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Kapco Helps Customer Revamp, Streamline Parts Supply Chain

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One of Kapco Metal Stamping’s core values is developing creative solutions to positively impact our business and our customers through innovation. What does that mean, exactly? It means working together to develop strategies and solutions that meet the specific needs of the partners’ businesses throughout the manufacturing process.

A relatively new Kapco customer came to the table with an opportunity to improve their overall product quality. The organization’s previous metal stamping vendor manufactured a particular part in a specific way for 20 years, stamping 22-foot-long parts which were hard to maneuver and ship. The customer needed a solution that was nimbler and easier to transport. However, due to complex tooling, there wasn’t an opportunity to change designs or adapt the product with the previous manufacturing vendor.

Instead, the customer turned to Kapco to help develop a solution because of Kapco’s reputation for high-quality contract manufacturing work and its centrally located position in the United States. To reduce the challenge of maneuvering 22-foot-long parts, Kapco worked with the customer to reengineer the product line to involve a “kit.” The single long part was ultimately redesigned into three separate components connected to form one piece in the kit. 

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Instead of just relying on metal stamping technology, Kapco deployed a combination approach, including flat-sheet lasers, progressive stamping, and an automated 5-axis laser to create the components that are then shipped to the customer’s Midwest headquarters for final welding and assembly. This new process allows the customer to deal with the logistics of moving, storing, and adjusting the design of the parts much more quickly, without the hassle of slow, expensive traditional stamp tooling.

Kapco also has a robust robotic and manual weld department.


This collaborative design, engineering, and manufacturing process led to a successful product relaunch and a new production method that increased quality and flexibility while minimizing logistics issues.

To learn more about Kapco Metal Stamping’s full capabilities, click here. If you’re looking for a new contract manufacturing partner to help you develop more innovative, more efficient manufacturing solutions for your products, request a quote today and get the conversation started.

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Kapco finds flexibility in its bending department with cobots

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Kapco was recently featured in The Fabricator Magazine for deploying cobots in its fabrication department

Any metal fabricator with a large percentage of high-mix, low-volume work looked at bending automation in the 2010s with a little bit of skepticism. Robot programming took time, and excessive downtime associated with programming new jobs was a red flag for some shops. Also, investing in a fixed automation system, complete with cages, was not cheap.

Those hesitations didn’t keep Kapco Metal Stamping, a metal forming and fabrication company in Grafton, Wis., from investigating bending automation three years ago. It found that the technology worked for some jobs but wasn’t as flexible as the company needed it to be.

The system had offline programming, so that wasn’t the issue. The problem was that the cell couldn’t accommodate as much bending work as the manufacturing team would have liked. The software limited complex jobs with multiple bends. Some parts didn’t fit within the confines of the guarding that surrounded the bending robot. When new parts were loaded into the cell for bending, the robot would stop because a human was present within the work area; because part loading was a manual process and took some time, the robot was not running as much as Kapco’s production team would have liked.

The recent emergence of collaborative robots, also known as cobots, gives metal fabricators a new perspective on automation. Kapco’s Advanced Engineering Team, who are responsible for implementing automation at the company’s facilities, saw these first-generation cobots at a recent FABTECH and recognized that they represented a new way to automate shop floor tasks. Even though the cobots were part of a cell, the team saw the potential of being able to move the cobots from one part of the factory to the other.

Click Here To Read the Full Article on The Fabricator’s Website

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ONE PARTNER. UNLIMITED SOLUTIONS.

Kapco is committed to high-quality contract manufacturing through innovation, growth, and a team that's driven by our partner's success.

Let's get started.