BILA’s Sales Manager, Lars S. Rasmussen together with Project Manager at MAN-ES, Jonas Syders Knudsen in front BILA RoboPower T850-6L
BILA’s Sales Manager, Lars S. Rasmussen together with Project Manager at MAN-ES, Jonas Syders Knudsen in front BILA RoboPower T850-6L
MAN Energy Solutions (hereinafter MAN-ES) is a world-leading supplier of large drilling diesel engines and turbo machinery for marine and stationary applications. The company designs two-stroke and four-stroke engines, gas and steam turbines and compressors. The product range is rounded off by turbochargers, CP propellers, gas engines and engines for locomotives and power stations.
The production process in Copenhagen has about 250 employees, who primarily manufacture high-tech components for the injection and exhaust system on two-stroke engines.
BILA RoboPower is a flexible robot cell for feeding and removing items from CNC machines. MAN-ES had insufficient capacity on its lathe which machines the components. The company wanted a standard, quick-to-install solution for the lathe, and when the opportunity of leasing a BILA RoboPower robot arose, they took it.
BILA RoboPower was installed in just four days, and a MAN-ES employee had been trained in how to operate the robot. Because the programming of this robot cell is very simple, the MAN-ES employee trained a colleague the day after it was installed so that the robot cell could be kept running the following weekend.
Lars Rasmussen, BILA’s Sales Manager, says:
“We usually spend a day instructing the customer, who can then operate it afterwards. And BILA RoboPower is so user-friendly that it’s easy for employees to train one another up without any problems.”
Seven days later, BILA RoboPower was running on three shifts, and because the cell was leased, it was easy to calculate the hourly price of loading the CNC lathe. The hourly rate is now DKK 20 per hour, which has made the process very competitive. At the same time, efficiency has risen and the lathe’s output has increased by 40%.
Claus Stab, Head of Factory, is very impressed with how easy it is to program BILA RoboPower, and he gets positive feedback from his employees who are very pleased with their new colleague:
“At MAN Energy Solutions, we run a job rotation system, which means that it can take up to three weeks before our employees return to operate the same machine again. Yet BILA RoboPower’s simple, innovative software makes it easy for all employees to familiarise themselves with the programming even three weeks later.”
The second BILA RoboPower was installed in conjunction with a circular grinder. After BILA saw how the grinder was manually loaded, it developed a robotic solution that could do the job. The installation went just as smoothly as the first robot cell, and the employees were again very enthused about the solution. Due to the highly flexible, easily accessible software, MAN-ES can process small batches and still benefit from the robot cell for loading the grinder.
After the successful installations of the first two BILA RoboPower robot cells, five more new solutions are in the pipeline for installation early next year. This will greatly increase MAN-ES’s capacity and ensure that all employees get a technology boost to further enhance a valuable workday with more interesting tasks.
“Attracting qualified workers is challenging at present, but we’ve managed to increase the productivity of the employees we have. At the same time, we’ve made their workday even more interesting by using the latest technology to remove monotonous tasks and free up time for optimising and streamlining our production processes,”
concludes Claus Stab Nielsen, Head of Factory, MAN Energy Solutions.
Contact our experts and let us together find the right solution for your company.
