Reducing waste, and cutting foam blocks more efficiently lies at the heart of two new machinery and software integrations from Albrecht Baumer.
German cutting machinery company, Albrecht Baumer has developed Baumer Nest, a piece of software which, the firm said, integrates with its existing networked machinery to enable companies to improve production efficiency. It has also introduced a larger, more efficient cutting machine.
In a conventional factory, the foam cutting patterns are decided at the start of the day and inputted to the cutting machines, Baumer software engineer, Volker Czymeck, explained. He added: “If this is done by an operator who has 20 years’ experience, he may come to the same result as our nesting programme. Less experienced operators may concentrate on speed of cutting rather than the total efficiency of the process,” he added.
Czymeck went on “our Nest system means we are no longer dependent on the ability of the worker.”
The system can enable companies without highly trained and experienced staff to save time and gives “the possibility to mix different customer orders or aggregate individual customers orders in the most efficient way in a short period of time,” he said.
Czymeck said that it might take 20 minutes at the start of a shift to set up a cutter for a large number of blocks, and a further five minutes to import those settings for a days’ worth of orders.
He continued that the Baumer Nest process removes the need for manual intervention because it interrogates the owner’s ERP and CNC systems at the start of the day and develops its own nesting system which is designed to extract as many cut components as possible.
Additionally, because the system integrates into a company’s ERP system, Czymeck said, the process will call for a new uncut block from the store as it nears the end of its current cutting cycle. This can save several minutes per block compared with manual cutting systems, he added.
The Nest system is designed to operate using Windows 10, and there is no limitation on the number of pieces which can be programmed, according to Baumer literature. It uses winCAP 3.0 text files and POS with the order data. This is used to sort the parts to be cut according to their depth and the type of the foam.
Czymeck said that there are five modes of operation, however during nesting the tool takes account of two parameters – stacking height or minimum waste – to develop its cutting programme. Baumer’s literature said that if “stacking height is taken into account during nesting, the production throughput time is improved enormously.”
Finally, the jobs are nested in the order in which they are sent from the ERP system, so they are produced in the order in which the factory expects them. In a further development it is possible to add a print system to enable the cut parts to be traced for later processing, Czymeck added.
The complexity of mattress production and cutting makes it difficult to give an absolute figure for the increase in efficiency obtained by process, Czymeck added. However, his firm’s publicity material suggests that there can be a difference of up to 10% compared with manual methods.
In a separate development, Baumer has introduced a new 3,400 mm cutting system designated OFS-HE3 which can handle up to four foam blocks at the same time, significantly increasing efficiency, the company said.
