Case Study: a leading manufacturing company achieves efficient lights-out manufacturing with FourJaw machine monitoring

How a customer utilised machine monitoring to figure out what was causing a grinding machine to malfunction and damage itself and the parts it was machining during 'lights-out' manufacturing

A leading manufacturing company that produces carbon-cutting tools faced a challenge with its new robot-loaded CNC machines. The goal was to use them for lights-out manufacturing to gain extra capacity, but each Monday morning would reveal a pile of scrapped parts. The company could not identify the root cause, so it had to stop its lights-out operations, restricting production to daytime hours and failing to see a return on its equipment investment. To resolve this, they turned to FourJaw and implemented its machine monitoring software.

By installing FourJaw's platform, the company gained visibility into the machines' operations, even when unattended. The data revealed that failures always occurred on the third operation. This led to a new strategy where the first two operations ran lights-out, while skilled machinists handled the problematic third op during the day. This solution from FourJaw led to a dramatic increase in productivity, with lights-out part production jumping from 3-4 to over 80 parts per weekend. Cycle times were also slashed by increasing the feed rate, and shop floor staff were happier with more engaging work.