Incorporates centre of excellence for press brake bending.

Salvagnini Robotica, Salvagnini’s new robotic applications project, has opened a modern plant in Brendola, Italy, which is also the centre of excellence for press brake bending. Salvagnini Robotica is the Group’s new division for the development and manufacture of press brakes and associated robotic applications.

The birth of Salvagnini Robotica is a new milestone in the Group’s evolution, expanding its product range by investing in press brakes 4.0, bending solutions, namely smart solutions aimed at optimising process efficiency. As it happens, it is more and more common for the bending stage to constitute a “bottleneck” in the manufacturing process, a busy crossroads that needs to be crossed in order to make the production flow responsive and ensure it meets the time frames demanded by the market.

Ever-smaller production batches and increasingly extreme turnaround times mean production changes are continuous and frenetic, forcing companies to become flexible and efficient at every stage of the production process, especially downline from cutting, which has reached ever-higher levels of performance in recent years.

A longstanding advocate of innovation geared towards providing solutions to real manufacturing requirements in line with market demands, Salvagnini was quick to see this situation unfolding and thus embarked on a growth path that has culminated in the birth of Salvagnini Robotica, the plant dedicated to the design and manufacture of B3 press brakes and relevant robotic applications.

The new plant has a factory floor space of 4 000m² devoted entirely, for the duration of this start-up stage, to the manufacture of B3 manual press brakes, which currently come in 14 models, from two to five metres and from 60 to 400 tons. Once the preset target of around a hundred machines per year has been reached, the next step will be the production of robotic applications integrated with the press brakes – Roboformers – which are still being developed.

At the Brendola site everything revolves around the “press brake” product, which has a different design and time frame approach to all the other Salvagnini products. Not surprisingly, then, the first tangible results of the new approach have been an increase in monthly production capacity, which has gone from three to five machines, and a significant reduction in so-called lead-time.

For further information contact PIM Machine Tools on TEL: 011 022 4648 or visit www.industrialmachinery.co.za