“It’s worth”

Springs, wires, chains, pipes – they can be found in almost all areas of everyday life. But who builds the machines that shape these indispensable parts into the perfect form? WAFIOS AG, headquartered in Reutlingen, Germany, has specialized in manufacturing these special machines for a wide variety of cold forming applications since 1893. In a project lasting several years, the long-established company succeeded in digitalizing its manufacturing processes from the design stage right through to the CNC machine. A pioneering step that unlocks enormous potential with the help of A+B Solutions GmbH.

WAFIOS has always played a pioneering role in special machine construction. The company began manufacturing manual braiding machines for fences in 1893, but developed the first automatic wire braiding machine as early as 1905. This innovative spirit runs like a red thread through the company’s history. The most recent example is the first introduction of a CNC-controlled tube bending machine for plastic tubes – another world premiere in a series of countless pioneering achievements. Thanks to its openness to new ideas and clear recognition of requirements, WAFIOS has navigated safely through all the ups and downs of the past 130 years. Today, WAFIOS is considered a leader in the field of special machine construction and employs more than 1,100 people worldwide.

From Industry 1.0 to 4.0

The company has mastered almost all phases of the industrial revolution, from Industry 1.0 to the current Industry 4.0. While mechanization was at the forefront at the beginning of the industrial age, mass production was introduced in Industry 2.0. Industry 3.0 arrived with automation through sensor and electrical technology and the spread of computers. Nowadays, intelligent networking, digitalization and the availability of information are at the heart of the Industry 4.0 era.

Investment in process optimization required

Each of these stages brought with it an increase in efficiency. However, stages 1 to 3 differ from Industry 4.0 in one glaring respect: while in the previous stages it was more or less sufficient to purchase modern machines, the real efficiency potential in the current stage can only be achieved if investments are made in the associated process optimization. If this succeeds in the form of digital consistency, a quantum leap is achieved. Processes become faster, errors are avoided and profits are increased. The result is a clear competitive advantage, which in turn forms the basis for a successful future for the entire company.

Production digitizers as guides

Entering the digital age requires a careful analysis of the current situation and a clear plan for digital consistency.This process requires hard work on the part of both the digitalization provider and the customer.Siemens offers suitable software tools for this, but these can only be used in combination with expertise and experience. Markus Häußler and A+B Solutions GmbH have successfully mastered this path with WAFIOS. The production digitalizers from Schwäbisch Gmünd have specialized in the optimization of production processes for many years as a Siemens “Smart Expert Partner”.As the person responsible for CAM programming at WAFIOS, Markus Häußler occupies a key position between design and production and is therefore ideally suited to lead the start of the digital revolution in the company.

Let’s get away from the data islands

In 2015, WAFIOS was struggling with many isolated data islands.The design department was already working with Siemens NX as a 3D CAD system at around 80 workstations.The design data and models were managed in the Siemens PLM software Teamcenter, which is connected to the SAP ERP system.However, the CAM area worked in isolation at six workstations with NX-CAM 3. Due to the “Genius” tool management software used, it was not possible to update NX to more recent versions.In Genius, all associated tools and programs were managed in a separate database, which stored the data in separate network drives.As a result, there was no direct access to the CAD data, which had long since been created in a newer NX version. This meant that there was no data consistency for the 3D models, which led to additional work.

Central Teamcenter data source

To eliminate the data islands, A+B Solutions proposed the introduction of Teamcenter for CAM and production. With Teamcenter, “Genius” could be replaced and NX-CAM could finally be updated. This decision also offered WAFIOS a path to digital consistency on the same database – from design to machine. At that time, the company was managing around 25 CNC machines with around 15,000 tools and 100,000 NC programs. The primary challenge was to transfer the existing data to the new system and make it available. The aim is to use Teamcenter to generate a central data source that everyone can access.

Adopting classification

Teamcenter offers a solution for this called MRL (Manufacturing Resource Library).The library has a modern classification structure for technology data based on DIN 4003 / ISO.The transfer of existing manufacturing data to Teamcenter is a specialty of A+B Solutions GmbH, which is why a joint migration plan was developed.The first step was to map the WAFIOS classification of the tools in Teamcenter MRL.Then the attributes were migrated from the Genius database to Teamcenter via PLMXML.The migration scope amounted to approx. 8,000 components and 15,000 complete tools. Markus Häußler describes the effort involved: “With this volume, it would not have been possible to enter everything manually. Fortunately, A+B Solutions has its own mapping and migration tools that create clear links between old and new. We were able to compare the mapping in a clear mask and ‘wire’ it up correctly, so to speak. This made things incredibly easy and gave us the certainty that all the data had been transferred correctly and could be used.”

Eliminate paper as a source of danger

A similar procedure is followed when migrating the NC programs, whereby the article numbers are linked to the production data and the correct structure is created in Teamcenter. What sounds so simple turned out to be a real Herculean task for Markus Häußler: “This process was relatively complex at WAFIOS, as we had 100,000 NC programs and 150 Leitz folders with clamping plans and notes alone. The folders with paper were distributed at every machine in production. Three work-study students then digitized them, resulting in 40,000 PDFs, which then had to be assigned to the NC programs. This is exactly where the migration tool from A+B Solutions helped enormously again, as we came up with a machine-specific logic. After all, each machine operator has his own working style, which he documented accordingly. Due to the analyses required for this, the start-up phase for the first machine took a little longer at six months, before we then became increasingly faster. Since 2019, we have integrated 15 machines and are making great progress in connecting the rest of the machinery.”In this way, valuable know-how from many decades, which was previously spread across the entire company, is digitally accessed and centrally managed.This aspect alone and the time saved from the cumbersome search processes of the past make digitalization with Siemens Teamcenter and A+B Solutions absolutely worthwhile.At the touch of a button, the right information now appears in the right version for the actually released program.