KBA adopts Missler Software TopSolid’Cam for its NC programming Michael Wendenburg
Just like any other international company, the printing machine manufacturer, Koenig & Bauer, faces the perpetual challenge of getting its products to market - worldwide - as quickly and cost-effectively as possible. The manufacturing process has its part to play in this. By using TopSolid’Cam from Missler Software, the company is looking to accelerate its NC programming and reduce machine preparation and machining times.
With its 8000 employees around the world and yearly revenues of around 1.7 billion euros, the Koenig & Bauer business group is one of the world’s biggest printing machine manufacturers, as well as being the manufacturer with the broadest product range in the industry. It caters to the full range of newspaper and phone book printing requirements, from sheetfed offset and commercial web offset to magazine gravure printing and digital printing. The group’s parent company is Koenig & Bauer AG (KBA), founded in 1817, with factories in Würzburg, Frankenthal, Radebeul and Trennfeld. Closely affiliated to the group are the KBA-Mödling AG machine factory in Austria, which manufactures its own machines for printing bank notes and components for sheetfed printing machines, and a number of other subsidiaries at home and abroad, for specific niche products.
Time and cost pressures are the major challenges facing KBA for its international business. “The cycle times for large machines have fallen over the last six or seven years from 24 to between 9 and 12 months. The whole process, from planning and design engineering through procurement of the rough casting to manufacturing, has been correspondingly compressed,” explains Andreas Göttker, the engineering manager in charge of production and casting at KBA in Würzburg. “At the same time, the cost pressures are increasing, since we are in competition not only in Europe but also in growth regions such as China, where we are coming up against regional suppliers whose machine production is subject to completely different conditions. In order to gain a solid foothold on these markets, we need to adapt our products to the local landscape, both technically and price-wise.”
The large printing machines are not manufactured in big production runs and need to be adaptable to diverse document formats and customer specific needs.
KBA has to manufacture increasingly quickly and cost-effectively in order to remain competitive on the world market
Customer-specific configurations
The large press installations, mainly used in newspaper printing, are developed and manufactured at the headquarters in Würzburg and in the Frankenthal and Trennfeld plants. Unlike the sheetfed machines, these print assemblies are not mass-produced but are adapted in each case according to customer specifications and/or the newspaper format involved. In order not to keep reinventing the wheel, the machines have a high degree of modularity, so that the contract-specific configurations can be derived from a stock of available components. Modularization was also the catalyst for the switch to design engineering using a 3D CAD system, according to Mr. Göttker.
A project has been underway in manufacturing for some years now with the objective of identifying the elements with the longest cycle times and determining how these cycle times might be reduced, beginning with the standardization of the raw materials, the rationalization of the planning processes into process engineering, NC programming, quality assurance and measurement equipment programming, through to the procurement of new multifunction machines capable of machining parts from start to finish. With regard to these cycle times, certain production processes have been kept in-house, such as the manufacture and machining of large cast parts: “We would be unable to take on projects with delivery deadlines of six months if we needed to spend four months procuring a large cast part on the international market,” explains Mr. Göttker.
While the design engineers have been working since 2000 with the 3D system from UGS, the NC programmers continued at first to use their old BRAVO NCG programming system, since, in the benchmarking, none of the CAM modules completely fulfilled their requirements. Due to the increasing difficulties with the repair and maintenance of VAX computers, however, the need for system change became inevitable. When choosing the new system, the market position and references of the manufacturer were as much a consideration as the technical requirements. “The new CAM software needed to function seamlessly with our CAD system and our administration tools from TDM Systems, as well as covering the broadest possible range of production techniques," stresses Klaus Rüger, NC Programming & Equipment Construction Head at KBA. “In-house, we have every machining technique you can imagine.”
The rapid machining of large side parts are essential to ensure short delivery times.
A system for all production techniques
Following an extended selection procedure, KBA opted in May last year to introduce TopSolid’Cam for NC programming across the company. The Missler Software solution won through not only on account of its versatility with respect to production techniques, but also because, compared to the rival systems, it offered the best support for the multifunctional turning-drilling-milling centres from WFL Millturn Technologies, used by KBA on all its sites. “This was one of the major reasons for choosing Missler Software", says Mr. Göttker. “The fact that we could also use TopSolid’Cam for everything else only occurred to us later.” In addition to its technical aspects, the software was notable for its straightforward operator guidance, which appealed to the NC programming users from the very start.
