Working Process offers highly automated lines with which to achieve excellent levels of productivity. This is an increasingly frequent choice for large industrial groups that are looking for strategic solutions capable of amplifying their market presence.
Working Process of Niviano di Rivergaro does not need much introduction: for some decades now it has conquered a place in the sun in the scenario of the most advanced technologies for the production of door and window frames. The Piacenza-based company deserves credit for having in some way revolutionised this production, defining a new machine model, a new ‘concept’ that has inspired many, convincing them of the quality of the project to the point of following in its footsteps.
A project that since its inception has been at the centre of numerous evolutions, implementations, ‘additions’, to the point that today the principles of the ‘Made in Working Process’ can be found in a wide range of solutions, from the single machine to the most complex line, ideas that have become reality to address any production need: from a few ‘batch one’ pieces to the production of hundreds of elements per shift, always with maximum flexibility and with the productivity levels required by each customer.
A clear example of this is a ‘double’ production line, which we will tell you about in these pages; a challenge that has been met to the point of not representing an isolated case, but of becoming – despite the fact that we speak of a ‘very demanding’ line in terms of investment, production capacity, and the space required to make it fully operational – almost a catalogue model that several large groups are asking to replicate. We are talking about a line installed at the French company F.P.V., which is part of the Bremeau group, thanks to which every day hundreds and hundreds of individual components are produced for the sixteen different types of window and door produced by the French company.
Telling us about this latest endeavour is Massimo Nicostrati, who has been in the industry for forty years and is now area manager of Working Process. “This solution has a special history, not so much because of the technology it encompasses – which is nothing more than a part of Working Process’s technological heritage and expertise – but because it describes a path that many realities of the window and door world have experienced, especially in France. In this country, as elsewhere, there are quite a few large companies that, after embracing the experience of PVC windows and doors, are now returning to equip themselves to offer wooden windows and doors, a product that is undoubtedly experiencing a season of important success in many markets.
We are talking about companies that have chosen, as we said, other paths, other technologies, other production organisations, and that now have to make up for lost time by demonstrating a clear desire to make important, wise choices that allow them to have the best technology available.
In a sector, that of windows and doors, where the numerically controlled machining centre has been at home for decades, the major French window and door manufacturers have moved to identify the best production method, capable of guaranteeing them the quality that an increasingly attentive consumer demands, while at the same time allowing them to manage large production volumes with maximum flexibility. And let’s not forget that even ‘good windows and doors’ are now available in several versions, in several models with technical characteristics that meet precise international standards and aesthetic values that allow everyone to have the solution they consider most beautiful, suitable for their home, their work space, their environment…”.
“Working Process has developed an articulated and complete catalogue of solutions,” Nicostrati continues, ” which makes it easy to configure the right solution for each customer, from the stand-alone machine for modern craft businesses to the most complex configurations. This obviously allows us to compose our machining centres, automations, intelligent magazines, accessory machines, and robots to create very high productivity production systems such as the one commissioned to us by F.P.V., a line designed and built to be an absolutely complete solution.
The bars are fed to a cut-off machine, which cuts them to size before each individual element passes on to four-sided moulding, a phase during which we also recover the battens. The parts are then sent to the two ‘Imml’ intelligent warehouses, each of which can hold up to 800 components, from where they are then taken to be machined by the two large five-motor ‘Logos Life Evo 3555’ machining centres, machines that work independently but which – depending on the instructions from the technical department – can also work together on the same job. In practice, the customer can decide from time to time the mode that he deems most “convenient” for a specific job order or for how he has decided to produce that day, knowing that he can count on two complete, independent lines, each equipped with an intelligent warehouse and the necessary automation to achieve any required result. Two lines, let’s say, that then unload the ready parts at the end of the plant, on a series of conveyors that allow the operator to easily pick up the elements of each individual job and send them to the next stages of assembly and painting. Everything is organised to ensure smooth organisation of all stages of the production process.
Each individual element obviously bears a label containing all the information necessary and required by the company’s production logic, therefore with all the instructions that allow the operator to work with complete peace of mind when reassembling the different jobs, being able to order – window by window – all the necessary pieces in the trolleys.
A system that is clearly ‘upgradable’: one can invest on the first machine, attach an intelligent magazine, and at a later stage put another machining centre and a high rack alongside, connecting them to the same line supervisor. “An investment that can grow as the company grows ,” adds Nicostrati, “ with the modularity typical of Working Process, which for some time now has led us to install software in our machines, even the smallest, that guarantees the possibility of interfacing with more complex systems with a view to absolute flexibility and ‘reactivity’, being able to change product in a few seconds and, in the configuration chosen by F.P.V., to produce two finished pieces per minute… and we can easily go even further with even more effective automation!
