Conception of Twisting Satellite Dispatching System (TSDS)

In the current industrial world, companies are under great pressure from their customers who demand good quality products and services at the lowest possible costs. To do this, it has become a prerequisite to ensure good care of the production assets in order to grant the greatest equipment availability at the best performance while respecting the budget allocated. Due to the lack of flexibility and automation of equipment, enterprises are confronted with using excess quantity of raw materials to recover the losses during the production processes and this becomes a great burden to the companies because they are obliged to fix the price at a high level. Or nowadays, the automotive market is full of great competitiveness and the act of elevating the product price represents a main root cause of the loss of customers and market share to a company. It is in this regard we use the engineering skills and tools to provide an improvement of two machines used by automotive wiring firms to help them overcome the mentioned difficulties. The work presented here, has been carried out in the enterprise COFICAB KENITRA in 2018 to improve the production processes in the metal department whose activities are focused on metal part of the wires manufactured in this company especially in Twisting zone. Before launching the manufacturing, the enterprise makes budget of the quantity of raw materials to be used while twisting copper strands, but due to the lack of flexibility of the current Twisting machine, the mechanical tension applied to each copper strand during the process is not the same, there is a great variability of the characteristics of the products. Moreover, there is a wastage of raw materials due to the friction of copper strands along some pieces composing the systems. So, it is in this connection, the enterprise undergoes variations between the raw materials used and that should be used and then, the cost of cable manufacturing increases. Finally, to recover this cost rising, the product price is highly fixed, which is a risk and a threat on the development of this company. The purpose of this research was to develop and conceive a twisting system able to minimize the variability of the mechanical tension applied to the copper strands by at least 80% and to minimize the friction of those strands and some system pieces by 100%. To accomplish a such mission, we adopted a very effective method to improve the industrial problems, it's about the DMAIC (Define, M: measure, A: analyze, I: improve and C: control). After implementing the first part of the solution, we were able to attend zero friction of the strands along pebbles and the tension variability has been reduced by 70% in the whole production process. The new system we conceived was named “Satellite Dispatching System” because the motion of cable strands crossing it resembled to the one of a satellite, and finally the project has been called “conception of Twisting Satellite Dispatching System (TSDS)” for automotive cables manufacturing. In the first step, we made preliminary studies of the research using mathematical tools to provide a model of what was our proposition and then we made its design and simulation using CATIA V5. After implementing our solution, the whole system became 70% more stable, precise, flexible, automatic and its productivity was increased by 6.2%. This paper is a summary of practical guide to the innovation and development of the industrial world machines especially ARH630 and D632, built by NIEHOFF and are highly used in wiring companies.