Sheet metal manufacturing companies are being squeezed with these price rises while, at the same time, trying to keep their costs down and prices as competitive as possible for their customers. This has encouraged them to look at ways of reducing the impact of material cost volatility.
Lantek is a technology leader in the sheet metal industry with over 29,000 customers and has been working for over 30 years to bring software solutions to the industry to improve efficiency, raise productivity and quality and reduce costs. With the current pressures in the industry, its software solutions can have a significant impact on the effect of rising costs, helping manufacturers to get the maximum possible finished and high-quality components from each sheet of material.
Lantek has three key areas where it can help manufacturers to cut costs. Firstly, with its automatic nesting algorithms for both sheet and tube material. These have been developed in collaboration with Lantek’s customers, OEM partners and with academic institutions. Functions such as nesting within larger apertures in big parts, mixing parts from different customers on the same sheet all go towards optimizing material usage. Lantek’s software also keeps track of remnants of material left over from previous jobs enabling them to be reused to further optimize sheet utilization. Other features in the software actively avoid collisions adding micro joints and altering lead-ins to ensure parts are not scrapped during manufacture, eliminating waste from poor quality or damaged parts.
Accurate production planning plays a major role in material saving. Lantek MES has been designed to make it easy to collate parts by parameters such as material type, thickness and delivery date. With this information, parts can be easily mixed from different projects, reducing inventory in the workshop, shortening delivery times and maximizing the possibility of efficiently nesting many different size parts in one sheet, optimizing material utilization.
Lantek MES goes further in its ability to manage the entire production process including cutting, folding painting etc., keeping track of inventories of parts, material and scrap for each operation, allocating material to particular projects and tracking material price changes to ensure that manufacturing remains profitable.
With Lantek, manufacturers can go a stage further with Lantek Analytics, analyzing data from the production process and from each machine and type of operation. With this information managers can find the real OEE performance of each machine or process, the tons of final parts made compared with the tons of material processed and similar key data. With this information, inefficient operations and machines can be quickly identified as can excessive material usage. Managers can then use the data to make decisions on how to rectify the problems from a position of knowledge enabling them to make better decisions while effectively minimizing material costs. Lantek’s Nesting, MES and Analytics are all fully integrated and work together to help manufacturers remain successful in a volatile market.
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