Soldini, Argentina – (March 2010) – Due to the need to optimize the cleaning process of gears and primary/secondary shafts of the tramsmission, the firm Fiat Auto Argentina, has recently acquired for their FPT Powertrain Technologies plant, in the city of Cordoba, Argentina, a suspended hook shotblasting system, model CAB 8x10 2 TR 20HP, designed for the batch shotblast processing of gears, primary/secondary shafts and ring gears which have been carburized. The equipment developed by Cym Materiales SA complies with all the strict quality parameters required by Fiat Auto Argentina, including purchase, design and manufacture management, under World Class Manufacturing norms and protocol requirements.

This was the first experience in the area of thermic treatment for transmission boxes in Fiat Argentina’s FPT Powertrain Technologies plant. In order to comply with the client’s procedures and requirements several visits to the Fiat Plant in the city of Ferreyra (Córdoba) were made to coordinate each stage of the equipment assembly with the users of the new machine.

The main features of this equipment are the following:

• Two (2) Shotblasting impeller turbines each Powered by 20 HP electric motors.
• Interior covering and protection of the shotblasting cabinet by high chrome steel plates.
• Three (3) hooks for batch loading of work pieces configured in an oval hook arrangement to improve product flow by reducing the load and unload times.
• Daily average cleaning capacity for 1550 sets of gear box components.
• Automatic Loader for new abrasive Special safety Components for internal requirements of Fiat:
  • Bi-manual control system
  • Acoustic sealing
  • Secondary filter system
  • Fire detection and prevention System Cym Materiales SA Personnel assembled the equipment in the FPT Powertrain Technologies plant over a period of 15 days during which our engineers followed the starting up of the Shotblaster.

At the same time of the setup and commissioning, the technicians and operators of Fiat Auto Argentina were given operational and maintenance courses in preparation of the shotblaster handover. Once the installation was finished, we received notification with the approval of Fiat Auto Argentina S.A., in the words of Ing. Jose Aguilera which made us feel that we had achieved our goal. “The first WCM-EEM Project performed by our area has ended. We want to thank all the people that really professionally participated in this Project, from the beginning the objective was to develop an interdisciplinary work team and we did it. Nowadays in TT we have new equipment with EEM and we have understood all the advantages that we experienced applying this methodology”. “I want to personally thank our supplier CYM who from the beginning of this Project understood what our objective was and became an integral part of this EEM team. It was a great effort for this company to adapt to the new FPT norms and requirements for WCM, and we have been rewarded with the achievement of first class equipment. I consider Cym a model EEM supplier for all new future projects”. This shows the challenge Fiat Auto Argentina had to overcome to become a productive company with continuous growth and improvement in environmental aspects, work safety, quality, maintenance, costs control and logistics, under the parameters of the World Class Manufacturing.

Characteristics  WCC - EEM

• Knowledge of and compliance to various International standards as a supplier.
• Compliance with safety standards (observance of the various requirements of each individual customer).
• Application of improvements learned through or applied in previous designs
• Compliance with a maintenance system (preventive/ predictive by component and autonomous) oriented toward zero failure.
• Analysis of the lifetime cost of the equipment.
• Minimize environmental impact through energy efficiencies
• Development of Lean Manufacturing.

This is a management philosophy oriented to reduce the seven types of “waste” (overproduction, delivery time, transport, processing excess, inventory, movement and defects).