At the dawn of this twenty-first century, the North American automotive industry is enjoying decade long prosperity and growth. Part of this success can be attributed to a sustained drive to develop and implement new technologies and methods for enhanced productivity and efficiency. While advances in tooling and materials have reached high level of technological and scientific sophistication, in some areas of automotive manufacturing, process and method developments have taken the back seat. As an example, sheet metal blanking is still processed today the same way as it was during the pioneering days of Henry Ford and Frederick Taylor, i.e. with presses and blanking dies. This old manufacturing process, despite tremendous advances in speed, yields rising problems associated with die-blanking capital and operation costs and lack of flexibility. In addition, a marketing drive for models offering multiplication also calls for increased agility of automobile manufacturing operations in the quest to respond to their quickness incompatibility with a growing e-business. A new automotive sheet metal Laser Blanking Initiative is proposed as a solution to address these problems, particularly for low volume production vehicles for which they become most acute. It involves process changes and consists of replacing press die blanking by laser blanking for sheet metal applications.
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