Saturday, July 18, 2020
HALCON is one of the premier brands of contemporary wood office furniture in the United States. The company designs and crafts precision tailored workplace furniture of highest quality. Driven by the vision of craftsmanship, excellence and dependability, the company provides veneered custom-built office solutions nationwide. HALCON is leading and driving the development of design and of smart technical solutions in its segment and has won numerous prestigious awards. Specialties are, among others, a 100% balanced and matched wood grain both on fronts and on corners, a sophisticated miter folding technique and intelligent invisible cable laying.
For HALCON, it was now time to re-think the entire area of parts machining and milling, as well as the cabinet assembly area. As for years, cabinets had been assembled on individual tables in view of their complexity. With HALCON’s production specialists providing detailed data of the assembly approaches and methodologies, SCHULER mapped out an entirely new work flow for those cabinets that can be clamped. Pre-assembly processes were precisely redefined. Material supply and feed, as well as part staging and item kitting was re-organized. As a result, this area will get into a real flow now.
All these measures led to considerably less material handling efforts, a reduced WIP, highly accelerated throughput times and a substantially higher productivity. Ultimately, HALCON went another step further and entrusted SCHULER with redesigning the factory layout so that the new organizational principles could be implemented. Here the focus was on designing the material flow in such a way that the building conditions and minimum possible handling are integrated to an optimal result. Machine positions were completely re- arranged. Intralogistics were integrally systematized, and converted to mainly roller conveyors. Cul-de-sacs and manual interruptions were eliminated and the material was allowed to flow.
This project showed once more how the intensive cooperation between the specialists of the producer – HALCON – and the engineering specialists – SCHULER – can lead to truly successful results. The newly designed facility will now enable HALCON to bring the growth of the next few years to the streets. The concept developed by SCHULER has enabled HALCON to make investments with pinpoint accuracy. Misinvestments were excluded. The manufacturing flexibility has been extended even further and finally the productivity was massively increased. The resulting new manufacturing concept is promising for the future of HALCON and today already meets the requirements of tomorrow.
Tags: CNC, furniture assembly, HALCON Furniture, Schuler Consulting, STyles Machinery
