A Sandvik Coromant Insight on Industry 4.0

MTD recently spoke with James Rhys-Davies, the Strategic Relations Director For Sales Area North Europe of Sandvik Coromant to get his insight on what the company is doing with regards to the manufacturing buzzword of ‘Industry 4.0’.

Speaking with James, he told MTDCNC: “We have been entrenched in the metal cutting industry for many, many years and with Industry 4.0 and the real demands that it is putting on industry to reduce waste; as this is the real driver behind Industry 4.0. The predictions are that by 2020, it will reduce greenhouse gasses by 9.1m tonnes; that is 16.5% of global output. This reduction is coming from reductions in scrap, waste in machine tools and their movement and the tooling. So, we are coming to the market with tooling solutions, not just for the machine but further upstream. This goes from the design end of the business, so when your actually design in your CNC environment or even outside of that, like in the CAD/CAM world. We go from this right through to collecting the data to offer OEE and connected solutions.”

Referring to how these statistics work in the ‘real world’ environment James continues: “If we take the design end of the business and before you even get into the machine tool, so if you’re thinking about consolidating cutting data, you can take that and you now have absolutions where you can select your cutting data from 20,000 different materials in a database. This will give you the tooling recommendations, so you can’t then start picking the wrong inserts or tools. We’ve also created an ISO database for building up tools – typically it would take 15 minutes to build a tool up, now it can be done in two minutes as long as you have an ISO database of tooling catalogue information.”

Acknowledged as the world’s largest cutting tool manufacturer, MTD asked if Sandvik is now increasing its involvement in other areas beyond the cutting tool. James said: “We’re looking at the whole process, a truly holistic approach. This goes from the conceptual end of the business right through to delivery and output. We have design and planning tools, connected in-machining digital tools, analytics and logistic support, so we are evolving into the whole chain within the manufacturing industry.”

Sharing his Industry 4.0 thought’s with MTDCNC, James concludes: “I firmly believe it’s the future of the manufacturing industry, particularly for the UK base to remain competitive. We need to take advantage and move forward with the solutions as fast as we realistically can. We need to deploy these tools to secure the foundation of the engineering economy now and in the future.”