Radan system user Ambi-Rad is one of Europe's leading manufacturers of industrial radiant tube heaters with over 50 per cent of the UK market and sales outlets in 35 countries world-wide. Its name is synonymous with industrial heating systems. It also has an increasing presence in the industrial and commercial markets for warm air units and air curtains.

The £18 million turnover company has its headquarters and main manufacturing plant in a recently-built 110,000 square feet facility in Brierley Hill, West Midlands. There are also two heating system subsidiaries, Nordair in Stockport and Reznor in Folkstone. Between them the three companies employ over 200 people.

Founded in 1979, Ambi-Rad has reached its present position by seeking to meet customers' needs for efficient heating solutions and by continually developing new heating system products. Today it offers a full range of services from heating system design to on-site support and commissioning.

For the past year a PC-based Radan CADCAM system, running New Radraft and Radpunch software, has started to play a full part in the company's expansion of its product ranges. Recently extended to two seats, it is used for producing workpiece drawings and for programming an Amada turret punching machine which is at the heart of sheet metal component manufacture.

Sheet metal forming is an important feature of the company's manufacturing operation. Three years ago, as part of a move to cellular manufacture on the shop floor, the factory now located at Brierley Hill brought sheet metal manufacture in-house and set up a separate sheet metal forming division.

Here many metal sheets are punched and proved, in particular the heat reflectors and burner control housings that are key parts of the products assembled in other divisions. The sheet metal materials used range from aluminium to stainless steel in sheet thicknesses from 0.5 to 2mm. The Radan system is truly kept busy programming the Amada to punch these. 

‘The programming never stops,’ says Nathan Jones who manages the sheet metal forming cell. After joining the company three years ago he was largely responsible for bringing the Radan system into the company to replace an outdated dedicated programming system. His past experience had already told him that this was the system to meet the company's programming needs.

I was able to show the board what we could do and what savings could be made in time and materials using the system, easily to achieve a quick payback. It is a well-known fact that Radan is the market leader but what sold it to them was that it is a large company similar in size to us and always likely to be there when we need them, in the future as they are now.'

One of his fears when the Radan system was installed was that once all the existing part programmes had been transferred from the old system there would not be enough work for it. His fears were unfounded. With many new products, customised variants and modifications to existing designs, together with prototypes, one station soon became two and both are now in continual use.

With his experience of both sheet metal manufacture and of the Radan, having used a Radan system for several years in a previous company which manufactured motor control panels and switch boards, Nathan Jones has found plenty of opportunity to further develop some of these parts for efficient manufacture.

He has been able to eliminate several post-punching operations to bring benefits to both part costs and cycle times. He quotes as an example a programme developed on Radan to enable several difficult brackets to be punched as a group. They could also then be formed in the press brake as a group rather than being produced individually as they were before.

With one new product the Radan system has already been used to design the sheet metal parts as well as programme them. The product is a smaller variant of the AirBLOC range of industrial air curtains launched last year. This creates a curtain of air to provide environmental separation in places where there are frequently open doors in warehouses, factories, cold rooms and commercial premises.

The Radan system's automatic parts nesting is proving a valuable material and cost-saving tool. The savings it can bring were highlighted when a problem cropped up in punching parts for a hinged box, normally punched on a sheet in families. The hinge- forming tool used on the turret punch was broken. So new nests had to be created quickly to allow those parts not needing the hinge-forming tool to be punched while the tool was repaired.

A batch quantity of 350 sets of parts would previously have required the use of 175 sheets. By separating out the hinge and non-hinge parts onto separate sheets it was found that, not only could production of the non-hinge parts go ahead, but once the full production of parts was eventually completed some 35 fewer sheets had been needed, representing a big cost saving.

Not only did it save material, it also saved time because fewer tools were needed for each run, so that turret setup time was less. Also because they were like parts they could punch from one end of the sheet to the other and so reduce cycle times. Such experiences have opened the way for fuller and more diverse use to be made of a very dynamic nesting routine.

The design of products and the generation of production drawings is normally the responsibility of a separate development department within the company. Component data for use in part programming is transferred into the Radan system as flat DXF files which Nathan Jones or programmer Dan Phillips then tool up on the PC screen to create the punching programmes.

As work is scheduled, the necessary programmes are called up by the punching machine operator at a Radan DNC terminal alongside the machine. The operators on each shift have the skill to manipulate programmes on this terminal in order to match them with the turret tooling arrangement at that time and so save downtime by eliminating the need to change the turret layout.

'I might create a part programme with a tool in turret station 2 and by the time the job is scheduled, perhaps some months later, that particular tool is in station 15. So the operator just scrolls down the programme on the screen and changes the codes to the new location', says Nathan Jones.

With just a year's experience of using the Radan system for drafting and machine programming, the sheet metal forming division at Ambi-Rad can already see the potential for further improvements it can bring to the whole manufacturing process. In particular with the opportunities for metal savings by auto-nesting there is likely to be further integration with the company's scheduling computer system.