Bosch Rexroth South Africa Group of Companies continues to invest in its production floors – with Hytec Engineering, the latest Group company to have optimised its manufacturing and repair operations.
Click to download and read the pdf
The acquisition of an additional 1 000 m2 of floor space; upgrades to shop equipment; as well as optimised process flows for the manufacturing and repair facilities are some of the new investments that have improved shop-floor visibility and are allowing the hydraulic cylinder manufacturing specialist, Hytec Engineering, to enhance operational efficiency and production capabilities.
Established in 1979, Hytec Engineering is one of sub-Saharan Africa’s few hydraulics cylinder companies with in-house cylinder design, manufacturing, testing and repair services in a single workshop. Its locally manufactured cylinders, which cover the complete fluid power spectrum up to 700 bar, are used in mining, materials handling, steel, oil and gas, marine and other industries.
And now its remodelled ISO 9001-accredited facility is geared towards maximum handling efficiency and ergonomic, lean production, while also meeting the most stringent health and safety standards.
Optimised production flow
In the case of Hytec Engineering, significant growth of the business since the design of its core production line 12 years ago had created an urgent need for space. The purchase of the additional 1 000 m2 of an adjacent work space has allowed the company to move most of the initial cylinder refurbishment facilities to this dedicated area.
Here, cylinders sent for repairs from mining and industrial sites across southern Africa are cleaned, stripped and assessed prior to refurbishment. New equipment, such as an upgraded, state-of-the-art stripping bench, which boasts 1 350 000 Nm of torque, provides improved efficiency across the inspection and assessment stages of the process.
“With this dedicated area, we have separated the ‘dirtier’ work of cylinder refurbishment from the cleaner aspects of the production process,” explains Hytec Engineering general manager, Pierre Goosen.
The main area of the workshop is now dedicated to component manufacture, assembly, testing and painting of the company’s hydraulic cylinders via a redesigned production flow.
In consultation with Bosch Rexroth production systems engineers from Germany, the process flow of the factory has been reconfigured with an emphasis on efficient handling and movement of products and workers.
From rod manufacture to welding and barrel manufacture, the process flows to the preassembly area where quality of components is checked before entering the assembly line. At the end of the assembly line is the company’s high-tech, in-house designed cylinder test bench that is used to verify the quality and conformance of cylinders to their precise design specifications.
Once tested, the cylinders are ready for painting in the company’s new three-stage painting booths. With this three-stage facility, painting of cylinders, including the specially formulated epoxy-based paints used in marine and other corrosive applications, is faster and more efficient.
Another new piece of equipment in the factory is the company’s sponge blasting facility. Among the first introductions of this technology in South Africa, it provides a much faster and far safer solution for removing paint and other superficial contaminants from repaired cylinders than traditional chemical removal, while also not generating the hazardous quantities of combustible dust associated with shot blasting. In addition, sponge blasting allows Hytec Engineering to provide special surface finishes on new manufactured cylinders as required by customers’ specialised applications.
A fully containerised solution, sponge blasting ensures the dust is localised before it can be extracted and processed by specialised dust collection systems. It also means that the sponge media utilised in the application can be collected and reused up to 10 times, allowing the factory to reduce its waste and lower its footprint, while meeting stringent safety standards for dust.
“These investments have produced a modern factory process that is tailored to our current operations, as well as towards meeting our expectations of growth, especially in the African markets, in the future,” Goosen explains. These markets, he says, particularly Mozambique, Botswana, Namibia, Ghana and the Democratic Republic of Congo, now represent close to a third of the company’s business.
Complete process visibility
Matching the company’s investments in new equipment and modernised production methodologies is its desire to gain greater visibility of the factory floor, and Hytec Engineering is the first of the Bosch Rexroth South Africa Group companies to introduce the Group’s new, sophisticated job tracking system to its workshop.
The system automates and integrates information of the company’s complete production chain, from the availability of materials and OEM parts to the administration of the various tasks of the production floor onto a central, in-house developed platform that communicates seamlessly with the Group’s enterprise resource planning system.
This provides Hytec Engineering far greater intelligence in understanding the status, progress and predicted delivery dates of each project, down to component level. A new scanning system at each workstation tracks parts across the production floor.
“Previously disparate islands of information regarding our internal production processes are now integrated in customised, usable dashboards that provide real time intelligence about the status of each cylinder,” Goosen says.
“For our customers, this means greater accuracy and transparency in predicting the final quotation time frames, manufacturing lead times and delivery dates of their cylinder order or repair. This is based on algorithms considering longest lead time of materials, labour availability, machine availability, and so on.” Customers will be able to receive automated reports about their products on request.
Relevant dashboards will also be available to the other Bosch Rexroth South Africa Group companies who use and distribute Hytec Engineering cylinders.
“Internally, the system gives us the tools to increase our understanding of key performance indicators, as well as potential bottlenecks and other inefficiencies across the production floor via an intelligent reporting layer,” Goosen explains. This will help the company operate with maximum agility, operational flexibility and capacity.
Ensuring production is executed with maximum efficiency is a key innovation that will maintain Hytec Engineering’s position as one of Africa’s leading hydraulic cylinder OEMs.
Cylinder Exchange Programme
Another key pillar of the company’s success is its hydraulic cylinder exchange programme that is offered as part of its cylinder services across Africa. An extensive and comprehensive stockholding of refurbished cylinders means that Hytec Engineering can immediately replace damaged or worn cylinders with an exact replacement during the repair process to avoid lengthy periods of operational downtime.
With a revamped, modern production floor geared to efficiently delivering the new and repaired cylinders for which it is renowned, Hytec Engineering is ready to meet the needs of mines and industries across Africa with the highest quality fluid power solutions.