Rupmaya Shoe Last Industries, India’s largest manufacturer of shoe lasts, recently completed a major CNC machine tool upgrade programme that has enabled the company to increase production capacity to 1,500 pairs of shoe lasts each day.

The CNC machine tools all feature NUM’s Flexium CNC platform and are produced by the specialist Italian company Newlast Italia S.R.L.

Founded in 2002, Rupmaya Shoe Last Industries has grown to become one of the largest manufacturers of shoe lasts in India. The company’s headquarters are in Agra, although it also operates production facilities in Kanpur and Ambur — and a product development centre in Noida. Rupmaya’s customers nowadays include many of the world’s leading shoe manufacturers.

Although Rupmaya started out as a traditional craftsman-based manufacturer, the company decided to transition to CNC machines at an early stage in its development. An initial investment in CNC technology from the Far East proved unsatisfactory on quality and support grounds, so in 2017 the company procured a ‘state of the art’ shoe last milling machine from Newlast for evaluation purposes and subsequently decided to migrate all of its production facilities over to Newlast machines — an upgrade that took three years to implement and was finally completed in 2020.

Mayank Agarwal, a director of Rupmaya, said: “The control flexibility provided by NUM’s Flexium CNC systems makes the machines extremely easy to set up and use, resulting in our operators only needing a few days of training. We are currently running three production lines simultaneously, giving us the capacity to craft over 1,150 pairs of lasts, as well as more than 350 pairs of samples — every day.”

Rajesh Nath, managing director of NUM India, added: “Newlast’s latest generation SDF HS machines can finish three pairs of plastic or wooden lasts automatically during a single working cycle. These machines, which are based entirely on NUM’s open architecture Flexium CNC platform, have nine interpolated axes and can produce about 45 pairs of highly accurate, fully finished shoe lasts per hour.”