Taming data overload: People & Companies

When a company is part of one of the largest tool manufacturers, merely employing good technology is not enough. That is why Fair Lawn, New Jersey-based Sandvik Coromant Co. needed to more efficiently track and manage tools and streamline production at its Mebane, North Carolina, plant.

Julio Vasconcelos, engineering manager at the facility, said Sandvik Coromant, which belongs to Stockholm-based industrial engineering group Sandvik AB, emphasizes the requirement to control costs and optimize processes.

“We value digital solutions, lean manufacturing and efficiency,” he said.

The site employs 130 people in design, management, programming, engineering and production. There are approximately 20 five-axis machines, 10 lathes and two multiple-axis grinders in nearly 8,083 sq. m (87,000 sq. ft.) of manufacturing space. The plant produces about 3,000 tools — mostly standard rotary ones — each month and maintains data on tools that already were made and shipped. Over 2,000 primary tool assemblies, including tools, collets and holders, are used. Vasconcelos said this translates to a tremendous amount of data, and keeping track of it was increasingly a headache.

With tool data management software, Denny Page, machine operator at Sandvik Coromant, knows that the tool he is about to use is correct. Image courtesy of TDM Systems

“It became clear we needed a better way of managing that growing mountain of data and controlling the tools at the machine,” he said. “Historically, each engineer had their own way of controlling the tools and evaluating and presenting the info to the operators.”

Engineers frequently had to stop to check the tool assembly in the CAM system and at the machine tool, Vasconcelos said. The tool assembly often was different than expected because someone had failed to document a change or inform a manager that a change had occurred.

“Along with downtime, which of course translates into extra cost, at a certain point we realized just how much money we were spending on lost information,” he said. “There was some information stored in process documents for particular product lines, and there was information that resided in our CAM system, and there was also some information that resided only in Excel spreadsheets. Keeping track of that information was difficult. It just wasn’t efficient. It was challenging for our people to remember where to put everything, and everybody seemed to have a little bit different take on how particular tools were used. This too was a situation that was costing us time and money.”

Leandro Pereira, automation engineer at the site, remembers the situation well.

“Perhaps most detrimental was the fact that the information wasn’t necessarily being shared among different users,” he said. “For instance, information wasn’t always adequately communicated between NC programming and the shop floor. We didn’t have a database where the native information resided, so it would get changed or cloned or mutated. People were running off of secondhand information instead of the nativeinformation.”

Change obviously was needed, and identifying a solution fortunately was not difficult. Seven years ago, Sandvik started an extensive study on tool management and determined that tool data management software from Schaumburg, Illinois-based TDM Systems Inc., a subsidiary of the Sandvik Group, was the best choice for controlling and optimizing tooling data.