TruBend Series 5000
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Ingenious sheet metal workers at the Swedish Rotage job shop show how automation can boost productivity. Ingemar Ronger’s “Blue Hall” consists of Two TruBend 5130 with Bendmaster, two TruLaser 3030 with LiftMaster Store and SortMaster, TruLaser 5030, two TruPunch 5000 with SheetMaster. All machines are connected with the storage device.
The business credo followed by Ingemar Ronger, business manager at Rotage, is entirely unequivocal: “We strive to make our work as productive as possible, and to move as little as possible by hand. Additional value is worked into sheet metal, the feedstock material, with each and every processing step”. Adhering to this ideal, the Swedish company, together with TRUMPF, has laid out “Northern Europe’s most advanced, fully automated manufacturing system for sheet metal processing, including storage for stock and finished parts”. That is the claim made in the company’s own folder describing the new manufacturing system.
6,000 tons of sheet metal each year
It was in the village of Kvänum, located in southern Sweden about 120 kilometers northeast of Gothenburg, that Ingemar Ronger set up the Rotage job shop as a one-man show in 1979. Today, a staff of 85 processes 6,000 tons of sheet metal every year. This job shop operation has enjoyed stellar success, doubling its turnover in the period from 2003 to 2006, to more than ten million euros. One decisive contribution to the Rotage success story: automation solutions by TRUMPF, the first of which went into service in 2005.
At the heart of the concept is the fully-automated storage area with space for almost 700 pallets, each carrying up to three tons of sheet metal. A picker and placer unit runs on rails down the middle of the hall, serving all the machine tools. Today, the production facility is 75 meters long and six meters in height. Since all the machines are the same color, Ingemar Ronger lovingly refers to his facility as the “Blue Hall”, reminiscent of the dining hall in the Stockholm City Hall where the annual banquet for the Nobel Prize winners is held.
Automated process chain
Following the first expansion phase (2005), three laser cutting machines and two punching machines of TRUMPF were integrated into the automation concept. A SheetMaster takes care of loading and unloading the punching machines and the GripMaster removes the scrap skeletons. The LiftMaster Store feeds the sheets to the laser cutting machines, while the SortMaster takes care of sorted storage for finished components. In 2006 and 2007, Ronger expanded the system once again, adding two fully automatic bending cells incorporating TruBend press brakes and the BendMaster units associated with each of them.
Space has already been made for the future, too. According to Ingemar Ronger, “Once you’ve introduced automation there’s no turning back. You are always seeking new areas of use.” Thus, Rotage has become Scandinavia’s prime example for an exceptionally comprehensive processing approach. Three techniques used in the sheet metal processing chain – punching, bending and laser cutting – are joined directly with one another. There’s a good reason for all of this, as Rotage is calculating a 25 percent increase in capacity thanks to the use of automation components.
Batch sizes between 100 and 1,000
Ronger also found the versatility of the automation solution most convincing. Contract work for a broad clientele requires “a high degree of flexibility – beginning right with a lot comprising just one single item.” Rotage delivers to a regular clientele of 230 buyers, the monthly contract volume will be as many as 100 different customers on average. In some cases, these are production runs for fewer than 50 units, but lots between 100 and 1000 items are more the norm. “We have long since proven that we are competitive in spite of the long shipping distances,” explains Ingemar Ronger. “This is, as paradoxical as it might sound, on the one hand, one of the successes owed to automation, but on the other hand, a way to retain jobs.” That is an important concern for the proprietor at Rotage, who has taken to heart the promotion of Sweden as a production site.
Ronger sums up, because only then can the work be planned according to the principle “easier jobs at nights and on weekends, more complex tasks during the day”. Ronger adds: “Our objective is to manufacture 24 hours a day, seven days a week.” Rotage is on the right road to that goal. Shifts with minimum staffing on weekends have long since become less the exception and more the rule.
