Additional programming capacity was needed to allow MSI Southeast to meet increasing demand for on floor programming. The increase in demand was fueled by the need to reduce Mold delivery times and meet increased sales demands. WorkNC is the primary programming system utilized to program our CNC equipment. Roger Olson, Plant Manger, commented, “When we added the additional seat we not only eliminated the bottleneck for programming but we also upgraded the software on all seats. The added features and the training we received during installation offers us new and better methods for machining. In addition to the programming upgrades the new software package also includes CAD software which allows 3D tools for core/cavity separation, trode creation and creation of surfaces.”

A total of 5 primary CNC machines rely tool path data generated by WorkNC. The realistic standard for programming stations is about 3 CNC machines per seat. The competition to serve those five machines by the use of the single seat of WorkNC was a bottleneck and was causing machine downtime. The addition of the new seat has provided operators adequate opportunity to write tool paths for their equipment and has virtually eliminated the wait time and the associated machine downtime.

Roger Olson states “The obvious goal here is to become more efficient in our toolpath generation and move some or all of our trode modeling to the shop floor. All of these little steps will ultimately allow us to reduce the overall shop hours we invest in the projects, thereby giving our customers better value for their tooling dollar and continue MSI's continuous process improvement.”

We just recently upgraded our computer network to provide increased capacity, security and the ability to share data with our customers more quickly. These upgrades allows information to be shared quickly and safely with our customers and sister facilities:

• New wiring infrastructure to cat5e standards.
  
• New file servers with Raid level 5 storage and power supply redundancy.
  
• Exchange server for increased mail security and efficiency.
  
• Extensive virus protection, both incoming and outgoing, to protect our customers and ourselves from virus propagation.
  
• Fractional T1 connection to the Internet for efficient data transfers in and out.
  

MSI maintains a simple to use and secure FTP site for transfer of data to our facility for our Customers. Check out our easy to use FTP interface site by clicking on the FTP site link at the left of your screen. It’s easy and secure to use and provides all the necessary information required to assure you that your data would be handled in a secure, timely and appropriate manner. We encourage all customers to use FTP instead of E-mail. FTP is more efficient, allows the data to be tracked and archived and is faster than sending large files via E-mail.