Could presetting with ZOLLER save you money?
At ZOLLER UK, we talk a lot about the benefits of presetting your tools offline – increased productivity and accuracy, less scrap, longer tool life and reputational gains.
We say that, though setting tools is an essential part of any CNC machining operation, the belief that the most cost-effective way of doing so is via an on-machine system is simply a myth.
Valuable machining minutes are lost every time a setting operation is performed and the spindle stops turning. And, as we all know, down time costs money.
So what if we could put a figure on exactly how much money a ZOLLER presetter could save your business, even down to how long it would take to secure a return on your investment (ROI)?
Actually, we can. When you work with our experienced engineers and tell them exactly how your company operates, they’ll do the maths – and you may well be amazed at the figures.
Consider this typical scenario: you’re a small to medium-sized metal-cutting operation with five vertical 5-axis machines on site, running an eight-hour daily shift for 46 weeks – or 230 days – of the year.
Your hourly machine rate is £50 and each machine requires 15 tool changes per shift, with a setting time of three minutes per tool change.
Using these figures, we can calculate the following to be true:
- A productivity loss of 45 minutes per shift, per machine
- A total productivity loss per shift, across five machines, of 225 minutes, or almost 4 hours
- A total productivity loss of 1,125 minutes per week – almost 19 hours where the spindles are not turning
- The machines would be inactive for 5 hours – or more than 107 working days – every year.
- That equates to a financial loss of £187.50 a day, £937.50 a week and, over a year, more than £43,000.
With ZOLLER UK, it doesn’t have to be this way.
By specifying and pre-building tool assemblies to meet production schedules, a ZOLLER presetter such as the smileCompact would give this user an annual saving of £43,125 each and every year.
Taking into account additional typical cost savings on machine tools of 10% using ZOLLER technology, that’s a return on investment in just two months.
Can you afford not to be doing it?