DOOSAN

Many manufacturers are actively investing in automation facilities to cope with shorter production and design cycles, the need to produce multiple types of products in small or large quantities, the growing demand for multitasking technologies, and the latest modular design trends. Notably, the smart factory is the biggest issue within the manufacturing industry at present. For SMEs, building a smart factory is not an easy task given the heavy burden of initial investment, the standardization of production lines, and the higher proportion of OEM production compared to their own brand production. That’s why small-scale manufacturers and factories with fewer than ten employees are striving to meet the new trend towards flexible production and manufacturing by introducing automated intelligent machine tools.

Gradual technological developments have facilitated automation across all industries while contributing to improving the performance of machine tools and peripheral equipment and devices. Doosan Machine Tools began to focus on research aimed at enhancing performance and the automation of machine tools back in the second half of the 1980s, which has led the company to emerge as a highly reliable ‘Solutions Provider’ beyond the level of a mere machine tools manufacturer.

Baek Woo-hyun, manager of AE Team 1 of Doosan Machine Tools, said, ““In keeping with new market needs, we are developing various unmanned machining solutions whose development we were unable to embark upon in the past due to their low profitability.” He went on to say, “Machine tools, in their capacity as ‘specialized machine tools’, are now required to be highly flexible in their production machining operations instead of being somewhat limited in their functions. It is for this reason that Doosan Machine Tools launched the AE Team in 2016 to take charge of the company’s development and establishment of automation solutions.

Mon Dae-won, manager of the AE Technology Development Team, said, “When a cutting process is followed by a thermo treatment process, different cutting processes and automation technologies must be applied. A designer who is unaware of such characteristics will never be able to come up with an optimized solution. Therefore, we have no choice but to customize our automation solutions to handle each customer’s specific cutting items.” Doosan Machine Tools intends to continue broadening its specialization and heightening its competitiveness in a bid to provide solutions to its customers’ needs from their perspective based on the know-how it has accumulated over the years, primarily by designing machine tools and providing automation solutions for each machining item.

An automated machine tool needs anywhere from 20,000 to 30,000 parts, while an airplane is made of 200,000 to 300,000 parts. To cut so many kinds of parts efficiently, diverse automation solutions are required as well as sophisticated cutting technologies, tools and software. Kim Sang-seok, manager of AE Team 2, said, “There can be no such thing as the “same automation solutions” given manufacturers’ different manufacturing environments, cutting machine tools, and operators qualifications.” Kim went on to say, “Doosan Machine Tools places top priority on the development of optimized automation solution models that can maximize its customers’ usability according to their specific needs and production environments.”

Given its inherent characteristics, the optimization of an automaton solution continues long after it has been delivered to the customer. In fact, it is gradually developed into an ever more efficient model in the process of finding the best solutions to the issues that may arise at the customer’s worksites. Manager Baek Woo-hyun said, “A solution undergoes a kind of evolutionary process as various improvements are made to it over time.” He went on to emphasize, “Therefore, the provider and the user of any given solution must establish a close relationship so that new models can be developed by the provider and better solutions can be offered to the user on the basis of experience.”

Doosan Machine Tools has secured such automation solutions as the bar feeder, gantry, and robot that realize convergence-based automation between machine tools and peripheral devices, and pallet- based automation solutions (such as AWC, RPS and LPS) that realize the automation of core parts. On top of that, Doosan Machine Tools provides ‘customized automation solutions’ on a turnkey basis whereby the customer receives not only workpiece and pallet automation but software solutions as well. The CEO of a DMT customer that manufactures parts said, “We carefully reviewed Doosan Machine Tools’ automation machine tools and systems and asked the company to design and optimize its machine tools and automation solutions for our company’s workpieces. We are deeply satisfied with the level of productivity we have achieved as a result.”

“Machine tools alone cannot realize automation completely,” declared manager Moon Dae-won. “To overcome that limit, we must find many ‘small giants’ with outstanding technological competence and strive for win-win prosperity with them.” When asked to reduce the loading time for bearing automation from 4-5 seconds to less than 3 seconds, Doosan Machine Tools met the requirement by incorporating the idea of a specialized partner company into a CAM drive system. It is a typical example of Doosan Machine Tools’ efforts to achieve win-win growth with partners equipped with exceptional technological competence. The company will continue to focus on finding such partner companies.

“Our AE Team has created a system called NAD (New Application Development) and developed sophisticated applications to cope preemptively with changes in both our customers’ needs and the overall manufacturing environments,” said manager Kim Sang Hyuk of AE Team 2. “As a company at the forefront of changes in manufacturing trends, we will strive to enhance our machine tool and automation design capabilities so that we can present solutions customized for new concepts of machining item,” he added. With the AE Team leading the way, Doosan Machine Tools is planning to offer its customers the highest value with its new machine tool automation solutions from their perspective.