Manufacturing Blog

Who doesn’t love the arcade with its bright lights, games and promise of winning—competition without the shouting of coaches and parents: racing simulations, air hockey and who could forget the shooting games—deer and basketballs alike?

Starting an industrial redesign project is exciting! We have fun visualizing how your product will help revolutionize and shape either new products or redesigning and optimizing a current product. But when the time comes to get into the gritty details, it feels like there’s an onslaught of questions that a features and functions document can help to focus in on and answer.

To enable your understanding of the features and functions document, we’ve taken the time to break down our features and functions document—what’s on it, what does it mean and in how much detail.

Quality is at the top of our list of priorities. So, when we receive industrial prints from our customers, we take the time and effort to reduce potential issues that may arise in fabrication.

Choosing a color for your industrial product may not be an exceedingly difficult issue. Many customers already have a custom color scheme that reflects their brand. However, the extensive options for powder coat finishing may throw you through a loop. No worries! Here’s a basic guide on glosses and textures, thanks to our consultant Dan Wolf from Akzo Nobel Powder Paint.

It’s not uncommon for sheet metal manufacturers to have some kind of in-house painting capability because, quite frankly, it just makes sense. Innumerable benefits go hand-in-hand with in-house painting, and they all boil down to these two categories: speed and quality control.

Powder coating can be a delicate matter. It requires precision, a keen eye and thoroughly maintained processes to ensure that nothing mars the finish. HUI powder coats its industrial products in-house and follows a strict set of guidelines to combat and avoid common powder coating mistakes.

The Problem

Yaskawa, a long-term customer of HUI, generally caters to a high-end, industrial market. However, in September of 2014, they decided to broaden their market and supply to entry level price points. To satisfy this, they needed to create and manufacture a more cost-Effective enclosure.

Manufacturability has a strong impact on who you choose as a manufacturer, cost and lead time, all of which control a vast majority of your project. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to change everything about your ideal industrial product. In most cases, designing for manufacturability results in a series of small changes that will benefit both you and your manufacturer.

Needless to say, scheduling is a tedious task, especially when there’s a lot of information to organize. Because no two shop floors are the same, it’s impossible to install a standard program that can accurately address and produce the most efficient scheduling technology, which is why HUI invested in a customized scheduling program—coined ShopFloor Scheduler.

Since its implementation, ShopFloor Scheduler has enhanced cross-team communication, customer relations and on-time orders.