By the start of 2009, a total of 56 licences for the CAM software are due to be in place on the three German sites of Würzburg, Frankenthal and Radebeul and the Austrian site at Mödling. The introduction of the solution will be divided into four phases, over the course of which the various machine groups will gradually be converted to NC programming with TopSolid’Cam and the operators trained accordingly. “At all sites there are overlapping production techniques,” explains Mr. Göttker. “This is why we have organized the project in such a way that each site begins with a different machine group, so that, hopefully, we can best exploit the synergies; in other words, so that the automatisms and post-processors developed in one place can be adapted more quickly on the other sites.” So, for example, colleagues in Radebeul and Mödling are working on linking up to WFL machines for end-to-end machining.
The implementation is supported by the three Missler Software Value Added Resellers: NC Data, Moldtech and Comdata, who not only train users and provide support, but also program the 100 or so post-processors for the large machine pool of the KBA group. The excellent local support contributed in no small measure to Missler Software being awarded the contract for the project, as Mr. Göttker goes on to explain: “We could quite easily envisage carrying out a common project of this order of magnitude, since Missler Software has competent partners locally, who also have post-processor expertise. Another important point was the company’s flexibility and its willingness to contribute to the cost risk associated with the promised services. What is more, the costs of training and project implementation were lower than with the other bidders.”
Klaus Rüger, Rainer Wiesner and Dr.Ing. Andreas Göttker (from left to right) explain the reasons for choosing TopSolid’Cam.
TopSolid’Cam has very powerful simulation functions which can detect possible collisions. These functions also help optimize programs and reduce cycle times.
Automatisms for drilling operations
After weighing the pros and cons, KBA made a conscious decision not to adopt an integrated CAD/CAM solution from a single manufacturer: “Of course, the association between CAD and CAM data facilitates the change service, but it also inhibits our flexibility to carry out production-related optimization,” explains Mr. Rüger. “With us, the NC programmer can quickly make changes without always having to seek the consent of the design engineer.” This notwithstanding, construction changes can be made with ease in TopSolid’Cam. The CAM system offers high-performance functions for geometric comparison, by means of which the differences between various versions of an imported CAD file can be spotted at a glance.
One of the key advantages of an integrated CAD/CAM process chain would be the possibility of leveraging the production information embedded in the design engineering elements directly for the NC programming. If the CAD data are imported in Parasolid format, as is the case for communication between Unigraphics and TopSolid, this information normally gets lost. Missler Software has, however, written an additional program for KBA that can at least evaluate the drilling features in the CAD model and provide the information included in list form. “In the drill lists it is clearly defined what kind of a drill hole is involved for the corresponding geometry, and I can retrieve all the relevant data for production,” explains NC programmer, Rainer Wiesner, one of the TopSolid’Cam key users.
The drill lists provide the basis for the partially automatic generation of the drill programs, and hold out the promise of considerable time savings, in particular with regard to frame manufacturing. The giant side frames, indeed, receive between 1500 and 2000 drill holes, 80-90% of which are consistently reproduced. The NC programmers already have a clear idea of how and with what tools these holes are to be machined, but to be able to apply this knowledge repeatedly it is first of all necessary to depict this knowledge uniformly and in the form of pre-defined machining cycles in the CAM software. This is one of the tasks of Rainer Wiesner. The automatisms for drill operations constitute, in his opinion, one of the great strengths of TopSolid’Cam.
Von der automatisierten Erstellung der Bohrprogramme mit Hilfe vordefinierter Bearbeitungszyklen verspricht man sich bei KBA erhebliche Zeiteinsparungen. (Bild: KBA)
Sophisticated simulation functions
The CAM solution from Missler Software is also distinguished by its sophisticated simulation functions, even though the NC programmers at KBA are as yet relatively inexperienced in this aspect. The machine volume models required for the simulation are made available to them by the regional Missler Software partners, along with the post-processors, so that they only need to re-model the settings in TopSolid. For the geometry of the unmachined parts they use the finished part model from Unigraphics and assign it, according to their empirical values, with an allowance that may of course deviate for cast parts from the actual unmachined part geometry. This is not, however, problematic, since new parts can be thoroughly run-in on the machine. If the machine operator sees that the allowance is higher, he reduces the feed rate accordingly.
