Sports R&D company adds VMC

Whether it’s a baseball or a hockey puck, if an object moves in the world of sports, its speed must be known. That’s where Automated Design Corp. enters the picture.

The Romeoville, Ill., company specializes in sports R&D testing equipment; ADC’s iBeam projectile sensors are the industry standard for velocity data collection.

ADC was founded in 1986. Until recently, the company outsourced the machining of parts. ADC was sending parts to up to four machine shops, but, lately, overall part quality has been disappointing, said Joe Bitsky, vice president of business development. “We were rejecting close to 30 to 40 percent of the parts.”

Automated Design produces a part at its machine shop
with a Basic Mill cutting tool from Haimer. Image courtesy of Automated Design

As a result, ADC had to hire a full-time QC manager to carefully inspect each outsourced part, which was accepted, returned for corrective action or rejected outright. In addition, the lead time for parts was long. Bitsky said ADC had to wait about 2 weeks to get quotes after putting out bids and then wait some more while the order came up on the vendor’s schedule. Receiving an order could take up to 10 weeks, not including the time spent waiting for a rejected order to be corrected.

“We would have to drive to the machine shop or wait for the machine shop to drive here, sending parts back and forth, have discussions and wait for the parts to get into their system,” Bitsky said about having parts corrected.

Looking to streamline the process and improve part quality, ADC moved into a facility last spring that enabled it to set up a machine shop. After installing a new Haas VF-2 vertical machining center the first week of January, ADC hired a machinist and began the process of tooling up the VMC, Bitsky said.

Bitsky said Drew Strauchen, vice president of Haimer USA LLC, Villa Park, Ill., is a longtime friend who was glad to provide consultation. “We were able to have some good, honest conversations with Drew about what we really needed and what he recommended.”