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News Release from: Mike Page - editor's feature articles
Edited by the Manufacturingtalk Editorial
Team on 17 May 2005
Open House demonstrates sawing
automation
Kasto Maschinenbau - manufacturer of sawing machines and systems - celebrated 160 years in business and invested a further EUR 4 million in its main plant.
It may be viewed by some machine tool builders as quite a 'gamble' - to build a a massive EUR 3 million automated warehouse - or 'logistics centre', which is rather larger than the factory needs The investment is to show potential customers just what can be done in terms of efficient warehousing of raw materials, components and sub-assemblies and 'bought-out' ancillaries
This article was originally published on Manufacturingtalk on 29 Oct 2001 at 8.00am (UK)
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Kasto Maschinenbau has built such a warehouse - part of its EUR 4 million investment programme - timed to coincide with the company celebrating 160 years in business.
During the company's recent 'Open House' - named 'FutureDay05' - in Achern, Germany, Kasto's president, Hans-Juergen Stolzer, said that while the company would not be yet using all the capacity of the logistics centre it was built to demonstrate what Kasto could provide for the likes of large construction equipment, off-highway and crane manufacturers - as well as the larger automotive components suppliers.
The logistic centre's dimensions are 38m long x 22m wide x 15.7m; served by a gantry crane it can store 4-tonne bar-coded bar stock cassettes (498), sheet/plate metal cassettes (38) and 0.8-ton euro-pallets (2372).
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To-date, one of the largest such 'honeycomb' systems delivered by Kasto was to Alcan in St.
Johann, Austria.
The system stores 1968 aluminium sheet/plate cassettes, each takes up to 3 tonne for delivery to cutting systems.
In the USA, steel stockholder Schaumberg in Illinois, has implemented four systems - totaling some 20,000 cassette/box locations.
Each honeycombe system has two gantry cranes, works three shifts on a six-day/week basis.
Payback is estimated at less than four years.
Kasto builds bandsawing and cold sawing machines, and business amounts to some EUR 61.5 million in sales turnover.
Of this total, some EUR 23.5 million represented sales to Germany and EUR 38 million to the European Union as a whole.
In all, a rise of 6% in sales compared with 2003.
Stolzer said that the sawing market was currently strong, while 'shop sawing' (individual machines sold to machine shops) was static and storage/logistics systems declining.
However, Stolzer gave a sales projection of EUR 70.5 million for 2005.
Sales had previously peaked at EUR 81.2 million in 2002.
In spite of the dip in 2003, only 11 employees out of 511 had been made redundant and a combination of short-time working and reduced vacation time had held jobs for the rest.
In 2004, Kasto started a project to improve in-house processes to increase performance, communication, speed and productivity.
It has restructured its sales department so that each country/sales area has been assigned a team of sales engineers for handling sawing and storage systems and is responsible for acquisition, order processing, installation and commissioning.
Before, three separate departments undertook those functions Interest is growing in Europe, said Stolzer, for automatically loaded and robotically unloaded sawing systems - capable of working under 'lights out' conditions.
The robots either load sawn billets to boxes, stillages, pallets or into machine tools/machining systems.
At Achern, Kasto's first two robotic sawing systems were under build.
One is for the Weser Stahl steel stockholder.
Weser was paying some EUR 350,000 for magazine-fed Variospeed C14 sawing cell with an ABB floor-standing robot.
Robotics represented about EUR 80,000-100,000 of the cell's total capital cost.
A rack system feeds bar to the saw and the robot offloads billets into boxes or euro pallets.
Another, similar system for the German couplings manufacturer, Willi Elbe Lenkungstechnik sees a robot off-loading billets from a KastoSpeed C9 saw into a Brio EB 1252 end-working machine.
Also on Kasto's shop floor was a cell based on a Kasto Variospeed M14 sawing machine.
The saw was magazine-fed, using a vacuum system to pick from a variety of aluminium extrusions to be cut up to form servo linear actuator bodies.
A portal robot offloads the sawn extrusions into pallets for feeding into an assembly area at the plant of Festo.
The extrusions are cut-to-length within a tolerance of +/-0.2mm at a cutting speed of 3200m/min.
At the time, Kasto had four more orders confirmed for robotic sawing cells - all to go to European customers.
In conclusion, 2005 was seen by Kasto as going to be a good year for automation orders.
The company has, to-date, installed some 110,000 saws and 1000 bar storage systems worldwide.
(Reporter: Mike Page).
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