It remains to be seen whether, and the extent to which, the running-in costs can be reduced by simulation of the NC programs on the computer. “We shall certainly not be doing away entirely with the running-in procedure, since mistakes can also be made when adjusting tools, but I do believe that we shall save time,” says Mr. Rüger, to which Mr. Göttker adds: “The costs of running-in depend ultimately on the quality of the NC programs and the confidence of the machine operator, who is, after all, a qualified specialist who does not just take an NC program and press a button.”
“The NC programs have now acquired the same quality as for the old programming system,” says Wiesner, who has already generated several dozen NC programs with TopSolid’Cam. “We have, of course, excellently trained people, most of whom will have previously worked in the workshop and who are entirely familiar with the working methods for the machines for which they are now producing NC programs.” A third of the NC programmers in Würzburg and on the other sites now work with TopSolid’Cam, if not necessarily exclusively. For similar parts, for which an NC program already exists, changes are still mostly made quickly with the old system in order to save time.
KBA’s operators appreciated, straight away, the ease of use of TopSolid’Cam.
Users need to adapt
For users, working with the new 3D programming system calls for considerable adaptability, since they have been used to writing their programs in a language in which they knew precisely which command triggered which operation. Now they are working with a volume model, which of course enormously facilitates understanding of the machining part, but they cannot immediately recognize whether or not a mouse click also actually generates the corresponding machine command. “We can only see that in the post-processor,” says Mr. Wiesner, going on to say: “For the machining to be applied directly to the model, we have to rely on the design engineer having made no mistakes, since we cannot compare each dimension in the drawing with the model.”
The programmers received twice 3-days training on the Missler Software CAD and CAM modules respectively, with a one week interval in which they could work on what they had learnt. In Mr. Wiesner’s opinion, the training could have lasted longer, so that the users were really made familiar with all the relevant software functions and so were able to work all the more independently with them subsequently: “An NC program can of course be generated relatively quickly, but even a younger employee needs some time before he feels as comfortable with the new software as with the old system.”
The new software has, nonetheless, been well-received, as Mr. Wiesner confirms, and the users are very satisfied with the operator guidance and the functional scope. One of the desired improvements, for example, would be a clearer overview of the breakdown of the tree structure, in order to pinpoint more quickly the parameters to be modified when changes are made. Mr. Wiesner explains why this is so important: “The large number of drill holes on a side frame gives rise to a gigantic machining tree with a great many machining steps and hundreds of tools. If the man on the machine were now to set a drill hole parameter differently, he would enter this on the paper print-out of the program and we would have to reproduce this change in the NC programming so that we could re-use the optimized program for another similar part. This is why we need a kind of file structure as in Windows in order to group together the production operations and locate individual operations more easily.” Missler Software has already given its assurance that these improvements will be brought into one of the subsequent releases.
Simulation reduces machine preparation time.
Saving time through automation
KBA has introduced TopSolid’Cam with the key objective of reducing the time and effort spent on NC programming and thereby generating NC programs more quickly. Andreas Göttker is convinced that this goal will be achieved once the switchover has been fully completed and all users are in principle working with the new CAM system. However, he is reluctant to quantify the savings potential: “For sure, a lot of time can be saved on the frames, but whether this amounts to 30, 40 or 50 percent time savings will ultimately depend on how much time and effort we are prepared to devote to automation. The software alone will not make everything proceed more quickly for us. We also need to bring a greater degree of uniformity into our processes and, in particular, be able to resort to standardized elements and methods for the thousands of drill holes.”
Mr. Göttker also sees savings potential in the interplay between design engineering and manufacturing when all the PMI (Product and Manufacturing Information) associated with the 3D models can be drawn upon for the CAM processing: “Our vision for the future is certainly to be able to get by for our NC programming entirely without drawings.” At the moment, design engineering and production are quite independent worlds in terms of information technology. As Klaus Rüger points out, however, TopSolid’Cam is already being considered for integration, in a second project phase, into the Teamcenter Engineering product management system.
KBA is a printing machine manufacturer with a wide range of products. Its large offset printing machines are used principally for printing newspapers.
