HYBRID MANUFACTURING
A customer in the piping field needed machined flanges to connect a variety of their pipes to tanks, engine blocks and manifolds. The traditional method for producing these flanges was to machine them from bar or plate. With PLSMFG’s ability to utilize various technologies to reduce costs and improve quality, we were able to provide a laser cut blank from plate that was subsequently machined in critical fit areas to achieve the same functional capability at a 20% cost savings from the existing method.
Another customer, a manufacturer of industrial cord handling systems, has a high volume product that, with some modifications, can also be sold as a low volume custom part made from the same component family. The high volume part is perfect for hard tooling, the sister part is not. What we can do for this customer is provide a way to avoid the tooling costs associated with the low volume part. Instead of tooling up to produce both parts, they manufacture the high volume part and we modify a small number of them to create the low volume sister. This gives our customer the ability to utilize the low cost stampings without investing in additional hard tooling or paying for custom low volume parts.
