As a global leader in banking and retail support services Camberley, Surrey-based Cennox Plc is at the forefront in the battle against card skimming at cashpoints, developing components and systems that help banks stay one step ahead of the criminals.
To maintain its lead Cennox has an active research and development program that requires numerous parts to be machined with relatively short lead-times. In addition it also has production parts to produce in order to back up the service it provided to banks in repairing damaged cashpoints In the past all of this machining work was put out to sub-contract, but as demand grew the cost and delays that this created was impacting on productivity, so the decision was taken to investigate bringing machining in-house. Iain Ferguson, Technical & Operations Support Manager, Cennox Plc explains: “We were faced with two challenges, the cost and delays of sub-contracting all of this work and, the fact that we had no experience at all of machining. As we would be starting from scratch we needed to find a machine tool supplier that would work with us to bring this project to fruition.”
Craig Wilson, with help from Matchmaker quickly reduced cycle times.
After investigating the market Cennox chose Matchmaker CNC to supply the machine it required as well as providing extra support in pulling together a tooling and CADCAM package (Sharp CAM). The choice of a Matchmaker VMC 1020 vertical machining centre, with its 1100 by 560 mm table that allowed multiple set-ups to be in place at any one time was a big advantage to Cennox as some components require six operations and to have them all on the table simultaneously improved productivity and manufacturing costs considerably. Typical savings over sub-contracting these parts is running at around 75 per cent per component, with initial batches running at around 400 off, and ongoing batched between 20-30 off this is a major saving. Added to that is the elimination, almost completely of lost time while waiting for parts to be processed by a sub-contractor lead times considerable saving.
Given Cennox’s lack of machining experience part of Matchmaker’s role was to provide some ongoing support, through its applications engineering department, who worked alongside experienced R&D Machinist/Programmer, Craig Wilson, who was brought in to Cennox for this project. “The help we received from Matchmaker was excellent, Craig machined our first parts in a cycle time of 1 hour 20 minutes, he then tweaked the program and reduced that to 45 minutes per part and we were happy with that. Then, sitting down with Matchmaker’s applications team we have reduced cycle time even further, producing each part in 34 minutes,” says Iain Ferguson.
Making use of the capability of the Matchmaker VMC 1020 the productivity at Cennox, compared to what was being achieved through sub-contract is dramatically improved. With its 8000 revs/min, 7 kW spindle and 10 m/min cutting feedrate capability, and its Fanuc 0iMD control system, it is making short work of the volume of parts required. Typically, its sub-contractor would use two machines to produce 12 parts/day for Cennox. Now, with the single Matchmaker VMC 1020 in-house, Cennox is producing the same number of units per day with a marked improvement on dimensional accuracy and overall quality.
“Considering that our starting point was of no machining experience whatsoever, we were probably a unique proposition for any machine tool company, given the size of our business. We therefore had to place a lot of trust in Matchmaker to supply us with a machine and support that would deliver what we needed,” says Iain Ferguson. “That trust was well placed as we now have a machining facility that in which we are confident can produce anything that our design department comes up with and, deliver it in a very timely manner. The machine has delivered everything that we expected and the support from Matchmaker has made the whole project run smoothly from start to finish.”
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