Vollrath Pujadas (Santa Coloma Farners, Spain), a major manufacturer of kitchenware, storage systems, transport, and small utensils, provides a wide-ranging service for the hospitality trade. As with many kitchenware manufacturers, the company was facing increasing requests for different-sized items, as explained by the company technical manager Jesús Planchart: “Our customers require increasingly customized products, which means that the number of items in our catalog is always increasing. This caused us problems with lead times for procuring discs for use as raw materials, and led to major storage space requirements.”
The previous disc suppliers to Vollrath Pujadas manufactured discs on presses, so they could only make a limited amount of different disc diameters based on the available dies. Although this manufacturing method offered high productivity, the system had become too inflexible for the requirements of Vollrath Pujadas.
To overcome these limitations, Vollrath Pujadas chose to buy a Danobat LB coil-fed laser cutting machine because they wanted to manufacture any disc diameter without resorting to outsourcing. With the Danobat flexible coil-fed laser cutting line, they eliminated the limitations on shape and lead time they encountered with their regular suppliers and at the same time, they optimized materials and cut costs.
Danobat laser blanking solutions revolutionize the traditional press line industry by providing a wide range of advantages over press lines—some of the most important ones are savings in maintenance and energy, elimination of down times, space optimization, and great flexibility. These advantages make the Danobat LB the perfect system for medium and short series.
The application field for this coil-fed laser cutting system is wide, which is why the client’s needs must be analyzed in each case: type of material, thicknesses to be cut, necessary production, characteristics of the workpiece, etc. This type of machine is especially appropriate for the cookware industry, where discs of many different diameters must be cut.
Danobat’s sheet metal division has always heavily invested in R&D to develop highly customized solutions for a broad range of applications in metal forming. Its latest development involves technological solutions in the field of coil-fed laser cutting as well as flexible manufacturing systems. With flexibility as the main proposal, its coil-fed laser cutting line is a high-productivity solution that combines all the advantages of fiber technology applied to laser cutting with the benefits of metal coils as raw material.
The company continues investing in the development of special and innovative solutions with the aim of meeting the most demanding requirements. The Danobat LB coil-fed laser machine is tailor-made and custom-designed to meet the particular needs of each customer. In addition, it can be combined with different bending solutions to offer a complete flexible line that will efficiently manufacture finished parts automatically in one system.
To sum up, now with the Danobat flexible coil-fed laser cutting machine, they free up the space formerly used for storage and also save money. Each time they feed in a coil, the machine can meet all they needs for material uninterruptedly—that is, without stopping for loading and unloading.
Client success stories, like Vollrath Pujadas, encourages Danobat to continue improving with the most advanced technologies. “Danobat was capable of identifying our needs on designing the project, and through close cooperation with us was able to customize the machine to our production requirements at Vollrath Pujadas. With the new machine, we make only those blanks that we actually need, thus doing away with the need to stockpile them,” Planchart says.