Worcester-based
A13 Engineering, which has both fabrication and machining capabilities, designs and manufactures a range of attachments for excavators, diggers and tractors; the company also makes structural steel buildings for farm and factory applications. In October last year, it moved from plasma cutting to laser cutting with the installation of a Bodor 12kW Laser and
Lantek Expert software.
Harry Hodgetts, A13 Engineering’s managing director, said: “We found that high-definition plasma was not suitable for about 10% of our production, prompting us to invest in a laser cutter that gives higher accuracy and automatic part etching for easy component identification, which is crucial during the manufacture and build of our products, as they have many very similar components. Making our own products now takes up around half of the capacity, with the remainder filled with sub-contract work.
“The decision to integrate Lantek was straightforward. Laser cutting allows us to handle a variety of materials, and with the software we can seamlessly import customers’ CAD files into Lantek Expert. Most of our work is cutting mild steel between 2 and 30mm thick and stainless steel between 1 and 10mm thick; and because the laser has a shuttle table, we can unload parts while the machine is cutting the next sheet.
“Moreover, with Lantek’s nesting capabilities we can tag parts in the sheet, nest parts in ‘larger profiled holes’ that would otherwise be scrap, add the odd part in a spare area — and use up remnants of material for maximised material utilisation.”
The sub-contract side of the business has required A13 Engineering to generate a large volume of quotations. Previously this was done using a series of spreadsheets which took over 20min for each quotation, but using Lantek ‘iQuoting’ has cut this to 5min. The software also holds material prices and allocations of material — and simulates nesting and machining times, along with gas use.
Mr Hodgetts concluded: “Gas usage is a big variable cost and highly job dependent. However, we have done trials and found that the usage calculated by ‘iQuoting’ is very close to what we actually use; and once this software has completed an estimate it generates a pdf quotation, which is emailed directly to the customer. When the order is received, all the manufacturing information is already in the system so the job simply needs to be released to the workshop ready for manufacture.”