ANCA and Bosch

Two different international companies making Australia great again

As part of Australian Manufacturing Week VTE was invited to tour two very different facilities; one an iconic Australian company that has made huge inroads into manufacturing as well as huge inroads into establishing Australia as a high-tech innovator – ANCA.

The other Bosch, a household name that has been in Australia for years and years, but the company is now very different to the one that was established across the road from what was initially the VW manufacturing plant in Clayton, and later the Nissan plant.

Anca

ANCA is coming up to its 50th anniversary next year, a milestone for a company that started with two Australians Pat Boland and Pat McCluskey. At 25 years of age, they started ANCA. Mr Boland was an electrical engineer with a First degree from Melbourne University and Mr McCluskey was an awardwinning technician trained in state-of-the-art machine tools.

ANCA now has more than 1000 employees, many of them engineers based at their Bayswater, Victoria facilities which has a vast engineering space on the second floor of the main building, other ANCA buildings are located in the same street and also have engineering centres.

“So, we’re in 31 countries, we’ve got about 2,500 customers across 45 different countries,” explained Johanna Boland PR and Communications Manager – Australia.

“We’ve got about 1,300 employees. We do have a commitment to Innovation and Technology … we’ve got 19 patents and there are 12 additional patents that are pending.

We invest about 10 percent of our revenue into research and development every year.

“We are vertically integrated, so we design and manufacture most of the technology ourselves in-house.”

Since the typical machine that ANCA produces lasts around 20 years the company has service and support areas in all the regions in which it sells its machines.

“We don’t export to Russia anymore, but we’ve got an office in the US, we’ve got one in Thailand, Europe in Germany, and in China. We just opened up this last year in Japan as Korea is one of our biggest markets,” explained Ms Boland.

Where once ANCA was simply making and selling CNC machines, it is not the only thing it does now. It still designs, makes and sells those CNC machines but has expanded into three main business areas: ANCA CNC Machines that design and make CNC tool and cutter grinders, ANCA Motion that designs and makes flexible control systems specialising in high precision solutions for CNC machines, and ANCA Sheet Metal Solutions that delivers a complete endto-end service from product design to manufacturing to coatings and assembly. It doesn’t stop there, the company actively searches for more integration options, as an example ANCA was one of Australia’s largest importers of robotics and then opted to design its own robotic arm called the 300. More than anything else what has driven ANCA’s growth over the past 44 years has been a series of innovations that revolutionised the production of cutting tools and impacted the whole of manufacturing. ANCA’s first significant innovation was the measurement of tool geometry inside the grinding machine by use of a touch probe. This technology seems basic today but in 1986 ANCA was the first company to apply this technology, changing tool grinding forever.

Other firsts by ANCA include in-machine measurement using a CCD camera, 3D tool simulation, tubular linear motors, redundant axes generated in the coordinate transformations, wheel balancing and many more.

ANCA Machines

This is where it all started for ANCA, the design and construction of world quality machines that are now in every type of industry from tool manufacturing, automotive, medical, woodworking, power generation, electronics and aerospace. The machines make anything from endmills to punches, taps and PCD tools.

ANCA teams develop and make the machines from base to canopy including controls and drive systems, design and simulation softwar, and even machine monitoring software. Owning all the technology means engineers and designers can consider the entire machine as a single system when developing new solutions. Recently the company has introduced its AIMS system (ANCA Integrated Manufacturing System) to optimise cutting tool production which incorporates connected machines, connected processes and lights out operation.

A series of machines and robots take over repetitive manual tasks and work day and night seamlessly using a series of ANCA machines and processes including AutoFetch an autonomous mobile robot. With its modular solutions AIMS offers flexibility taking blanks to finished tools with mobile automation supported by integrated data flow.

The system enables the transfer of tools between operations with

AutoFetch, handles blanks in and out of CNC machines with AutoLine, and automates tool measurement and process compensation using AutoComp. Watch a complete ANCA AIMS installation at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4LotTOmSrQ

ANCA Motion – tailored automated processes

ANCA originally started making electronics for CNC software back in the ‘70s and was one of the pioneers at that time making and designing by hand.

In 2004 ANCA incorporated an office in Shanghai to provide sales and support for its tool and cutter grinding machines. This eventually led to the formation of ANCA Motion in 2008, to specialise in CNC control systems for the global automation markets, including specialised machining. With ANCA Motion the business started using its capability to apply that to other machine types.

ANCA Motion is the sole supplier to ANCA CNC machines, and its strength lies in its advanced CNC controls which deliver high precision and performance in applications such as five axis machining and high-speed laser cutting, which have been developed over decades.

ANCA Motion designs and manufactures flexible control systems, specialising in high precision solutions for CNC machines. The company tailors hardware and software to suit an OEMs’ exacting requirements, providing solutions that give customers a competitive edge.

ANCA Motion manufactures innovative motion control systems. These computercontrolled systems form part of ANCA’s tool and cutter grinders manufactured at a 14,000m2 site located in the same industrial park.

All the design and development of ANCA Motion is done inhouse at Bayswater with a manufacturing facility in Taiwan, and an office in Tianjin, China – a significant step forward in its commitment to the Chinese market.

The new state-of-the-art office has applications development and support, training, sales and logistics and provides locally based support to its Chinese customers.

