As you may have heard, this has been a big year for us at Shimco. We’ve moved into our new facility in Cambridge, Ontario, expanded our business offerings and global footprint, and have been featured in major industry publications. Clearly we’re doing something right – and we’ve decided to continue this trend by incorporating new machinery into our process.
We’ve recently brought online a new Mazak flexible manufacturing system (“FMS”) that is comprised of two horizontal high-speed CNC machines and a pallet changing system. This new system will allow us to run up to 32 jobs with just one operator – cutting costs and saving time for our customers. We’re working on shifting to a lights out manufacturing operation on the FMS through advanced data capture, reporting tools and scheduling, allowing for unmatched productivity.
The new FMS includes our current Mazak HCN 4000 horizontal machining centre, a new, identical Mazak 4000 HCN and the Mazak Palletech system. Both horizontal machining centres are connected to the Palletech, resulting in a single flexible manufacturing system. The Palletech holds 12 pallets, and each pallet holds either a 2-sided or a 4-sided tombstone. The end result is that we have 32 work surfaces in the FMS, allowing us schedule 32 jobs at once with just one operator.
This is a huge step for us in increasing our efficiency and throughput so that we can take on even more, and higher quantity jobs for our customers. As the demand for new aircraft continues to rise, we aim to meet that demand by improving our processes with new machinery upgrades such as this.