Bartco Lighting - SigmaNEST

Industry

Lighting Fixtures

Fabrication

AccuShear
Wiedemann NC Turret Punch Presses (Motorum 2044 EZ, Motorum 2048)
Accurpress Press Brakes (6’, 8’, 10’)

Software

AutoCad
Autodesk Inventor
SigmaNEST
SigmaBEND
SimTrans

Bartco Lighting (Huntington Beach, CA) is a manufacturer of spec-grade linear fluorescent and LED lighting fixtures supplying the world’s hospitals, colleges, museums, retail stores, office buildings, and similar institutions. Recently the company launched a comprehensive Lean Six Sigma program designed to improve manufacturing speed, efficiency and productivity.

Turret Punch Press Programming

SigmaNEST has long played a key role in the company’s fabrication process. Today, Bartco is putting the software to even greater use by integrating it with their ERP system by adding SimTrans.

“Previously jobs were nested only with like-parts,” “Recently customer demand has moved to more requests smaller lot sizes. Therefore, auto-nesting of mixed part lots makes a lot of sense for us.”

Efren Saenz,
Director of Operations,
714-230-3219

This flexibility translates into substantial time and material savings as both changeover time and material consumption are optimized.

A study revealed 40% of current Work Orders were for 20 pieces or less – an ideal scenario for mixed Work Order nesting. At the same time Bartco had been using the same programmer (the metal shop supervisor) for several years. When this person became less available, the company had to utilize a second resource for the task.

SimTrans™ was identified as the solution. SimTrans™ is an online transaction manager bridging SigmaNEST and Material Requirement Planning (MRP) systems, order entry or other management software solutions. It was decided that Bartco would use SimTrans to mix nests with multiple Work Orders rather than continue to schedule like-products on dedicated blank sizes. Similarly, the automated part programming feature of SimTrans/SigmaNest within a nest eliminated the need for a traditional NC programmer.

Today Bartco is in the early stages of SimTrans implementation. Future plans include the complete integration of MRP, bending, programming, and automatic nesting.

Press Brake Programming

Press Brake tooling changes were averaging 25 minutes and there were approximately 6 changeovers per machine with each shift. With on-time completion floundering at the 20% level improvements had to be made.

Bartco launched a Single Minute Exchange of Die (SMED) initiative to reduce tooling change-over time. A primary component of the project involved moving offline as many operations as possible with programming representing the most significant opportunity for improvement.

The exercise allowed Bartco to better understand, control, and gain press brake capacity. The next move was to schedule to press brake capacity and then back schedule the turret presses. The company did not try to schedule to turret capacity, but rather allowed the brake schedule to pull in production from the turrets.

SigmaBEND software was a key component to the project’s success in reducing setup time from 25 minutes to 5 minutes or less. Implementing SigmaBEND, combined with an ability to schedule to press brake rather than turret presses improved on-time completion in the Metal Shop from 20% to a staggering 95%.

Conclusion

Bartco Lighting was committed to adopting a new manufacturing methodology in order to achieve the significant and sustained improvements. These changes required a new mindset along with an investment in new equipment and new software. “There was no magic bullet,” said Saenz. “In order to separate yourself from competitors one must be willing to scrutinize all aspects of the business and commit to adopting leading technologies and best practices.”