Central Screw Products core business is contract manufacturing of machined components. As many of you know, we machine components both domestically in Troy, MI and also in our partner facilities in China.
In our U.S. facility, we remain competitive by automating our machining jobs. This process takes time, patience, and a whole lot of elbow grease, but in the end we have a system that produces the components for our customer quickly and effectively. My brother and I learned automated systems in high school, and armed with our engineering degrees and our excellent staff we are always looking for ways to reduce the labor in a job.
Automating machining equipment is still the holy grail for robotic companies. They talk about the time when every machine will have a robot in front of it. Even though there has been tremendous progress, most machining companies have not fully taken advantage of robotic automation. This has always seemed foreign to me, as I love the concept of getting to have these machines work together, but I was enlightened a few weeks ago when I went to visit a partner of ours, Fanuc Robotics.
I headed to Fanuc to investigate a vision system we are thinking of implementing on some of our Detroit Gun Works equipment. This system would allow the robot to "see" the part it was picking up and then change the program in the machine to run the correct type of part. We basically want to "idiot proof" our equipment. When I was at Fanuc we were talking about the machine tool industry and how it supports customers like myself. I was talking about a problem we were having back at the shop with an expensive machine tool we had purchased and how it hadn't been running. The problem when you buy a system that someone else developed is that you need that person to fix it if it breaks. And when push comes to shove he might not be available.
I was fascinated at Fanuc Robotics because I realized they are set up to "teach" me and my staff on how to use their equipment. They want to teach me everything about it so I can learn how to do incredible things with it. In order to do this they devote extensive time and effort to their R&D using shops like ours to see what problems we are having and then trying to find innovative solutions.
I realized my machine tool builders are simply concerned about cutting metal, nothing else. They are not concerned about all the other problems that surround my business and even so they are not set up to teach me everything about the equipment. They simply want me to use the equipment and replace it when it gets old.
It validated the work that we have been doing with our robots, as well as validating all the time that we spend to integrate a system. It takes us forever to work the bugs out, but in the end it supplies you a better product. Not only that, but I believe it is a true differentiator. We are the type of company that learns how to integrate our equipment so we can provide you with the best possible components. In doing so we will always be ahead of the companies buying turn-key solutions, because when the machine breaks on Friday afternoon, they aren't going to be able to get anyone to fix it until Monday morning.
So send us your inquiries and we will look for innovative ways to manufacture your product. Robots are allowing us to develop systems we never thought possible in the past, and we look forward to working with you to solve those problems.
