Located in the village of Les Geneveys-sur-Coffrane (some 5km from Neuchâtel in the French-speaking region of Switzerland), Felco SA dates back to the end of World War II when Félix Flisch — a trained fitter and turner — set himself the goal of creating the best pruning shears and selling them in Switzerland, Europe and beyond.
Mr Flisch fabricated the first pair of Felco secateurs in the garage of his home, alongside which the current factory sits today. The reliability inherent in their simple design, almost unchanged 70 years later, caught the attention of wine-makers at the region’s many local vineyards. The company’s early products were ergonomically designed to offer comfort; they also introduced an inter-changeability of parts and durability — attributes that have since become common features of all Felco products (owners of Felco secateurs made in the 1950s and 60s can still buy replacement blades and other components).
With the exception of screws and springs, all secateurs components are manufactured at the company’s Swiss plant, the two blades being he critical parts. Most companies in the garden-tools industry produce their blades by stamping, but Felco — with the aid of the latest Haas DT-1 drill-tap-machining centres with integrated robot loading and transfer
(www.haascnc.com) — now produces its blades on CNC machines.
The company installed its first Haas machine — an EC500 CNC horizontal machining centre — in July 2011; this was followed soon after by a VM-2 vertical machining centre. Thanks to the performance and reliability of these machines, Haas was in the frame when it came to Felco’s latest project — the automated blade-machining cell. Manufacturing manager Sebastien Nussbaum says he wanted machines that could — among other things — change tools quickly.
“The Haas DT-1 has a high-speed side-mount 20-pocket tool changer that gives a chip-to-chip time of just 1.8sec. Together with a generous working area, powerful direct-drive spindle and fast rapids and accelerations, the Haas DT-1 machines offered me a good price-to-specification ratio; they also provided the foundation for a manufacturing solution that has changed the way we make our products.”
A cell with vision
Felco’s two Haas DT-1s form a single cell that uses Fanuc LR Mate 200iC vision-enabled robots to orientate, load and transfer parts between the machines. The company splits the operations on the DT-1s — one for each side of the steel blades. Operations to tolerances of 0.03mm include profiling, bore production, feature milling and blade-point milling. Cycle times average out at around 40sec and annual blade volumes from the cell exceed 700,000.
Mr Nussbaum says: “Today, only Felco is milling blades, and by doing so we get much higher quality than the stamped alternatives offered by our competitors. Not only is milling a lot faster as a complete process, there is also no grinding required to finish the blades.”
The new Haas cell runs 24hr a day, seven days a week. Felco has staff in the plant between 05:00 and 22:00 “to keep an eye on things”, but from 22:00 to 05:00 the cell works unmanned — a period Mr Nussbaum refers to as the “ghost shift”.
From its earliest days, Felco has sought to bring in-house every process required to manufacture its product range. This approach has allowed the company to systematically integrate technological advances into each stage of production and to enhance them with know-how acquired over 60 years. Today, Felco — widely acknowledged as the leading brand in its field — has six subsidiaries distributing its products in more than 120 countries.
Cutting and pruning are, by their very nature, seasonal. In general, there is no pruning in the summer, so Felco’s production continues for stock purposes only, with sales typically re-commencing in the autumn, dropping off later in the year and building up again in the spring. In total, 90% of the one million secateurs produced at the Felco factory every year are exported — 15-20% to the USA, with Europe the next biggest market.
Felco has a history of developing solutions in-house, even to the extent of building its own machines. “We did our homework before selecting the DT1 machines,” says Mr Nussbaum. “They were supplied by Haas Automation, and the robots were supplied by Robotec. We wanted to assemble the cell and create our own process from scratch, simply because we have always done so and we have the in-house expertise.”
Mr Nussbaum highlights the challenges of keeping a well-established, Europe-based manufacturing firm at the forefront of its market, given the competition it faces from companies located in lower-cost regions of the world. “There were 15 people working in component manufacturing when I started in 2005; today, there are only five. We’ve pushed to use CNC wherever possible, to keep costs down and quality high. As well as replacing our 15-year-old stamping cell, the Haas DT-1 cell has allowed us to remove a number of old Felco-built machines and other conventional mills, which were not suitable or reliable enough for high-volume manufacturing.
“It was also important that we improved the perception of Felco as a manufacturer, bringing it into the 21st century; but it wouldn’t have been possible without affordable technology. Some 30-40 years ago, salaries in Switzerland were quite low; and critically there was little competition. Today you need CNC and automation if you are to maintain quality at the high volumes required for products to remain affordable.”