AFR Winner

Employees: 500+

Fraisa wanted to manufacture taps in Switzerland. Taps are tools that create threaded holes for inserting screws; used in watches, electronics and heavy industry. A complex process, grinding taps previously required multiple machines. ANCA’s innovation enabled production on one fully-automated machine, halving costs and allowing manufacturing in high-cost labour markets. ANCA’s TapXcell is unique to the market with capacity to combine multiple tap grinding operations onto one machine.

This gave opportunity to automate the entire process, but running a machine for 50 hours unmanned requires extensive technology. We integrated a robot loader, extending grinding volume capacity. To guarantee taps are consistently high-quality we designed a fully-automated, industry-first process to measure the thread pitch diameter to ±0.002mm accuracy. Using our software we integrated the machine into Fraisa’s factory ERP system. Our remote monitoring software sends live notifications on the machine’s progress and alerts faults via text messages, emails and interactive website.