5 Ways to Improve your Flow of Laser-cut Parts
Being a fabricator is not an easy job. One of the hardest tasks you might have is to maintain the efficiency of your laser cut machine. And you can do so by following adequate steps to improve the flow of laser-cut parts through a fabrication shop. Using quality parts like Bystronic laser parts, Mazak laser parts will benefit you for a streamlined flow. Here is how you can speed up your laser production by maintaining the flow of laser cut parts.
- Shop Layout
From all the areas of concern, it is most important that the layout you are working is efficient. Your shop’s layout can make or break even the most versatile production plan. A point to note is that the more time your parts spend in transit or waiting for delivery, your overall efficiency will reduce and can affect the production and overall the plant.
In the ideal scenario, the incoming material should load directly into or nearby the main machinery and all the secondary operations should happen near the laser output area. You must be wondering this is such an obvious thing. But sometimes fabricators do not pay much attention to the layout while installing the laser machine. To overcome this layout mistake, usually, fabricators or owners use a patchwork approach. And when a patchwork approach to shop is inefficient, the entire shop layout would need a redesign.
Any layout’s basic objective is ensuring the smooth flow of work, material, parts, and information through a system. When you understand the overall flow of the shop, it can help the material move efficiently.
- Proper Maintenance
It is important to consider that maintenance is an equally important part when it comes to laser machinery. To be honest, some fabricators don’t pay much attention to the maintenance of their parts. Unless they experience some problems in the speed or accuracy, they will not feel obligated to maintain their lasers or their quality Amada parts.
It is important to stay on top of the recommended maintenance activities. Because once a problem occurs, the equipment operator won’t be that much more productive. You don’t have to pay much attention because today’s manufactured lasers come with enhanced options that make it easier to practice healthy maintenance. You can schedule and set a regime that allows you to stay on top of your maintenance schedule.
- Programming
It becomes crucial to program automated material and part handling, majorly for maintaining efficiency. In the production industry, it has become a necessity to have automation. It yields double or triple results. A shop that upholds a manual sheet can vastly have different outputs than a shop that has a completely automated system.
To help avoid downtime, it is necessary to optimize your plant layout, maintaining your equipment on a schedule, programming, and automation, monitoring your production.
In the past years, program software developers used such algorithms that homed parts with as little waste as possible. This saves you more money which means more money left in the pocket of the manufacturer. It is important to maintain integrity in laser nests while unloading them automatically so that they can render at various locations. It is true in cases where high-capacity carts are in use. Because a stack of cut sheets can become a tangle of parts and scrap.
- Automation
Technology never stops providing better tools for increased efficiency in the workflow. After optimizing your shop layout, performing maintenance and programming, it is important to set out to stride toward laser automation.
If you can operate your industrial laser with 50 percent efficiency then it is pretty much good! The most common beam-on times for an average mix of materials have hovered between 30 and 40 percent historically. But your laser could be capable of more than that. If you add a very basic load and unload automation system, it can increase your beam-on time to more than 80 percent.
If you use standard cart unloading, it might create denoting bottlenecks which can delay the arrival of parts downstream. Conveyors are popular as they allow denesting to occur at the same rate as production. It enables you to react more quickly to production issues. It gives you more time to downstream operations.
- Monitoring the Production
To make some revolutionary improvements to your laser-cut-part flow, it is important to understand and track all the jobs. When you get statistics like beam-on-time, transit delays, maintenance schedules, and process bottlenecks, it can help you in achieving continuous improvement.
There some laser cutting equipment that comes with a production monitoring option. When there are robust production monitoring and support system intact, you can design and provide transparency to your machine process anytime. it will enable you to achieve real-time access to an extensive amount of data through your desktop or mobile device. To find quality laser parts you can go for Bystronic laser parts and Mazak laser parts for the quality outputs.