More efficient, and with the same production space!
Furniture Technologies
Pleasing a client is the aim of any industrial machine manufacturer and in the case of office-furniture manufacturer 3B IDO Jörg Scholz, SCM hit the mark.
“Welcome to the office of the future. We are furniture designers, manufacturers and full suppliers of bespoke work environments”: this is the introductory business card used by 3B IDO Jörg Scholz GmbH in Lauffen am Neckar to introduce itself to the outside world.
“Most of our clients ask us what 3B IDO stands for”, explains the managing partner Jörg Scholz. “3B are the initials of the German words Baustoffkomponenten which mean ‘parts of construction material’, Bausysteme (‘construction systems’) and Baulösungen (‘construction solutions’). A perfect summary to describe us considering we transform parts and systems into solutions for construction. IDO, on the other hand, is an acronym for Innovation, Design and Organisation, the first two concepts at the heart of our daily work while the organisational aspect is essential for the company to operate correctly”.
Since Scholz took it over in 2001, the company has continued to grow non-stop. “Nowadays, we often work as a general contract for large-scale projects coordinating up to 14 different professional figures. The company’s core business, however, was and still is creating furniture and this is why we place a great deal of focus on our internal production processes."
The 3B IDO Jörg Scholz’s clients are industrial or artisan companies and service companies, mainly working in the commercial and health sector where furniture becomes a key part of the interior design. The German company offers a complete design project of all the furnishings which not only includes the production of furniture, wardrobes and shelving but also benches, any kind of desk, extending as far as a complete design project with lighting, sound acoustic and ventilation solutions.Looking only at furniture, 3b IDO offers a catalogue of about 8,000 different products and 250 of these are regularly manufactured in different versions, colours and sizes.
In order to produce these volumes, Scholz wanted to update the internal production processes. “Right from the start, Martin Krapf knew how to advise us well, irrespective of the investment needed to purchase the machines. Nowadays, we have a flexible edgebanding cell, a 5-axis machining centre and a drilling centre, solutions that are not only perfectly in line with our production requirements but have been designed for the spaces available to us. We have gone to Rimini more than once and we took the time to see these machines and discuss their details: machining times, stations with buffer function, reduced distances between one machine and another in order to work flexibly and improve internal logistics... Each one of these elements was key for us and thanks to all the improvements made over the last 20 years, we can now achieve volumes of up to a million Euro in turnover in the same workspace.”
The relationship is about 70% standard furniture to 30% design, but even our standard production reaches very high levels of customisation with 26 colours for each product, for a total of about 270 possible colour combinations. Furthermore, 3B IDO works veneered products in the same way as all the other common materials used on the market. This too was a pre-requisite that had to be met for all the purchased machines.
The parts are preliminarily split into groups and different thicknesses to optimise the flow of incoming material to the edgebanding stefani cell E. This system was Scholz’s latest investment and triggered a huge leap in terms of efficiency and, most of all, energy saving. It also guaranteed better quality on the machined pieces.
“Even the previous edgebander had a single panel return but with no conveyor so with a lower production speed”, sums up Bucher. “Now we have a gantry panel system known as ‘Pickback’ which is pneumatically controlled and has suction cups to pick up the pieces. The gantry system stacks and brings the piece back to the machine entrance. Even though this machine is bigger and faster than the previous one, we make a considerable saving on electricity with it. From a strictly energetic point of view, this replacement investment was definitely a sensible one. For us, however, the improvement in quality can be found in the visibly enhanced finish with a fine line of glue, an optimised dose and greater resistance to heat and dampness."
"The machine also works with greater precision thanks to the exact edge-panel centring, so we waste less material. It is also possible to work on panels of different sizes, for example, even with a thickness of up to 60 millimetres”.
After edgebanding, the panel arrives in a “morbidelli m600” 5-axis machining centre and “morbidelli ux” drilling centre. At this point, the pieces produced are again separated on pallets according to their order. The machining centre, for example, receives round pieces, while in the drilling centre the pieces are machined on both sides and don’t need to be repositioned. It is also possible to make a double loading of the pieces. All the machines have a CAD/CAM connection, machining centre and drilling centre controlled during normal operations by a single operator. The machine receives all the information about the piece from the bar code on the label.
If making the customer satisfied is the purpose of every industrial machine manufacturer, with 3B IDO Jörg Scholz, SCM can say it has succeeded perfectly.
“Good process analysis, strong focus on our demands and requirements and a competent customer service which assists us in the event of problems with our more recently purchased machines and with training our operators: this is exactly what our technological partner needs to be!” - Jörg Scholz
Excerpted from an article by Doris Bauer for Möbelfertigung
3B IDO
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