Page 24 - MMI- Aug2022

UMC’s systems.
Let’s learn how the two com-
panies pushed the envelope of
automated quality control data
in a machine shop.

Ultra Machining
Company
I first met Nipun Girotra and
Oleg Nickolayev at 1Factory’s
booth at Westec in late 2021.
Displayed on a large screen be-
hind the two men was a print
drawing of a complex part Source: Modern Machine Shop
that had been auto-ballooned
by their software. “There is
plenty of quality control soft- Like most workstations on UMC’s shop floor, Machinist Gerrit Fonkert’s station features several
measurement tools and a computer where he processes each part’s inspection data in real time
ware that auto-balloon prints,” with 1Factory.
Girotra said, before launching
into a dizzying array of features
built into the platform. al departments for mill-turn, operations. On the shop floor,
As the “By the way,” he asked at the Swiss, EDM, turning, milling, every workstation featured a
control plan end of the visit, “have you ever prototyping, and inspection. desktop computer with 1Fac-
is created heard of a shop near Minneap- As a company that primarily tory displayed on the monitor.
in 1Factory, olis called UMC? It might be the serves highly regulated indus- Everyone was tuned to the
UMC quality most impressive machine shop I tries, including Medical, Aero- same channel.
engineers have ever seen.” space, and Defense, the UMC’s The quality control process at
can manu- Established in 1968 near Minne- inspection lab is a central hub UMC begins like this: An en-
ally define apolis, UMC is a family-owned of activity. The lab boasts eight gineer uploads the customer’s
or let the machine shop that not only pro- vision machines and more than print, typically from a PDF
software
auto-gen- duces complex parts routinely 20 coordinate measuring ma- drawing, and 1Factory au-
erate sam- but also machines a full spec- chines (CMMs), some of which to-balloons the drawing and
pling rules trum of challenging materials, are serviced by pallet changers assigns numbers to the part’s
for part such as Hastelloy, Inconel, Tita- and multi-axis robots. features, including radiuses,
inspections. nium, and Cobalt alloys. UMC’s By the time I arrived at UMC in diameters, positions, geomet-
140,000-sq ft shop floor is orga- March, the company had ful- ric dimensioning and toleranc-
nized into separate operation- ly integrated 1Factory into its ing (GD&T) data, and any text
instructions contained in the
margins. Let’s say that balloon 1
is a linear dimension located in
zone f5 with a mix/max value
of 0.843–0.847 in. The software
extracts this information and
populates it into an auto-gen-
erated quality control plan. At-
tempting this process manually
(still a reality for many shops)
means ballooning one feature
at a time and individually no-
tating all the values required
Source: Modern Machine Shop ered down the line of a manu-
for the report. Mistakes discov-
al process often mean starting
over from scratch.
in 1Factory, UMC quality engi-
UMC Machinist Jeremy Desmet views the inspection history of a part using 1Factory’s run chart. As the control plan is created

24 | July-August 2022 Modern Manufacturing India