Swede-Wheel is automated
The world is, in many ways, different than two years ago. Many companies have a difficulty obtaining goods and materials in time, which has resulted in delayed lead times. The benefits of domestic production have not been this great for quite some time and Sweden-Wheel is choosing to invest more in automation at Hillerstorp.
Tobias Hildingsson, Production Manager at Swede-Wheel, explains more about Multiflex!
Multiflex is a fully automated assembly machine that solves one time-consuming aspect for us: mounting castors onto the bracket. Multiflex is an upgrade of its little brother, Miniflex, and can be used to mount somewhat larger castors, from 80 mm all the way up to 150 mm.
We are very proud of this machine, since we built it ourselves in this building. During all these years, we have managed to garner substantial experience in terms of production, which allows for us to develop and build such machines. It took about one year to finish Multiflex and the pandemic often hampered the process. For example, we came to a standstill for a month because we were not delivered a small cord that was stuck at the port.
Why did you choose to build the machine by yourselves?
I see many advantages in having developed Multiflex proprietarily. The greatest advantage was being able to customise it exactly to our own requirements and needs. The most important aspect was to make it as smooth and efficient as possible. It should be easy to switch to a new wheel to shorten the stopping time as much as possible, and thereby increase efficiency. Since all of the machines that we build proprietarily are similar, it makes it easy for a machine operator to switch between them. If you can operate one of our machines, you can learn to operate several more within a short time. This facilitates and shortens the time we need for training our production team.
We did not actually build everything ourselves, but utilised electricity and software from a company here in Hillerstorp. We had a close collaboration and spent a lot of time refining and enhancing the efficiency of this aspect. We observed that saving just a few seconds per cycle had a significant impact on savings per day and a considerable impact on savings per year, and the savings were in electricity and software.
What is the outlook for production at Hillerstorp?
We firmly believe in producing as much as we possibly can, here at our home base in Hillerstorp, where we have a whole different level of control and greater flexibility! We have been investing heavily in production in Sweden and will continue to do so. Although some of the work will involve building new machines, the greatest focus will be on developing the machines we already have and, above all, automating what is yet to be automated today. Automation provides obvious benefits, such as cost efficiency and consistent quality, as well as other values that we deem to be important. We want to automate what are currently very monotonous actions, and create more variations in the day-to-day life of our production staff.