 Moving to shop-floor machining with Delcam's PowerMILL CAM software has allowed Korean mouldmaker Young Shin Corporation to increase its machining efficiency and product quality.
Young Shine specialises in the manufacture of plastic moulds for LCD televisions. Its main customers include major international brands such as Samsung, Toshiba, Hitachi, Sharp and Panasonic, and many others. Among its many successful projects was the supply of moulds for Samsung's Crystal range of high-performance televisions.
Despite this good track record, customers such as Samsung and Toshiba wanted Young Shin to reduce the delivery times for its moulds and also to cut its manufacturing costs. One area the company identified for improvement was its CAM system. The existing program was very complicated to use and had many limitations in its range of strategies.
Young Shin contacted Hankook Delcam, Delcam's joint venture company in Korea, as part of its search for a better programming system. The staff there recommended a move to shop-floor machining, as well as a change to PowerMILL. The shop-floor approach appealed to Young Shin as the company wanted to maximise employee efficiency during their limited work hours, as well as to cut delivery times and improve the working processes.
Following a comprehensive series of machining trials, Hankook Delcam was able to prove that PowerMILL would be the best solution to the challenges at Young Shin. This resulted in an initial order for eight seats of PowerMILL in April 2007. After the successful implementation of this software, further orders took the total to 18 seats of PowerMILL, including two for continuous five-axis machining, plus two seats of Delcam's feature-based CAM system, FeatureCAM, to generate programs for gun-drilling, and one of the PowerINSPECT inspection software for On-Machine Verification as part of the company's quality control procedures.
The use of PowerMILL and the switch to shop-floor machining have led to a significant increase in productivity. Previously, the machine operators would often have to wait for many hours to get NC data from the CAM office. These delays have been eliminated now the operators generate their own programs, so shortening the overall production time.
Furthermore, because the operators are very experienced in the latest machining techniques, they are better placed to decide upon the most appropriate cutting tools for each part of the manufacturing process. They have found PowerMILL much easier to use than the previous system and so are able to get the best results from the software. As a result, machining efficiency at Young Shin has increased, the quality of the moulds, and of the products manufactured with them, has improved, and production times have been reduced.
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