DoorCo is the UK’s leading composite door manufacturer, specialising in delivering the highest quality composite doors and cassettes to both commercial and retail customers across the UK.
DoorCo is focused on innovation, constantly investing in the most advanced technologies to elevate their product development and manufacturing processes. They invested in a ZOLLER smile 420 tool presetter from ZOLLER UK, allowing them to enhance productivity, streamline shopfloor processes and minimise wasted time and resources.
Project Brief:
As leaders in the UK’s fenestration industry, DoorCo produces over 25,000 bespoke doors per month. One of their most popular products is the revolutionary GRiPCORE technology which combines the best of traditional and modern door manufacturing, using a hybrid-timber foam core in between two aluminium sheets to ensure exceptional strength, weight and rigidity.
Having previously relied upon manual measurement and setting techniques for their tooling, which took up large amounts of time and risked high levels of human error or inconsistencies, DoorCo began investigating the benefits of offline tool presetting.
Both Aaron Williamson, Head of Manufacturing, and Chris Mansfield, Manufacturing Manager, had previous experience with ZOLLER tool presetting technology and contacted ZOLLER UK to organise an on-site demonstration to help transition to a more standardised, accurate and reliable production process.
Chris said: “Prior to investing in the ZOLLER tool presetter, everything was set manually. Operators were running one singular door and then they would adapt the tool to suit that. There was no precision in what we were doing.
“If the operator gets it slightly wrong, we’re rushing a PCD tool going straight into a door and not at the right depth. So we could be looking at taking a 20mm cut on something which maybe cost hundreds of pounds, rather than what should be taking a 1mm cut.
“We were using upwards of three or four sets of tooling a week on some of the machines.”
The Solution:
DoorCo invested in a ZOLLER smile 420 tool presetter from ZOLLER UK, enabling them to enhance their productivity, streamline shopfloor processes and minimise wasted time and resources. By presetting tools offline, this state-of-the-art tool presetter unlocked significant production capacity and valuable machining time across DoorCo’s shopfloor.
“When we first brought the ZOLLER into DoorCo, it was completely new technology,” Chris said.
“When we got the sales team in and they actually showed us, they did a demo here on site and they went through some of our tooling with us.
“The operators on the shopfloor had never seen anything like it. When they had a label being printed off that had measured the tool to three or four decimal places, they didn’t realise you actually had to set tools to that.”
Chris added: “A big priority for us at DoorCo is customer service and by having the ZOLLER on site, we can then provide a better service to our customers who then provide that to the homeowner.
“We’re given the challenge of prepping these doors. Our customers don’t want to be worried about what the prep is, they just want to go and hang the door and it be correct first time. By us having ZOLLER technology on the shopfloor, we now have confidence that what we’re making is correct.”
The Benefits:
Since investing in the smile 420, DoorCo have revolutionised their shopfloor production processes which has enabled them to increase capacity with full confidence in the products they are distributing across the UK.
With additional auto-focus and power-clamping spindle capabilities, the smile 420 has drastically improved the repeatability, reliability and speed in which operators can measure tools.
By being able to preset their tools away from the machine, DoorCo have been able to reduce their set-up times considerably, saving significant amounts of production time, and also reduce their tooling costs by avoiding costly spindle crashes previously caused by human error.
Chris said: “Since we brought the ZOLLER in, it’s just made everything a lot slicker. The set-up times have reduced, our reworks have come dramatically down and the operators have confidence to know what the machine is going to be able to do.
“We’re doing two sets of tool changes per week. Previously, we would be losing upwards of three hours machining time because of that. We’re now completing that task in less than 20 minutes.
“That’s adding capacity that we didn’t think we were going to have and now, we don’t even have to factor in any downtime for the changeover.”
As DoorCo continues to drive the sector forward and leads the way in terms of innovation, ZOLLER is an integral part of that, playing a critical role in helping them to push towards becoming a smart factory.
Aaron said: “We invested in a lot of machinery, close to £1,000,000 in total, and the ZOLLER was part of that investment.
“The ZOLLER was like the final piece of the shopfloor that we put in. Once all the new machinery was in place, we then had that confidence that we know it was going to produce doors to the standards that were expected.”
He added: “I would 100% recommend ZOLLER UK to anybody looking at tool presetting. The package that you get in terms of not just the machine, but the demos, the training, the service and the aftercare, it would be hard to find somebody who could rival that.”
Why ZOLLER UK?
ZOLLER UK delivers world-leading precision of tool-setting, inspection, storage and management solutions, adding improved efficiency and value to any manufacturing process.
ZOLLER UK is part of the Carfulan Group who specialise in providing the most advanced manufacturing technologies available, helping customers across their five divisions to achieve optimal performance and end-product excellence.
