Managing director Jason Chauhan says they have emerged strongly from the recession due to their investment in machinery – which includes a Salvagnini P4X panel bender and a powder coating plant – along with moving to new 60,000 square foot premises incorporating offices and machine shop. “There’s still a strong market for high precision sheet metal work, but a lot of manufacturers don’t have the technology or capacity to do what the industry requires.”

Combining the new EMZ with their Amada Europe 258 punch and Trumpf L3030 laser which are also driven by Radan, he says they maintain a constant flow of parts for forming on the panel bender. “We wanted to invest when everyone else was down-sizing so we would be ready for the economic recovery, and this is paying off. We’ve now got the best machinery and software, we’ve got the space to manage production efficiently and the capacity to grow.”

As long-standing suppliers of such diverse products as point-of-sale stands to the retail sector; compressor housings, heating panels, air conditioning units and radiator covers to the heating, ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC) industry; and a number of security items, JC Metal Works find Radan’s ability to handle offline programming and drive machines from any manufacturer across all cutting technologies, to be absolutely invaluable.

“It gives us flexibility to switch a job between laser and punch, or from punch to punch, depending on the availability of each machine,” says Jason Chauhan. “With Radan we have one piece of software for all three machines so if one machine is full to capacity we can move the work to another one very easily, simply by changing the tooling. Without it we’d have to use three pieces of software – one for the laser and one each for the Europe and EMZ – and program online which means the machines would be unavailable for manufacturing during that time.”

And talking of tooling, the Amada EMZ’s large tool station has reduced machine setting up time. “The loading station holds 240 tools and we can have up to 47 tools on the turret. As all the tools needed for the work on the EMZ are changed automatically we don’t have to spend 30 or 40 minutes setting up the job. And there’s a part picker on the machine, too, which picks up the parts ready for the folding process on the Salvagnini and the press brakes.”

Combining those time-saving features that comprise the configured EMZ, with the finished quality of the punched parts, it all adds up to creating fast new processes for JC Metal Works to ensure they stay ahead of their competitors. “Because we predominantly work with 0.9 to 1.5 mm thicknesses of mild and stainless steel along with aluminium, which is mostly powder coated, the EMZ produces parts to the exact quality that our customers want.”

With many customers now providing the product design to them in a 3D format, JC Metal Works’s designers replicate them into manufacturing drawings for the shop floor using SolidWorks, adding further details such as weld information and critical dimensions. Those flat patterns are then imported as dxf files into Radan where their four specialist programmers work on tooling, nesting and generating the CNC codes.

As well as controlling the 287 tools in its stride, Radan also ensures material costs are kept down through its powerful nesting engine which creates cost-effective nests for both punches and the laser. Material used to represent between 30 and 40% of the total cost of their parts, then costs started to spiral upwards, and it is now about 60%. “It became important to make maximum use of our raw material and have as little wastage as possible. I tasked our engineers and operators to get the absolute most out of our sheet metals, and Radan’s nesting capabilities played a significant part in helping us achieve that.”

Jason Chauhan says automatic nesting is the norm for their lasered parts, but they use the flexible semi-automatic function to finalise some punching nests, as not all parts can be rotated, depending on the multi-indexing tools.

Using e21

With Radan’s e2i system effectively modelling JC Metal Works’s complete environment, it enables them to manage all aspects of the business including estimating, buying and manufacturing, through to delivery.

“Before we had e2i we quoted for jobs using Excell spreadsheets, which would go on to our system as sales orders when we won the contract. But there was no traceability, meaning that if the job was repeated we did not have the necessary information to make an adjustment on material costs,” says Jason Chauhan.

Now they do everything in e2i. With material costs kept on the system, when they receive an enquiry they input all the correct processes and send the quote out as a pdf. Once the customer has accepted the quote, the route cards are generated, the parts produced and the invoice issued – all through e2i. “We’ve got all the different processes in place for the routing, so if the job is repeated we simply call it up on the system and get things running very quickly.”

E2i has been specially designed to give companies like JC Metal Works the functionality they need for efficient and traceable product and process management:

?? Sales – use the customer database for activity logging and contact records

?? Administration –? keep records up to date

?? Engineering – maintain operation libraries, bill-of-material creation etc

?? Estimating – estimate creation and monitoring

?? Production – use of routing database to record job progress

?? Despatch – access to the system for delivery management

?? Goods-in – access to the system to record goods received

?? Accounts – access to allow invoice control and maintain customer payment

?? CAD/CAM links – e2i is readily integrated with Radan’s CAD/CAM functions.

Modules to carry out those functions include:

?? Quotations – creates quotation data from estimates and presents to customers in a professional format

?? Contract – generates and manages contract/sales order forms

?? Route cards – generates route cards and manages items to be manufactured

?? Stock control – manages stock levels of all parts within the system

?? Purchasing – generates and manages items to be purchased

?? Capacity – allows users to see the effect of work they schedule

?? Shop floor data capture – records the actual time spent on each operation of a job

?? Delivery – generates and manages items to be delivered

?? Invoicing – generates and manages items to be invoiced

?? Stores --? control receipt and despatch of goods.

“The traceability that e2i gives is starting to play a much bigger part in our operation because we’re currently focusing on repeat business, especially in the HVAC, lighting and security sectors,” says Jason Chauhan.

About Radan

Radan is a principal brand of Planit Software – recently ranked by CIMdata as the world’s fastest growing CAM vendor, with most industrial users.

For further information visit http://www.radan.com