Mario Rodríguez, Product Manager, Lantek
Things don’t always run smoothly in a production environment. In your sheet metal manufacturing company, you take a lot of care to plan the manufacturing workflow through the different machines you have in your workshop, carefully nesting parts to optimise material utilisation on the machine you have chosen for the cutting. If that machine is suddenly unavailable it can cause significant delays replanning the nesting and production to suit another machine. What is required is a system that will adapt the nest and the cutting operations to suit another machine in your workshop – resolving a manufacturing headache with a few clicks.
Whatever the reason, breakdown, maintenance, rush job, planning error, the result is the same and the job you have carefully planned, all its nesting and cutting sequences need to be redone for another different machine at short notice to avoid disrupting delivery times and the remainder of the planned workflow. Machines are rarely 100% compatible so all the nesting and cutting operations need to be started again to generate the right CNC code and methods that suit the substitute machine.
Lantek Expert’s Solution
Lantek provides a solution with its ‘Modify Machine’ feature, which will quickly resolve your workflow problems, seamlessly adapting the existing nesting and cutting plans for a new machine. This capability will save hours of delay, taking away the need to manually recreate programs for a new machine, solving a real-world problem that can happen in a dynamic and fast-moving manufacturing environment. Manufacture is up and running again without delay and with very little effort. Additionally, the constraints of having to use a particular machine are removed, further adding to the flexibility and efficiency of a factory and its equipment.
A new mindset
The ability to make changes to the selected machinery at very short notice and with little effort will also have an effect on the mindset during production planning. Modern production involves a dynamic and constantly changing environment, so Lantek’s ‘Modify Machine’ feature is not just clever technology to solve an immediate problem. Its benefits can be far reaching, in making the best possible use of the machinery available in the workshop, maximising machine utilisation and increasing the options for using ingenuity to solve production requirements.
By combining the skills of your engineers with the intelligence in the software, Lantek has created a solution for a problem that can also revolutionise how a company investigates ways to use its available machinery to the full.
About Lantek
Lantek is a multinational which is leading the digital transformation of companies in the sheet metal and metal industry. With its patented manufacturing intelligence software, it enables factories to be connected, turning them into Smart Factories. It rounds off its range of services with CAD, CAM, MES, and ERP solutions for companies that manufacture metal parts from sheet metal, tubes, and profiles using any cutting technology (laser, plasma, oxycut, waterjet, shearing and punching).
Founded in 1986 in the Basque Country (Spain), one of the main European hubs of machine tool development, Lantek enables the integration of sheet metal and metal processing technologies using the most advanced manufacturing management software. The company is currently the outstanding leader in its sector thanks to its capacity for innovation and commitment to internationalization. With more than 32,000 customers in over 100 countries and 21 offices in 15 countries, it has an extensive network of distributors with an international presence.
