Founded in 1979, the RJ Group has primarily been involved in the production of automotive components since its inception. Located in San Giorgio Canavese near Turin, the Italian manufacturer now has manufacturing sites on three continents. To succeed in this highly competitive industry sector, the RJ Group is continually striving to improve its production and processes – it is here that Siemens has delivered a multitude of benefits.
With a client list that includes globally recognised automotive brands such as Maserati, Fiat Chrysler Automotive, Iveco, Volvo and Daimler, the company produces components ranging from cabin lifting brackets to engine brackets, supports to complete injection pump supports, exhaust manifolds to belt tensioners, pulleys, assembled wheel hubs, bearing bushes, fan supports and oil pans. This range of components are produced at the North Italian facility that has a complete suite of Heller machine tools in its 110,000sq/m factory. The Heller machines are controlled with Siemens CNC systems, so when the company wanted to optimise its already impressive productivity levels – it called upon Siemens to help.
Nicola Cescato from Siemens says: “The objective was to help the RJ Group get better visibility of their processes, their machine performance and also extract better performance and optimise machining processes.”
To undertake all of this, Siemens engineers needed to evaluate existing processes. Discussing this, Nicola Cescato adds: “We use Manage My Machines, which is a cloud-based application based on MindSphere that can monitor and record performance to give visibility of all aspects of the production shop floor; and then we decided to be even bolder. Even though the RJ Group is very good at optimising and leveraging the maximum performance, they can use the adaptive control application from Siemens to further cut cycle times.”
“This was a challenge because the RJ Group is already mastering their productivity, their machines and their processes. However, we realised that with this software that measures the torque of the spindle and adjusts the feed rate, we were able to gain significant time in these processes.”
Considering the thousands of Siemens CNC control systems already operating in the manufacturing sector worldwide, Nicola Cescato continues: “Most of the Siemens controllers are supported by this technology, even the older control systems. So, for other controllers, we have hardware that can be added to achieve the same performance level. This means that manufacturers can utilise Siemens as a consultant like we have worked at the RJ Group to achieve these performance benefits.”
Alluding to the return on investment (ROI) at the RJ Group, Nicola adds: “The time to provide a return on investment was very short, it is usually from 3 to 9 months. At the RJ Group, we were on the higher side of this because of their ability to already optimise their processes. The main challenges with the RJ Group were to understand how they work with their processes and how we could help them with our products. The second factor was to achieve better performance in a company that was already well known for being very efficient and very productive. The third consideration was to do training with the RJ Group staff, so they are more independent, and they can use these tools without relying on Siemens personnel.”
Discussing the project from an RJ Group perspective, Dr Cristian Iuculano Mamao says: “Our relationship with Siemens is very long and in fact, most of our machine tools have a Siemens control. So, we have worked for many years with Siemens and in recent years we have digitalised our production to ensure that analysis is done automatically. Added to this, we wanted a ‘real time’ overview of our company and the production, so we could act immediately on production to make changes and solve any problems as soon as they happen.”
“We wanted to reduce our cycle times, even though our cycles were already very well optimised. So, it was such a challenge for us and also for Siemens to try and reduce this, but we gained good results with the adaptive control software, and we reduced our cycle times by around 10%. For this reason, we are going to extend all of these results to all of our other facilities which includes one in Brazil and another in the USA,” says Dr Cristian Iuculano Mamao.
