AUTOMOTIVE SECTOR NICHE OPERATOR AUTOMATES ASSEMBLY
customer base, it counts Bugatti, Atom and
Lotus, alongside other prestige marques.
BRAKING IN VOLUME
Calipers are AP Racing’s volume product,
some 80,000+ annually, with those for the
performance car upgrade aftermarket
representing the highest volume within that,
then OEM and then race. To support
assembly of higher volume parts, the
company has spent £1.5m on upgrading the
assembly processes, moving from cellular/
manual assembly to a semi-automated line,
commissioned in August of last year. The line
will tackle some 60% of the company’s
caliper output.
Assembly for race and other lower volume
or special parts will continue through the
manual cells kitted out with necessary
support equipment. This approach provides
the “huge amounts of exibility” that the
company offers its customers, underlines
managing director David Hamblin.
Parts assembled in a caliper cell or via the
semi-automated line include seals, pistons,
bleed screws, wear plates, H-pieces, crossover
pipes and pads, which are attached/
tted/inserted to the painted caliper subassembly
(AP Racing is the world leader in
forged, monobloc caliper manufacturing,
incidentally, with all new designs adopting
this approach).
Located in its own adjacent recently
acquired building, although the seven-station
line is faster than the manual cell method –
each part now produced in around a third of
the time previously taken – that was not a
core criterion. The three key reasons for the
investment were capacity increase, quality
and traceability, advises Ian Fotheringhame,
industrial engineering and facilities manager.
The fact that the company has added £15m
to its turnover in 10 years serves to underline
the capacity driver, but this new line also
gives the company the ability to bid for more
work, says Hamblin, adding: “We see lots of
opportunities, both in niche OEM and
aftermarket, where we will utilise this line.”
Indeed, if one of its current discussions
provides fruitful, a second line is already
pencilled in to sit alongside the rst.
But even low volume requirement race
manufacturers are said to be interested in
what the line has to offer. Bennett explains:
“Having the ability to give customers all the
data for that caliper proves consistency.
If they can see that caliper one has 10
pieces of information and the other calipers
have the same 10 pieces of information,
this gives them signi cant peace of mind.”
The line and associated equipment,
supplied by a specialist in the technology, are
believed to be unique, says the industrial
engineering and facilities manager, who was
one of those that helped specify it: “This has
been done in collaboration with Brembo and
is the rst time we’ve undertaken anything of
this scale within the group. The line is
designed to build 13 different part families
that cover 197 individual assembly
members.”
Serving the line with parts is ‘the
supermarket’, which is an intermediate store
of parts held separately from those in the
company’s main warehouse. The
supermarket is complemented by ‘smart
trolleys’. Guided by a pick-to-light system,
parts are taken from the ‘supermarket’ and
placed into the appropriate trolly location.
Loaded trolleys can be parked until required,
whereupon they are wheeled to the rear of
the appropriate line station to support
assembly of the designated number of
assemblies.
The line has several xtures mounted on a
carrier plate system to transport the
assembly to and through each station. These
are exible and cater to all product
assemblies, while xtures at each
station are changed as
necessary to support the
variations. At each station,
on-screen work
instructions guide
activities, supported by pick-to-light systems
for picks from the trolleys, together with
connected tools or xtures for tightening
screws/unions, pressing in pins/cylinders
and lubricating threads, for example. The
work instructions and associated active tool/
xture/gauge setting requirements are held
within a central supervising computer and
called or prompted by the scanning of a
unique data matrix code (DMC) laser etched
onto the caliper body; part number and order
serial number are similarly etched.
If any operation or setting is not
completed according to the instructions and
associated quality/activity data, then a part
cannot progress along the line, because at
the next station, scanning the DMC will reveal
non-compliance – no faults forward. For any
part that is unable to meet a required
standard, it can be rejected off the line and
moved to a failure bay. Parts placed here are
only accessible by a supervisor, who will
make the call on rework or scrappage.
Incidentally, the supervising computer knows
what part it is expecting at the outset,
because the line has been set up for it, so
again, a wrong part scanned at the rst
station could not progress.
TRACEABILITY ENHANCED
It should also be said that traceability for
parts taken from the smart trolleys, such as
seals, is also now possible. Bar coded
packages that are scanned as parts are
picked operates, so traceability for some
bought-in parts is also part of the new
operational picture.
A nal element of traceability occurs at
packing, when an anti-counterfeit DMC label
is adhered to the nished assembly. Of
course, that information is linked to all the
other data associated with the assembly.
Recipients scan the code using an app to
register and con rm authenticity. Intended
primarily for rst use, it does ag up
subsequent ownership or an attempt to
counterfeit. As a guide to its effectiveness,
prior to the system’s introduction the
company would receive about 150 emails a
week asking about authenticity,
reveals Bennett. “The month
after we introduced the
system, that fell to single
gures,” he reveals. So
far, some 200,000 labels
have been applied – the company
The shopping isle, intermediate stock that is used
to supply the smart trolleys that feed the line stations
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