ANCA Sheet Metal Solutions

ANCA Sheet Metal Solutions was established in 2000 and it began by designing and building canopies for AMCA’s CNC machines. It later transformed into a division that now offers a comprehensive set of services that integrate cutting-edge sheet metal fabrication equipment with a highly skilled workforce of qualified manufacturing engineers, technicians and welders capable of transforming a concept into a well-priced, high end quality sheet metal product.

The company says its agile thinking coupled with a culture of lean manufacturing ensures efficient, costeffective solutions delivered on time utilising a team with skills ranging from CAD design and CNC programming to laser and waterjet cutting, CNC forming, welding, painting and assembly.

ANCA Sheet Metal Solutions works in a range of industries that include food processing, electronics, construction, aerospace, agriculture and automotive. This ANCA division offers a complete end-to-end service for product design, manufacturing, coatings and assembly.

Bosch Australia is BAMS and diodes

Bosch has operated out of the same site in Clayton, Victoria since it opened its operations in Australia in the 1950s however, most of old brick buildings are gone and the final stages of decontamination of the old site is almost complete.

In their place are new buildings including a modern multi-storey head office and an automation centre – Bosch Australian Manufacturing Solutions (BAMS) that’s just two years old, such is the need that there are plans to replicate it and build another onsite.

BAMS

Bosch Australia Manufacturing Solutions (BAMS) is a division of Bosch Australia, and it is recognised globally for its innovative work in engineering services providing solutions for a wide range of manufacturing industries.

A leader in the design and development of special purpose machinery, BAMS is the preferred supplier to the MedTech, food and beverage, and advanced manufacturing industries.

What BAMS does is offer its competence to other companies to design, build, test and commission complex factory automation solutions for external customers in various industry sectors as vastly different as food and timber. BAMS offers services in robotics and automation, production line systems, Industry 4.0 solutions, equipment servicing, test and measurement systems and manufacturing consulting.

As an example of its forward thinking solutions, at BAMS a digital twin can be made which is a physics-enabled virtual replica of a real machine that can be commissioned with the same controllers and the same programs as the real machine, communicating bi-directionally, in real-time, and vastly speeding up the development time and the quality of the final product. If a programmer plugs their PC into a machine in another room, obscured from view, they should not be able to tell whether they are plugged into the real system or the digital twin.

This is game-changing when it comes to commissioning multiple lines at massive customer sites because most of the code can be validated offsite, decreasing time spent on customer sites and reducing disruptions to a customer’s factory.

So, by offering custom machine building, engineering and manufacturing support, and consulting services for Australian manufacturing operations, BAMS is helping to elevate Australian manufacturing.

Diode manufacturing for the global market

The transformation of Bosch was not just of this site but also of the company, where once its focus was as a first-tier supplier to Australia’s car manufacturing it is now something quite different transformed under an unlikely Australian, Gavin Smith who was an IT contractor who started with the company in 1990.

Now chairman and president at Bosch Australia, Mr Smith went on to salvage Bosch with a humble diode, an essential part of every car alternator but even that is changing as EVs do not need alternators but that’s another story.

Germany had to be persuaded to continue to make diodes in Australia after all there are plenty of other places in the world where these could be made, so Mr Smith made his arguments to Germany and won. Bosch Australia now produces around 120 million diodes per year for global export.

Within Bosch’s Australian diode manufacturing centre is a modern operation that works over three shifts, five days a week though it can run to seven days a week if needs be.

Bosch supplies global car makers in the United States, Asia, Europe, India, Japan and Korea with these diodes.

The raw material for the diodes is sourced from this facility, the diodes are made here, tested here and dispatched from this site to other operations all over the world. What’s unusual is that normally the development teams in Bosch are in a different country or another site to manufacturing but in Australia engineering is in the same facility and it’s an advantage.

Three workshops are used to produce a diode, the first is the semiconductor fabrication workshop that fabricates the silicon wafer for the diode. But the company also purchases fabricated silicon wafers from other manufacturers.

The second workshop produces the heat sink and the head wire, which is a cold forging workshop. And the third workshop is where the product is assembled, tested and packed.

What has enabled Bosch to continue to be the production hub for diodes is a concerted ongoing effort to improve systems, 20 years ago the company started with lean manufacturing then about eight years ago the company moved to industry 4.0 IoT connectivity and data analytics. Setting up this IoT meant that it was easier to collect information such as an hourly part count, breakdown diagnostics and much more. Websites were set up to manage operator training so that only operators that were trained on a particular piece of equipment or manufacturing process could be assigned that work. An entire wall of screens and boards makes this area look more like a large-scale university lab, gone are the whiteboards of yesteryear replaced by screens displaying a very complex array of data moved mostly using your finger – like working with a sophisticated iPad. It shows targets, it shows production, it shows stock – it basically shows everything including the efficiency of the staff known in Bosch as ‘associates’.

Bosch diodes has applied lean manufacturing methodologies for constant process improvement, fast reactions and minimal down time – all the things necessary to keep production in Australian. Manufacturing data is easy to access and shown on these interactive screens, team leaders can use it to manage resources and process engineers can access realtime data.

This is the type of industrialisation that is needed in Australia to keep manufacturing here, whether that’s diodes or other things. Certainly, Bosch Australia has the advantage of being part of one of the world’s largest companies employing more than 400,000 worldwide but even much smaller companies need to get onboard as much as they can with new production methodologies. The world won’t wait for Australia to catch up.