British enclosure constructor Pneumatechnique Ltd. was looking for ways to reduce its operating and overhead costs through automation. It found the solution it needed at Rittal: The Perforex machining center reduces the machining time for enclosures, improves the accuracy of recurrent working operations, and allows specialist production staff to be deployed more efficiently.
“Today, we can complete a project in 20 minutes that would previously have taken four hours. At the same time, quality has improved.”
Adam Wilson, Production Manager at Pneumatechnique Ltd.
British enclosure constructor Pneumatechnique Ltd. was looking for ways to reduce its operating and overhead costs through automation. It found the solution it needed at Rittal: The Perforex machining center reduces the machining time for enclosures, improves the accuracy of recurrent working operations, and allows specialist production staff to be deployed more efficiently.
Before: Simple working operations and an enormous amount of effort
The biggest challenge for Pneumatechnique was the inefficient way that its production staff were deployed: They produced many enclosures with small lot sizes, which meant that highly qualified, well-paid staff could not be deployed according to their abilities. “We needed our people to perform the simplest processing steps, such as drilling. This tied up a lot of resources and cost a great deal of money,” said Jim Venters, Pneumatechnique’s Managing Director. An automation solution was needed as a remedy.
Today: Automated machining with Rittal Perforex
When carrying out its market research, the enclosure constructor found out about the Rittal Perforex CNC machining center, which fully and automatically completes all the machining operations. Cost calculations showed that the investment in the machine would significantly reduce the operating and general costs, and that it would quickly pay for itself.
Greater quality thanks to high repeatability
Another advantage of automation: The machining time for each enclosure has been dramatically reduced, while the machining quality has been increased even more due to the high level of mechanical precision. “From a production point of view, the machine’s greatest benefit is its repeatability,” added Adam Wilson, Production Manager at Pneumatechnique. “The machine has only to be set up once – everything else functions on its own. The parts are reliably dimensional accurate and within the tolerances. And errors that used to occur during manual processing can be ruled out.”
