Galaxy Technologies / Tebis America
Customer Success Story
Situation
Galaxy Technologies designs, manufactures and assembles production tooling for the aerospace, defense and plastic markets.
The company recognized an opportunity to improve the efficiency and quality of its tool design and development process. Understanding that having stagnant processes and software put them at a competitive disadvantage, Galaxy decided to make an investment in CAD/CAM software to become more automated and improve the company’s ability to win business.
Solution
Galaxy was looking for a partner that could help them leverage a simulation tool. Recognizing Tebis’s expertise, highly regarded reputation and a recommendation from an industry consultant, Galaxy brought the Tebis team onboard to make their automation and simulation goals a reality.
The biggest challenge was the culture change that needed to take place, especially with associates on Galaxy’s shop floor – the previous software had been in place for 30 years. With the transition, the team now had a simulation tool to ensure parts fit and validate the programming involved, as well as 100% off-line programming. Additionally, the company recognized developing templates, although time consuming, helps standardizes the programming process resulting in time and quality improvements.
The next step was to educate and train the team – onsite at the Tebis office in Michigan in addition to locally at Galaxy – as well as working together to build an accurate, feature-rich tool library and NC sets.
As a business partner Tebis collaborates with Galaxy to ensure they maximize the software’s capabilities resulting in new processes and the ability to address the unique challenges from customers.
Result
After successfully transitioning to Tebis and educating the entire Galaxy team, which took approximately one year, Galaxy started to reap the rewards of Tebis software, including:
· Improved efficiency/less rework
· Improved quality of tools
· Elimination of violations
· Approximately 30-40% reduction in programming time
· Grew capacity without adding people or machines
And because Galaxy can write their own templates, they’ve been able to streamline those tool builds that are similar – what used to take 10-15 minutes to program, now takes less than 3.
Today, Galaxy has 10 machines running with Tebis solutions.
“The Tebis team is incredibly supportive, always going above and beyond for training and answering questions. We see them as a business partner to help us develop new processes and tackle challenges that tend to arise when adding new business to your current operations.”