Investment in FourJaw platform ‘a revelation’ for Hydrafeed

Milton Keynes-based Hydrafeed, a leading manufacturer of automation equipment for CNC applications and sub-contract supplier to the aerospace industry, has gained real-time visibility into its factory operations, after implementing machine monitoring technology from FourJaw Manufacturing Analytics. The move will enable Hydrafeed to meet growing production demand with its existing workforce and achieve energy savings worth more than £17,000 a year within a month.

Based in Milton Keynes, Hydrafeed relies on 50 people and 19 milling and turning machines to produce bar feed and machine tool automation products for CNC machine users and several of the world’s leading OEMs. Hydrafeed installed FourJaw’s plug-and-play platform on 14 of its machines in September 2023, enabling it to automatically recognise when they were productive, record reasons for downtime, generate a digital work schedule to guide factory operations and improve communication with machine operators.

FourJaw’s platform has provided Hydrafeed with a real-time understanding and visualisation of its factory data, enabling it to establish a production efficiency benchmark and a detailed account of energy use. This has already improved the day-to-day management of manufacturing operations and provided a clear understanding of where Hydrafeed can achieve productivity and sustainability gains.

Energy savings realised
During the first five weeks of using FourJaw, Hydrafeed was able to generate the same output in its milling cell with four fewer machines, allowing the redeployment of machine operators to its turning cell, where it has boosted usage by 30%. Hydrafeed identified further opportunities to reduce energy usage through more efficient machine operation within days of installation. The energy savings Hydrafeed has already identified will deliver a complete return on its investment in FourJaw.

Paul Gilligan, operations director at Hydrafeed, said: “We had a strong business before FourJaw but limited visibility of shopfloor operations. We have addressed that with FourJaw, and the response from management and machine operators has been positive. Everyone has clarity of what needs achieving and has bought into our plans to improve productivity and profitability. FourJaw has been a revelation. We have already reduced energy consumption and identified further opportunities for improvement. We know precisely what machines are running and when, what they are working on, how much energy they use, how long each job takes, and where time is being lost and why.”

FourJaw Manufacturing Analytics CEO Chris Iveson said: “We were thrilled to welcome Hydrafeed to FourJaw’s growing community of manufacturers and pleased to see our technology provide an almost immediate return on investment. We see manufacturers who are proactively using FourJaw’s technology, can typically achieve productivity gains of anywhere between 10-20% which can increase output capacity by as much as 30%, so we are excited to see what more Hydrafeed will achieve with FourJaw.”