The business issues here include cutting lead-times. In many cases, we’ve seen people who automate a 5-axis system and cut their lead-times in half. The ability to easily run low volumes is really a big part of this.

You can significantly reduce WIP and finished goods inventory, mostly because you can do the parts in fewer operations and not have parts sit between operations.

Increased equipment utilization has a huge impact on the manufacturing capacity of a single machine. Minimizing direct and indirect labor is a concept typically operated by a single person, which means you can increase output without increasing labor.

You can eliminate setup simply because the machine is always producing while you’re setting up, which means the machine doesn’t wait on setup.

Flexibility: we mentioned large and small lots. With the 5-axis capability, you’re handling parts less often, leading to reduced stack-up errors, which will also improve quality and part-to-part consistency.

With that, I’d like to show this video. What you’re going to see is a manufacturing process that includes an actual case study. This particular company is a high-level job shop, meaning that they do a lot of complex parts, which is one reason they went with the 5-axis setup. So they had a need for automation to increase the spindle utilization.