Capacity Increase at Short Notice? – No Problem.

Increasing the speed of the primary product assembly line in the timescales was deemed feasible, but the key production constraint was the in-house spring manufacturing capacity that fed this, as the lines were already running at more than 85% Operational Equipment Effectiveness (OEE).

Trying to squeeze increased uptime from the current coiler equipment was not feasible to meet the increased demand. Adding additional spring coiling machines was considered but the build and validation time to implement these was far longer than the customer deadlines allowed.

The approach taken was to add a spring buffer system. This would allow coilers downtime to be covered when required and top-up coiler capacity to increase the ceiling of how fast the product assembly line could run. This approach would be far quicker to implement than new lines, and the validation burden was far less as no new spring production equipment was needed. It would also integrate with the current systems and be fully automated so no additional labour would be required.

The existing set-up had a backup coiler for use if any of the production coilers feeding the assembly line had issues or was just requiring a wire reel change.

A Spring Transfer Buffer (STB) and control system were designed, manufactured, and implemented. The solution meant that during normal operation, the designated production coilers would be feeding the assembly machines, whilst the backup coiler would feed the STB. The STB would then top up each of the other production coilers, to ensure a close to 100% uptime. Should there be an issue with any of the production coilers, the system would switch the backup coiler to feed the assembly line directly, whilst the STB would continue to top up the other stations from the buffer stock.

Quvara has a highly experienced, in-house process engineering team, which together with the senior management team, were able to quickly devise and sign off a solution in principle. The system requirements, testing and validation process was developed and then shared with the partner supplier for the coiling equipment. Risk assessments were conducted and mitigation plans developed and implemented to address any significant issues. Working as a team, the STB and control system design was created, reviewed and signed off with buy-in from the customer.  The Quvara project management and engineering teams devised a stagged implementation plan to role the solution out for all the assembly lines to start the scale up as quickly as possible.

The work on speeding up the assembly lines was fully handled in-house with test runs at a range of increased speeds, monitoring part quality, in process readings and machine wear, to fully validate the process at the increased rate.