Shop finds CAM package boosts productivity and profit

 machinery scrap One of the most compelling justifications for computer-aidedmanufacturing (CAM) is that it helps end dependence on skilledprogrammer-machinists to maintain production. These skills are scarce to nonexistent in many rural areas, asdrillrig rebuilder PEMCO of New Mexico Inc. ( pemconm.com ) found out. Confronting a business boom, it could not get thepeople to keep up with demand. PEMCO found a solution for this bottleneck in Edgecam from PlanitSolutions. The Edgecam software quickly began generating dramatic results inboth productivity and output. It also is helping to drive abusiness transformation at PEMCO to new levels of competitivenesswith better customer service, shorter delivery times and lowerpricing. “The technical help we have gotten from Edgecam and ECAD (theEdgecam reseller) has been tremendous.” Garry Buie, presidentof PEMCO, said. Edgecam ( www.edgecam.com ) is based in Southfield, Mich. Planit is headquartered in Bath,England. ECAD is based in Midland, Texas; it also resells AutodeskInventor, which PEMCO also uses. The problem PEMCO had was hiring and retaining skilled machinists. Skilled machinists who are looking for work are almost nonexistentwhere PEMCO is located — Hobbs, N.M., in the southeasterncorner of the state. “The shortage of programmers held us hostage,” GarryWilson, CADD specialist and PEMCO’s primary CNC programmer,said. That shortage was aggravated by a new multibillion-dollaruranium enrichment plant that located just a few miles from Hobbs. Programming was a big production bottleneck on the heavily usedSwedTurn that is 27 years old. Both a replacement and a CNCretrofit had been under consideration. “That is a very solid, very tight, very well-built machinewith almost no wear, but the programming was completelyobsolete,” Buie said. "The retrofit would have taken six months, and having it outof production that long would have cost us between $100,000 and$220,000 in lost business. That is our only machine for largerturned parts,” Buie said. What impressed Buie about ECAD was the knowledge and willingnessthe company showed to work with the shop. Steve Duke, accountmanager for ECAD, knew about the SwedTurn. He ran one as amachinist many years ago, Buie noted. PEMCO rebuilds cranes, derricks and of truck-mounted drill andwork-over rigs and their key power components such as scoping rams,hydraulic cylinders, heads, valve bodies and sprockets. "Our niche in the business for 40 years has been to produceobsolete parts,” Buie said. "None of our customers ever brought us a drawing We areonehundred- percent reverse engineering,” Billy Ganaway,general shop foreman, said. That means PEMCO had to manuallymeasure every part and draw it by hand. Prior to buying and implementing Edgecam, PEMCO’s productionmethods were equally “manual.” Parts were machined directly from hand drawings on conventional,non-CNC machine tools or they were run on CNC machines that wereprogrammed manually. Machinists keyed raw-stock and finish dimensions directly into themachine tools’ controllers as G-codes. That was costing PEMCOmany hours of production per week per machine. Machinists had been holding speeds and feeds to one-fourth or evenone-tenth of what cutting-tool suppliers recommend. This excess ofcaution had kept PEMCO cycle times uncomfortably long whileshortening cutting-tool life. Complicated parts were avoided because of programming difficulties.CNC machinery is most effective on complex parts, so PEMCO wasmissing a sizable payback opportunity. Amid a boom in oil and gas drilling with crude-oil prices at anall-time high, rigs are in high demand. Even old units are beingpressed into service, driving up demand for PEMCO’s services. The company has five CNC machine tools and employs 25 people in itsmachine shop and 60 total. The acronym stands for PermianEngineering & Manufacturing Corp. The second local energy boom — uranium enrichment — madePEMCO unable to keep pace. Under contract to the U.S. Department of Energy, URENCO, A Europeanconsortium that makes enriched uranium for nuclear powergeneration, is building a multibilliondollar National EnrichmentFacility (NEF) in Eunice, N.M. In an area where skilled workers have always been scarce, URENCOhas hired over a thousand people in the past two years, andexpanding local businesses and URENCO suppliers hired hundredsmore. Ganaway said that the initial gains were tremendous, even beforemachinists were trained, before the postprocessors were finished,and before the machines were fully reconnected. Amid myriad distractions of combining PEMCO’s two machineshops, Billy Rodgers, machine shop foreman, said he found time tolearn Edgecam. "It was simpler than I thought it would be and I had almostnever used a computer before,” he reported. “Now I do90 percent of my CNC jobs on Edgecam. Only the very simplest jobsare still programmed online,” Rodgers said. Success with Edgecam encouraged the other CNC machinists to use theoptimum speeds and feeds recommended by cutting-tool suppliers.