Automation
While it offers robotic automation, Fastems primarily sells its FMS automation to customers, of which about 50% are in the aerospace/defense industry, noted Michael Bell, Fastems director of operations. “About 10% of the units that we sell involve an articulating robot, and that percentage is growing,” said Bell, noting that it doubled last year from 5% of sales. “We already have robots in Boeing, so they’re finally starting to use the articulating robots in some of their processes.” Most of Fastems’ products are custom, but the container is a standard product for the company, Bell said. The FPC- 3000 is designed to handle 800 and 1000-mm pallets with a 3000-kg capacity. Larger-capacity systems, such as the FPC-7500, offer a 7500-kg load capacity. “Setup time is key, because now we’re able to do multiple setups,” Bell said of the FMS systems. “We’re seeing about a 35% increase in spindle utilization from the cut on. This will get you to 75% spindle utilization.” With Fastems’ systems, spindle utilization has reached as high as 93%, Bell added, for an aerospace
application for machining small titanium parts, with multiple setups per tombstone.
The Fastems Manufacturing Management System (MMS) software gives users highly flexible control over scheduling jobs in a single manufacturing cell or extended through the enterprise working in concert with ERP software systems. Now in its fifth generation, the MMS5 gives manufacturers predic- tive scheduling, employing intelligence derived from links to third-party ERP packages to shuffle job queues on the fly. “The software is the key to the utilization rates. It plans your production,” Bell said. “The information can be down- loaded directly from your ERP software system. It analyzes all that and it is able to come up with a plan.” Fastems’ software was written in-house using the C# (C Sharp) language. In the 1980s, the company used Siemens’ control system before de- veloping its own software. “We monitor the tooling consistently and only send the tools needed,” Bell said. “We also warn the operator whether a machine has enough tooling to run.”
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www.abb.com/robotics
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ManufacturingEngineeringMedia.com | August 2013
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