When I started Micro-Mechanics nearly 30 years ago, you could really think about your business

machine by machine. You could uby a fairly complex piece of equipment but you could bring

it in and within a day or two you could be up running. Those days, in my opinion, are

gone. The type of system-built equipment that we’re running now is much more complex.

It’s really all about engineering and you need very, very strong partner and engineering

help from the OEM.

In our engineering development line that we’ve partnered to develop with Makino we have three

a61 machines running on the MAS control system. Our aim is to maximize the productive hours,

and for us what that means is to do any and everything we can to get 168 hours out of

each spindle minus a five percent allowance for service. 24/7 machining means that there

are going to be some hours where a human is not there to attend to a machine or process.

Knowing that up front, the number one requirement is all the machining processes have to be

repeatable. And by that we mean that we need to know that when we start machining we have

a predictable quality outcome.

The second key fundamental is we need to move setup from online process to offline processes.

We did a lot of careful engineering studies where we looked across all of the world class

manufacturers of machine tools. And, in fact, when we assembled an engineering group for

24/7 machining we even went to Europe and looked at some of the best machining companies

in the world to try to understand what they were doing. And from that, we decided that

Makino had the leading edge among all other suppliers.

First of all, great, repeatable, robust maintenance-friendly equipment. And secondly a control system that

brings many machines together to act as one, where we felt that we could automate, truly

automate, all of the many process that otherwise have to be done by humans.

When you’re running a business where the core competence is engineering, we have to

apply our engineering skills against real-world problems. And one of the biggest problems,

especially here in the United States, is how do we close cost gaps, how do we produce faster

and faster for a marketplace for our customers that’s increasingly volatile and unpredictable.

We need to not only produce a perfect part, but we need to do it on time and we need to

do it faster and faster in smaller and smaller batches, and very cost effectively. We think

the only way to do all of that, to really align with the realities of the marketplace,

is through 24/7 machining. 24/7 machining by definition is you’re getting more and

more productive hours, those productive hours lower cost, they reduce cycle time, and sort

of the derivative of all that is you can’t produce lots of hours if you don’t have

a great quailty process.

So, the 24/7 really brings everything together. Better costs, better quality, shorter cycle

times, smaller batches, that’s really what our customers are asking for.