February •  March 2005 • Vol. XXIII No. 3 • An Arnold Publication

Target: Unmanned Job Shop
A Silicon Valley Job Shop Sets Its Sights
On Maximum Productivity with Minimum Manpower.  

Story and photos by C. H. Bush, editor

During the high-tech, silicon valley gold rush of the late 90’s, a lot of companies found their growth stunted by a shortage of qualified people to man their equipment.

“It was really frustrating,” says George Koerber, president and sole owner of Sunnyvale, CA’s G&K Machining, Inc. “When things were really going crazy in ’98 and ‘99, one of our biggest problems was staffing. We were bursting at the seams, literally. We had eighty people. Every machine was going. We had fully staffed day and swing shifts, but we could never get a fully staffed graveyard shift. The most we could get was five or six people on graveyard, and we were getting half the efficiency you would get with the same number of people working days. Even on the the swing shift we lost 30% efficiency. We vowed to never be trapped in that situation again.”

“Production was dropping, quality was dropping and our customers were not too happy,” adds Greg Kaila, a 15-year G&K veteran who handles sales and marketing for the company. “We hated the situation, but at the time we couldn’t do anything about it.”

“That’s when we made up our minds to find a way to solve the problem,” says Koerber. “That’s basically when we crystallized the goal of building an unmanned job shop. We wanted a way to run 24/7 that was independent of the whims of people, and, of course, that meant automation.”

4-Axis History

G&K Machining, an ISO 9001:2000-certified company, offers engineering, turning, milling and some assembly, but the company’s specialty is in producing very complex, very tight-tolerance parts, mainly for customers manufacturing equipment for the semiconductor industry.
“We had already started changing our manufacturing methods ten to twelve years ago,” says Koerber, who took over the company reins when his father retired 15 years ago. “We had switched over to four-axis machining back in the early ‘90s. We were doing complex, multisided parts with very high tolerances.”

“The problem was we were working with a lot of part numbers in stand-alone 4-axis mills,” Kaila says. “That was very labor intensive and meant a lot of setups.”

“Right,” agrees Koerber. “One of our main goals was to find a way to cut setups. We took a look at a year of production and found that out of 8,000 hours of production, 3,000 hours were spent in set up. So we asked, ‘Why not find a way to get another 3,000 hours of production. Why not eliminate the setups and put that to the profit side.’”

“Our parts are so complex, that back then on the standalones, they could take as many as ten to twenty setups,” Kaila adds. “If we could find a way to get rid of those setups we would be well ahead of the game.”

Search for a Solution

Koerber and Kaila undertook several steps in an effort to reduce the impact of the high number of setups required.

“One thing we did was develop a pallet system,” says Koerber. “It was a fixturing system for the standalones that allows us at the drop of a hat to take one pallet and do part numbers x, y, z. Then, if a customer calls us thirty minutes later and says, ‘Now I need this,’ we can load on new material, and we’re ready to go.”

“But that didn’t really solve the setup problem,” Kaila says. “It made us faster and more efficient between setups, but we still had the setups.”
Koerber and Kaila also spent time trying to find a machine that would take care of production with less time wasted on set up.

“Basically, we thought, ‘We go home at 3:30 and we have a second or third shift, so how can we keep the equipment going and still maintain our philosophy in machining?’”Koerber recalls.

“Right,” Kaila adds, “We searched for awhile and couldn't find a machine that was suitable to help us achieve our main goal. Basically, what we wanted just wasn’t out there yet.”

“What we wanted was a true 5-axis, palletized vertical milling machine,” Koerber says. “But when we went looking, we couldn’t find one on the market.”

Clarifying the Equipment Need

According to Greg Kaila, G&K’s ability to achieve an “unmanned” shop was a matter of evolution.

Kaila: “It was really two things that drove us to where we are now. One obviously was the manpower capacity issues we faced a couple of years ago. Another was just the family of parts that we were seeing on a regular basis. The parts were very complex. They had very tight tolerances on perpendicular surfaces and opposing surfaces.”
Koerber: “Actually the individual parts themselves dictated the need for very expensive, labor-intensive setups from one face of the part to the another. Just for our fixturing purposes we would have to hold tolerances that were two, three and four times as critical as the customer required. We had to do that just so we could fixture off of a particular surface in order to put in the features on the opposing surfaces. Very complex.”

“A lot of our production is chucking work, larger lathe parts that also require milling,” Kaila says. “The rest is complex milling operations.”
“What we found was that no one made an unmanned chucking machine that also mills efficiently,” adds Koerber. “So we figured the right approach for us was to have our mills do the lathe work, because there’s less lathe work. What it came down to was that we needed a 5-axis, palletized, vertical milling machine with the capability of doing lathe work efficiently.”

Solving the Problem

At one point Koerber and Kaila took a trip to Japan where they met with Bill Selway and Matsuura engineers.

“Matsuura had a machine that basically did everything we needed,” Koerber says. “The problem was their machines were designed to do very small, very intricate parts, and I was going to them with bigger parts. I told them, ‘This is the stuff we have to do.’ Then about a year and a half later we got a phone call and they said, ‘Hey, we have your machine.’”

The machine was a Matsuura MAM72-3VS, 5-Axis Multi-Pallet Vertical Machining Center.

“It was exactly what we were looking for,” Koerber says. “The 72 in the model number actually stands for 72 hours of unmanned operation, so we bought one of the first machines in 2000. We bought another one in 2002 and a third one in 2003.”

Configuration of G&K’s palletized MAM 72-3VS included 26.5" x 15.5" x 24" table travel, built-in 4th and 5th axis, 15,000 rpm, 20-hp direct-drive motor, 240-tool ATC, 40 5.12” square pallets, a built-in pallet changer and a Fanuc 16iM control.

“These machines allowed us to achieve automation while maintaining our machining philosophy,” Koerber says. “When the first machine hit the floor, I had a little side bet going with Greg about how long it would be before we would be running 24 hours. He gave me six months. But the machines were so easy, we were up and running full bore in less than two months. We haven’t looked back since.”

G&K still uses the custom fixturing system they developed in the early ‘90s.

“Our cycle times for parts are all over the place,” Koerber says. “Some run as quick as five minutes, some take hours. With our tombstones and custom fixturing system, we have true flexibility. We can lay a hundred part numbers on the table and have one generic fixture, and all the parts will go into the fixture. And, even though we designed the system ten years before getting the first MAM, it still works perfectly. We get flexibility, speed and all the quality we need.”

Unmanned Job Shop

What have been the results of G&K’s efforts to create an unmanned job shop?

“Things have gone extremely well,” Koerber says. “Where we used to require ten to twenty setups to produce a part, we’re now doing it with only two. The bottom line is we’re currently getting as much production as we did when we had eighty employees, except that we’re now doing it with only twenty people. We haven’t achieved a true unmanned shop and probably never will. On the other hand, we’ve just purchased a new, modern, 20,000 square-feet building, and we’ve become very competitive in our quality, delivery and pricing.” 
 

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