Department Highlight - Programming Team

by Archie England - 

The Programming Team creates the files that are used to cut parts on the lasers and plasma. As mentioned in a previous department highlight, a large portion of the parts that go into our products are made within Maintainer. Of that population of parts, most of them start by being cut on the lasers or plasma. They would then be routed to the various locations in the plant for further processing (brake press, door assembly, paint department, etc…).

This team tries to ensure that the raw sheet material is used in the most efficient way possible. To do this, they “nest” the parts by placing as many as they can on a single sheet. The goal is to throw away / scrap the least amount of material as possible. This scrapped material left between the parts is called the “skeleton”. They also try to use larger pieces of leftover material, called “remnants”.

To give you an idea of the scope of this, here are some stats:

• A single service body unit may have over 550 parts that need to be cut out of sheet metal.
• A single DuaLock drawer set may have over 60 parts that need to also be “nested”.
• This does not include many accessory items, made for stock items (“IPO's”), customer service orders, or even crane parts.

That is a lot of nesting / programming! There is computer software to help with this task, of course. However, it still requires a lot of effort and attention to detail. The nesting also has to be completed in the right order to make it in time for the production schedules. This means that they are often juggling a lot of tasks in order to help make sure the manufacturing departments have the parts that they need!

The next time you see one of our sheet metal parts, know that the Programmers helped it all get started.