Page 23 - MMI- Aug2022

cess, UMC had all but signed a
contract with another quality
management provider when
a colleague of Sundine began
Source: Photos by Brent Donaldson, with screen captures provided by 1Factory rotra, CEO and Co-founder of
researching one of the less-
er-known bidders on the RFQ.
That research led to Nipun Gi-

a company based in San Jose,
California called 1Factory.
“It was the most detailed
RFQ I’ve ever seen,” Girotra
says. But a quick demo of
1Factory by Girotra and his
Co-founder Oleg Nickolayev,
was impressive enough to
convince UMC to purchase a
John Loscheider, CMM Programmer, Ultra Machining Company, oversees an automated CMM and business partner, CTO and UMC is
30-day pilot program.
multi-axis robot. The inspection data from this CMM is uploaded in real time to the shop floor, allowing
machine operators to see whether the parts remain within tolerance requirements. At the end of the trial run, a fami-
nearly everyone at UMC who ly-owned
interacted with 1Factory, from machine
that a high-precision shop near you shut down our quality soft- the machinists to the quality shop that
Minneapolis called Ultra Ma- ware, we can’t run,” she recalls. engineers to the inspection not only
chining Company (UMC) found lab workers, lobbied hard produces
complex
itself in just two years ago. The A sleepless month of for the company to adopt it, parts
business had accelerated, but nonstop work Sundine says. So, as the clock routinely
so had the burden of managing The immediate response from ticked down toward pulling but also
stringent quality control stan- Sundine and her team was to the plug on UMC’s existing machines a
dards on highly complex parts. write a request for quote (RFQ) quality control software—and full spec-
By 2019, UMC was collecting a that included more than 150 as COVID-19 began sweeping trum of
million points of part inspec- technical requirements, which the globe—Sundine, Girotra, challenging
tion data per month, then seg- UMC then blasted out to qual- Nickolayev, and several mem- materials,
menting it off into five separate ity management software bers of UMC’s team embarked such as
quality management platforms. companies around the globe. on a sleepless month of nonstop Hastelloy,
One of those platforms was After a weeks-long vetting pro- work to integrate 1Factory into Inconel,
Titanium,
designed and built by UMC in and Cobalt
partnership with its vendor, in alloys.
the hope of eventually market-
ing the software and selling it
to customers. But the software
became so highly customized
for UMC that, whether relat-
ed to its customization or not,
the vendor decided to exit the
product category. The vendor
notified UMC that, after a six-
month phase-out period, it
would no longer support it.
Sarah Sundine, Director, Proj-
ect Management, UMC, remem-
bers the day the news dropped Source: Modern Machine Shop
— during a production crunch
when UMC was actively pro-
cessing more than 1,000 parts. UMC, which recently expanded to more than 140,000 sq ft of shopfloor space, relies on its quality
“We were like, oh my gosh, if control system that features real-time availability of measurement and inspection data.

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