News High power fiber laser cutting: Doing more with less

In a growing, yet competitive market, companies are looking to do more with less-that is, more throughput with less labor, less space, and less overhead.

Located in the city limits of Lincoln, Nebraska is Kinney Manufacturing (intometal.com), a contract manufacturer with extensive capabilities in engineering, fabrication, finishing, machining, quality, and welding. The company has been investing in high-power fiber lasers and automated solutions to drive increased throughput, efficiency, and profitability.

When traveling to Lincoln, one notices how this company is completely surrounded by vast acres of farmland and wide-open prairies, and because of this, how this contributes to how competitive the local labor market can be. This factor that has led Kinney Manufacturing to be able to do more with less. Today, companies like Kinney Manufacturing are leveraging high-powered lasers and material automation to create a winning combination. The company uses a 10 kW fiber laser cutting system with a fully automated material handling and automated part sorting system (see Fig. 1), as well as robotic bending cells and robotic welding systems for its automated processes. When evaluating new laser technology, there are two key factors that seem to resonate with most people: 1) processing more material through machines in a shorter period of time, and 2) the ability to do this within the same amount of floor space as the older equipment. For example, by taking out a lower-wattage carbon dioxide (CO2) laser and replacing it with a high-wattage fiber laser, manufacturers are able to accomplish both tasks, creating an efficiency plan that will pay off.

The next most important question is how to get higher-power laser-cut parts to the next process as fast as they can now be cut. Velocity must match velocity when looking at automation. With automated part sorting, parts are stacked as fast as the 10 kW fiber laser cuts the parts. The laser can produce up to 5X more parts per unit of time compared to a 6 kW CO2 laser, and can cut thicker parts as well. The sorting system with its dual sorting heads is able to offload the parts onto stacks that can be moved immediately to the next downstream process, and with minimal work in process storage and no backlogs attributed to manual sorting.

How are manufacturing companies achieving all of this? Randy Kinney, President of Kinney Manufacturing, notes that "98% of all parts that are processed on our laser are sorted. Common assembly parts or bending parts with similar setups can easily be sorted together to make it simple to get them to the next operation together."

Operators are able to do more with less with the right automation solution. Kinney says, "If you pair a material load-and-unload system with an individual part-picking capability, you get a combination with an unmatched benefit. One person can now load material, verify programs and cutting sequence, verify quality, and move parts to the next operation. With a shortage of skilled labor, this is a winning system. There is a climate of growth for the operator; for the company, it allows them to manage labor costs."

Kinney notes, "Automation has enabled us to pass on savings to our customers and also to reinvest for additional automated solutions. With automated loading, cutting, sorting, stacking, and robotic bending technologies, we have very flexible systems that can run in the off-shifts and with very little supervision."

Lean thinking 

One might ask, what other factors move manufacturers to review these types of systems? Using the lean mindset, you need to touch the parts as few times as possible and ideally only when it involves adding value. There is no value added when manually sorting parts. After the system stacks the cut sheets, you typically need about four manual sorters moving parts and materials, and at the risk of safety issues.

With parts sorting automation, you can perform real-time parts sorting and stacking by the next downstream operation, or by like parts requiring the same press brake tooling setups or common assembly (see Fig. 2). The movement to the next operation as groups or like parts can be achieved immediately as the stacks of sorted cut parts are completed.