PM Blog

Lean Six Sigma’s black belt training can be time consuming and expensive. It pulls valuable employees away from their daily commitments. The training is rigorous, and certification is not guaranteed. But companies including 3M, GE, Ford and even Allied Machine & Engineering, a 78-year old family-owned cutting tool manufacturer, continue to invest in the training. Implementing Lean Six Sigma can be intimidating, but businesses committed to educating employees in key roles throughout their organization can see long-term benefits in customer satisfaction, work culture and efficiency.

The Team Cutting Tools of Luxembourg-based Ceratizit Group has developed a new approach to turning that it calls “High Dynamic Turning” (HDT), which, combined with the dynamic FreeTurn tooling system, uses a turn-mill center’s B axis or milling spindle to perform the turning process. In contrast to conventional turning, where the contour is created with an indexable insert at a fixed angle-of-approach to the workpiece, this solution allows for 360 degrees of freedom as the tool approach and point of contact in the machine can be varied during machining.

Ceratizit showed the turning technology for the first time in a live demonstration during the company’s Open Days 2019 in Reutte, Austria, on an Emco Hyperturn 665 MCplus. According to Dr. Uwe Schleinkofer, head of R&D cutting tools for Ceratizit Austria, HDT allows all traditional turning operations such as roughing, finishing, contour turning, face turning and longitudinal turning with just one tool.

It ended up being the most life-changing meeting of my career, and it all began when I answered the phone on my desk. On the other end of the line was the prominent investment banker who chaired the board of directors of the company for which I was controller, a position I had accepted only months before.

Earlier that day I had learned that the company’s president and vice president had been unexpectedly fired from their positions. As the chairman summoned me to his posh downtown office, about 30 minutes from mine, I knew that my time working for my then employer would soon come to an end. I abruptly collected the personal items from my office and walked through the facility one last time before settling into my car for the half-hour drive.

In a competitive business environment, manufacturers need to do whatever they can to give themselves an advantage. For machine shops, investing in the best technology available is one way to gain the leg up needed to win jobs. This is how Anthony Machine Inc. of San Antonio, Texas, operates its business. The company also maintains strong relationships with its suppliers to ensure that it is getting the most out of the latest technology. “We’re always competing against smaller, lower-cost shops, and in order to continue winning new business in this environment, we have to adopt the latest in advanced tooling and machine tool technology,” says Anthony’s operations manager Mohsen Saleh. “This is what’s given us the edge, and Kennametal is a big part of it.”

Anthony Machine Inc. has been providing precision machining services to industries including oil and gas, mining, transportation and power generation since 1946. With all that experience, there is little this job shop cannot handle. However, after the company purchased a pair of NLX 3000 1250 universal turning centers from CNC machine builder DMG MORI—the shop’s first Y-axis, live-tool lathes—the company’s manufacturing team was challenged with making the most of that new investment.

Aaron was born and raised in a small town in Michigan and graduated from Michigan Technological University with a degree in electrical engineering technology and has since been interested in all industrial technologies. His career history includes working with robotic waterjet cutting, plastic welding, and currently at PMPA technical member SBS Ecoclean, a company that manufactures industrial robotic washing machines. He has been involved in customer service as well as controls engineering since day one with Ecoclean.