic gathering of parts by machine / material / thickness combination, are implemented on three "Methods" workstations. A floating license installed in the workshop then enables the machine operators to trigger the automatic creation of the NC program on demand: nesting, calculation of machining sequence and tool paths are executed in batch mode without any human intervention. If this mode is not applicable to all programs, it is more important for the users to have software automated as much as possible, which enables them to significantly reduce preparation times. Thus, Olivier Frey, Methods engineer responsible for the project of rationalizing sheet-metal working at Trane’s, estimates that act/cut allows the preparation of 24-hour production on the T2020 machine in 60 minutes, that is to say about 160 different nestings on average. For the T500 machine whose programming requires more interactivity, the ratio is still of a hundred programs for only 2 and a half hours of programming. The rationalization started with sheet formats (eight different formats currently used), combined with the act/cut nesting performance, reduced the offcut rate by 10 points on the parts manufactured in Golbey and to be mounted in the Charmes plant. Indeed, the offcut rate of the T500R machine fell from 35 % before the transfer to 25,5 % since this machine was programmed with act/cut in Golbey. On an annual consumption of around 3 000 tones of material, it is easy to imagine how much has been saved... The flexibility introduced by act/cut also helps save time: thanks to the internal organization of the software, it is easy to switch from one machine to another one without having to reprogram it. After several months of use, the results are very positive, Alma’s solution being perfectly integrated to this ambitious project of reorganizing the sheet-metal manufacturing that will nevertheless only be fully operational end of 2004. Trane and Alma will also continue working together to further automate the software, notably for punching under the clamps and common slitting. The location of parts also representing a difficulty in the organization of production, Trane would like to equip the punching machines with a marking system to identify the parts, function already managed by act/cut. The collaboration between Trane and Alma does not only concern act/cut and fine sheet-metal working since the welding managers of the Charmes site recently chose the act/weld off-line programming solution to program an IGM RT 330 robot being installed on the exchanger manufacturing line. The off-line programming was initially planned after the fully satisfactory operation of the robot, but Alma’s solution demonstrated obvious productivity gains considering the complexity of the parts to be welded and the ease of selection of the seams to be welded from 3D CAD models (example: you can select the contour of a cylinder / cylinder intersection with only one mouse click). Therefore, the complementarity of the range products enables Alma to position itself as a global CAD/CAM supplier for Trane. Alma is proud to be trusted by this dynamic customer who recently installed act/cut in Charmes in replacement of the Rimbaud software commissioned by Alma in 1990 to program a plasma cutting machine Esab. |
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© 2004 Alma |
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Visit Trane's corporate website: www.trane.com |
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