A Successful Automated Solution for the Medical Device Industry

摘要

With products that are sold worldwide in over 100 countries, Smith+Nephew is a producer of advanced wound management products, arthroscopy products, trauma and clinical therapy products, and orthopedic reconstruction products. Smith+Nephew was experiencing significant growth in producing medical device parts requiring Small Hole EDM drilling - specifically, endoscopy components that require multiple .025" +/- .001" holes burned to depth while avoiding a backwall strike sitting .020" beyond the hole depth. When completed, the parts are inspected for surface finish, hole quality and concentricity to confirm accuracy versus tight tolerance design. This proved to be a challenge in two ways: maintaining the consistency of the holes to pass the QC process, along with the explosive growth and lack of throughput capacity to support this growth. Together, these created a bottleneck and delays in plant efficiency for the production process.