H&T Presspart | “We have 4 Vici machines, 3 in our pharmaceutical factory and one in our industrial factory”.
H&T PRESSPART are part of the H&T Group.
We manage deep drawn metal pressings for the pharmaceutical and industrial businesses.
So, we manufacture aerosol cans made of aluminium or stainless steel. We also manufacture other industrial components – pen parts, water pump parts, rivet bodies.
As a company we produce about 400 million components per year which equates to roughly one and a half million per day.
As a high-volume manufacturer, quality is incredibly important if anything goes wrong, then it’s going wrong with a lot of components.
Our customers expect components to be dimensionally correct, they have very tight specifications. We work in the market to introduce optical measurement on our aerosol cans. After reviewing the VICIVISION technical information, we took the decision to go ahead with Vici, due to the technical capabilities but also due to our experience of good after-sales support from VICIVISION UK.
So, we have 4 VICI machines – 3 machines in our pharmaceutical factory and one in our industrial factory. All our machines are located within the production environment and serve the day-to-day operation.
So, since we transitioned from attribute gauging, we’ve seen lots of benefits from optical measurement.
Before we introduced the optical measurement systems we used to collect parts, transfer them to our metrology lab and measure them offline.
That is negative because we’re really not getting live data from the process.
VICIVISION machines allow us to collect, measure and feedback to the operation within a really short time period.
We run within control limits but they also allow us to predict process failures through the trending that we do.
This in turn improves our OE and from that point of view we have improved efficiency from our machines, less downtime and reduced scrap as well. We don’t have any issues relating to vibration, oil, dust.
The VICIVISION machines have been really reliable, and the accuracy is maintained during production.
It’s a permanent change and we only see that it’s going to be extended through the business into the other divisions, onto other products.
For me personally, there are so many benefits to it from a point of view of the accuracy, the data collection, the process understanding, the process control. There’s no way we’d ever go back to attribute gauging from optical measurement.
The after-sales support for the VICIVISION machines has been excellent. If we have any technical queries or we need any support, then the technical guys are always very quick to respond and provide the support we need.
Overall, the machines are actually very easy to program. We’ve been trained to a very good level which has allowed us to be pretty much self-sufficient. The capability of our process has improved and the quality of the product has improved.
The move from attribute gauging to optical measurement has been a complete success.
Mike Delderfield
Quality Manager of H&T
Article of the official Vici & C. dealer: VICIVISION UK