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Waterloo Air Management

Stretchy software wins to make large cost savings at Waterloo.

A small investment in parametric software development is saving Waterloo Air Management £100,000 a year by enabling the production of plenum chambers to be brought in house and automated.  It is all thanks to an interface programme written by Radan to enable Waterloo's Radpunch programming system to manipulate dimensions originating on its Avante business system.

Waterloo Air Management system, based at Aylesford in Kent, manufactures a wide variety of heating, ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC) products from grilles and diffusers to fan coils units and air handling units.  It reckons to be the largest independent manufacturer of its type in the UK with a turnover of £17 million and a workforce of 220.  It also has a smaller sister company of 60 people in The Netherlands.

The plenum chamber is a key product accessory to its grille & diffuser range of products. The plenum is a five-sided sheet metal box with spigot, which attaches to the grille/diffuser and the spigot, enables the connection of the HVAC system's ductwork to the grille/diffuser mounted in the ceiling. Used mainly in building ventilation & office air conditioning system installations, its correct sizing is important to the efficiency of the system.  Plenum dimensions are precisely specified to fit each individual grille/diffuser for each customer order.

Between 500 and 1000 plenums are produced every week.  They are punched, formed and assembled by mechanical stitching from 22gauge galvanised steel sheet in a wide range of sizes and in batch quantities ranging from 1-off to 100 or more.  Punching is done on a Trumf5OO punching machine linked by DNC to the Radan system that does the programming and nesting for it.

Until a few months ago all plenum chambers were manufactured by sheet metal subcontractors at a cost of £750 000 annually.  It was decided to bring production of plenum chambers in-house as a way of cutting cost, improving the response to-order time and of maximizing sheet metal punching machine capacity and workforce by introducing a twilight shift.

Initially in-house production was to be confined to some of the more common regular sizes made in large quantities.  That was until it was realised that by developing a parametric programme, and by using the plenum dimension data relating to specific customer orders already stored in the business system, all sizes of sheet metal parts could be automatically programmed and nested using the Radan system's Radpunch and Radnest software.

As Information Services Director, Martin Curry, explains: 'The initial approach to Radan was from our production people. They wanted a programme by which they could enter a plenum's part dimensions into the Radan system located in the shop floor programming office. I realised that those dimensions were already in the Avante system, having been entered by the sales office as part of the customer's order.'

Within this business system is a rule-based configurator that asks questions relating each customer order.  It requires input of all the essential dimensions of the parts that make up a product.  It will calculate the sheet sizes based on the individual customer order.  The system is then able to check for materials and schedule the work for the shop floor.

It was argued that if the configurator knows how big each plenum is, that data can be transferred out to the Radan CADCAM system to programme and nest a kit of plenum parts automatically.  Radan's office in Bath developed a general interface programme which now manipulates standard symbols for the dimensional features of the panels that form a plenum assembly that Parametises (stretches) these to the sizes required by the specific plenum order.

At the end of a day shift all dimensional data relating to the sales orders that require to be assembled the next day will be made available.  This can be called down by the Radan system through the interface using just one function.  The programming and nesting is done automatically for each individual order.  This enables kits of parts to be produced overnight on the Trumpf punching machine, ready for assembly the next day.

Says Waterloo's marketing manager, Nygel Humphrey, who has been one of the key people driving through the programme to bring plenum manufacture in-house, 'This has been the best thing we have done in the business for a long time.  It was important we took advantage of the savings we could make as soon as possible.  So we drove it hard.  And now it is saving us £100, 000 a year.'

Not all plenum chambers are manufactured in house.  At present the figure is about 80 per cent.  The rest will be small volume non-standard designs, or have non-standard features; for example spigot sizes that do not conform the commonly used ISO standards for duct sizes.  Unlike the standard ISO diameter spigot which is made of plastic, which fix like a screw top jar, these non standard spigots are still fabricated from sheet metal.

The business system's configurator has simple either/or formulae for determining which orders will be made in house and which will sub contracted.  The formula contains rules relating to the plenum type, its acoustic lining and spigot size to determine whether to Buy or Make.

Application of the parametric software is currently confined to the manufacture of plenum chambers but it will be enhanced and extended to cover other HVAC products that lend themselves to parametrics.  It can be used for example for programming the production of panels containing rows of punched holes.  The number of holes in a row will depend on the size of the panel.  Using the parametric software it becomes a simple matter to automatically produce punching programmes for the correct number of holes.

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