Ricoh — a £14.8 billion world-wide business and a leading player in the office automation equipment sector — has to work to tight tolerances and short deadlines. When the company installed a CNC teach lathe to undertake work previously carried out on manual lathes, Chris Mills — assistant manager in the parts engineering department at Ricoh’s Telford plant — described the change as ‘transformational’. It was also the first time that the company had bought Romi equipment.
Ricoh had no previous history with Romi but put the company on its list of suppliers to investigate. It subsequently visited Rugby-based Sandretto UK Ltd
(www.romi.com), which is part of the Romi Group, looking for a machine that could produce one-off components and short batches (up to 50 items) to precise tolerances — and fast.
Most of the work undertaken in Mr Mills’ department is for the UK plant, which employs 876 people and produces a wide range of printing and imaging equipment; it also produces jigs, fixtures and gauges for other Ricoh plants around the world, particularly those in France and California. This department is seen as a ‘centre of excellence’ within Ricoh, and since last year it has been the preferred supplier within the group of ‘Q Jigs’, which it can produce competitively while maintaining the highest quality standards.
Mr Mills says: “The Romi C420 lathe was favoured, because it could be supplied with either a Siemens or Fanuc control; we opted for the Siemens system. The machine was also particularly robust.”
Consistent accuracy
Where Ricoh would previously have struggled with some components, they are now produced easily; and even on batches of 50 components, the variation between the first and last is less than 0.01mm. A wide range of materials — including plastics, aluminium and steel — is machined, and the eight-station turret on the C420 lathe means that switching between products is both fast and easy.
The visit to Rugby by Mr Mills and tooling engineer Scott Pardoe also resulted in the purchase of a second machine — a Romi D-series vertical machining centre. They chose Romi’s top-of-the-range D 1000AP, which features a 15,000rev/min spindle, a Siemens 828D control system and a 30-tool ATC with a chip-to-chip time of just 4.6sec. It also offers a comprehensive chip-removal capability and a rapid-traverse rate of 40m/min.
Mr Mills says: “The standard features are very good, and it’s really easy to use. The tool change is very fast, and we are seeing an increase in our productivity. That said, with the machine being so new, we need more time to accurately quantify the improvement. What is clear, however, is that we will get a return on investment in under two years.
“Equipment efficiency and productivity have become critical in the last six years, as we are now seeing new products being introduced in parallel rather than in series. Indeed, we can now have five or six new products coming at one time. The market is asking for bespoke solutions, so we must design, prototype, tool up and produce in a very short time-span.”