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Multispindle Turning Centre provides solution to Otto Engineering

Story added 12 February 2010.

Otto Engineering, in business for nearly fifty years, today markets their products via two divisions, Otto Controls and Otto Communications. The CNC machine shop run by John Lang, services the Controls Division which manufactures parts for their extensive line of switches and grips used in forklifts, tractors, medical defibrillator paddles, washing machines, Formula One steering wheels, B2 bomber flight controls, the Space Shuttle, and much more. The Communications Division of the Carpentersville, Illinois based company manufactures and assembles headsets for large corporations like Disney and for pilots and military on the field.

When John Lang joined Otto Engineering twenty-two years ago, the company was not nearly the successful US$90 million controls and communications OEM that it is today. Switches and controls manufacturers with thousands of SKUs like Otto were under great pressure to move production to China and regain cost competitiveness. So, Mr Lang looked around and assessed the situation. He decided it would not be in Otto’s best interest to follow the easy path to China.

Mr Lang knew that as an engineering-focused OEM, Otto had great products but the machine shop was taking too long to produce components and there was too much waste. They needed to make parts more efficiently so they could bring prices down on their end products and stay competitive.

The ISO:9001, ISO:14001 and AS9100B business added machines over the next fifteen years including a dozen single spindle turning centers and it began to make parts in a more modern way. Using their engineering ingenuity, employees worked to consolidate and pre-set tools in the turning centers to reduce setup times and streamline production. When the turning centres were at full capacity, Otto realised it needed more spindles to meet demands. Instead of simply purchasing more single spindle turning centers, the company stepped back and looked at the problem from an engineering perspective and then visited the IMTS show in 2002.

The solution appeared as a multispindle turning centre. The team wondered if they could get the job done using less floorspace and less overhead by purchasing one multi spindle machine instead of several single spindles. But, perhaps when others saw the price tag of a multi and were unsure it would work for their operation, not everyone at Otto was on board with the idea of buying a multi-spindle machine. Working with United States military, NASA, Boeing, Caterpillar, John Deere, Toro and Motorola to name a few, Otto sought to reduce their parts inventory to Just In Time levels – from one month’s worth of parts to one week’s worth of parts – or less. The plan was to run 400 different part numbers on a multispindle with an average lot size of 100 pieces. But as multi-spindle machines are generally classified as lower flexibility, higher volume machine tools, the company was determined to find out if a multispindle machine could indeed handle their high flexibility, low volume workload.

“It was a nine month argument and I put my job on the line for this machine and fought almost every department in the building because everybody wanted to go to China. But I didn’t want all these parts to go overseas. I was convinced that the way we beat China is through technology and responsiveness,” states Lang.

A multispindle machine turned out to be the right answer and the company developed drastically with cycle times reduced from a minute down to 10 seconds it made Otto so productive that within just four years they were at capacity again. It was soon realised that Otto didn't have the capacity it desired and the machine was not particularly well serviced - leaving the company wide open to lengthy and unacceptable downtime.

“We were doing a fine job making parts on the multi, but I didn’t like the machine,” explains Lang. “They didn’t have service. I sometimes waited for weeks for repair parts on the machine. And I will not buy another machine of that brand because of it. And as a matter of fact we just got in a part that took 13 weeks to get here. At 97% capacity, we couldn’t move up. One little hiccup and we were done. And so that’s when we started looking.”

Enter Tornos

“When Hydromat, the sole Tornos U.S distributor highlighted Tornos, that perked up my eyes right away because I knew Hydromat was as much an engineering company as they were a distributor of machining products. And that was attractive to me,” says Lang.

In January 2008, Otto took delivery of their new Tornos MultiAlpha 8x20. And not only have they been happy with the level of service they have received  they discovered many other reasons to appreciate the new machine.

Backworking Bonus

“The Tornos has better backworking capabilities than our old multi and it means I can get more sophisticated parts in the machine. And with 8 spindles instead of 6, I can put more tools in the machine and get more families of parts. Instead of taking something out and putting something in it’s already there and ready to go. There were parts that we have on (the Tornos) that for instance we would have liked to put in the other multi but we couldn’t because there were too many features, grooves, threads, double-threads and as the machine goes around, you run out of stations. With eight spindles you can add a groover and an extra threading operation or another slot or whatever."

Cycle times have been reduced on the Tornos too. One particular part that took 4 minutes on the other multi takes just 20 seconds on the Tornos. And the parts come off 100% complete.

While Lang recognizes that they are not using the multispindle the traditional way, the system they’ve developed works so well for them it can’t be ignored. Otto’s Controls Division has 15 major product categories. With thousands of individual products under each one. And 30 full time engineers are working on new products all the time. That’s a lot of variety – and proves just how flexible the Tornos multispindle can be. “Normally when a person buys a multispindle they buy it for making one part and a million of them,” says Lang. “But we set the Tornos up for 30 pieces. We’ll set it up for 1000 pieces or even 15, 50 or 3500 pieces.”

Otto does not like to keep any inventory, as the orders come in, they get them made and out the door in two weeks. According to Lang, in his industry that’s unheard of. But the way they do it is with pre-set tooling and by never changing the material. It’s true. No matter what size part they’re making, they always use 7/8” diameter aluminum to do it.

The benefit of locking in on one material

“If we’re making a ½” diameter case, we make it out of 7/8” diameter,” explains Lang. “The material is there and never changes. After the first program is done, our setups are scheduled for fifteen minutes or less. But, most people when they think of a multispindle, they think of a 3-day setup. We’ve reduced our setup times through engineering and pre-set tooling.”

Lang takes a part off the inspection table next to the Tornos. The part will become a sealed “trim” switch about one and a quarter inches long, with a milled slot in one end and three milled notches in the other. There is a deep o-ring sealing surface on the inside and a pinhole on the outside. “A part like this, if we set this up in one of the other machines, that might be a US$200 setup. It may take hours. This way we just push a few buttons and off we go.”

They use pre-set tooling and single material protocol not only to save on setup time, but because regardless of waste, the wasted material only costs them an average of a dime per part. “We actually make more money in the lower volume stuff,” Lang explains. “Someone orders fifteen… there’s not another switch company out there that would set this up for fifteen pieces. We do it and make money at it because we can charge more for the switch. I don’t think a lot of people are smart enough to give away the six cents of material difference between the small button parts and the big parts. And because I get money back on the chips, six cents really might be four cents. Plus, if you consider the changeovers – to changeover that bar feeder and all eight collets, pickoff, get it running, knock out the little bugs in it, it’s a day of production.”

Another unique idea from Otto is a parts collection system they created to help them run lights out. The system looks like it has four deep-fry baskets, each perched over a stainless drawer that rests on a rolling platform. The whole thing is about six feet long by two feet high by two feet deep and conveniently rolls into position on large casters to sit under the parts conveyor catching finished parts as they fall out of the machine. It separates parts by part program or by hour and helps with quality control – allowing Otto to back-track to a particular bin when a problem occurs.

“When we go home, this machine runs. So, it’s lights out. When I say lights out, it better run,” Lang says, underscoring just how much their business relies on the Tornos. “Our goal is to have 50-75 parts or work orders through this machine every single month and 500 hours of production. At the end of the year, that’s 6,000 hours of production.”

The future

“Eventually, we’re going to have four identical bins on the other side of the machine, so on a weekend we can set the Tornos up for 8 programs. We can have it run x amount of parts in each basket and it will automatically go from job to job without anybody being there. When I get the Tornos up to 300 programs – then I will have the flexibility to go through the families of parts and link them together – by processes and by tools. That will catch a lot of peoples' attention."
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