Crane-Free Processing at HME, Inc.

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A cruise through the streets of downtown Topeka will lead you to a small, unsuspecting warehouse retrofitted to be utilized as a steel fabrication shop. This unique facility is home to HME’s new PeddiAssembler and four PeddiRotator weld stations. The cranes-free strategy behind the PeddiAssembler shop is that steel NEVER touches the ground.

It's a truss cord assembly. It's like 19 of them, and they had roughly 30 components and in 70-75 minutes for the robot to fabricate it, and the assurance of a part is 100%.

The company's vision over the last 20 years was heavily focused on technology. Jon Haas, he started the company in his garage, and today we have multiple beam lines, saw lines, angle lines, and robotics.

Benefits of PeddiAssembler to our customers is it allows us to be more efficient, it allows us to drive the cost down on the project, it allows us to be more competitive on bid day, and it allows us to shorten schedule.

What the PeddiAssembler's pushed out in the month of April was like 18.7 tons per day. So we're on our goal is to do a load per shift. A completed load, 45,000 pounds a shift, so we're getting close. We're getting close to it, which is pretty impressive. We've reduced fabrication time by 50% easy on a lot of projects.

What's cool about one of our operators we have is he came off the fabrication floor, so we were able to tie his fabrication skill into the technology of letting the robot do all the manual work, and he was even floored by the technology that's here that we're utilizing.

It's human error. We'll all make mistakes and things like that. So that's just something that the robot kind of weeds out. It's just, it's cut and dry every time.

Benefits to our shop guys on the PeddiAssembler is it takes away the monotonous, repetitive work. It gives us additional manpower, and once again, in today's market, where it's hard to find manpower, PeddiAssembler is a great supplement for that.

What we're pushing out now, the fabrication side, we've two to three times faster on a lot of our assemblies. Now you got assemblies that maybe you're only 20% to 30% in reduction, but there's some that are two to three times faster, like the more small part assemblies that we get put on the beam. We see that it's just exponential how much time we gain.

There's a specific project that we had to come to the machine. It's a truss cord assembly, it's like 19 of them, and they had roughly 30 components on there, and in 70-75 minutes for the robot to fabricate it, and the assurance of the part, right location, at the right dimension where it's being put on the main assembly was 100%. As opposed to manual fabrication, a good skilled labor 3 and 1/2 hours just to fabricate.

The flow of the new expansion, we bring the material up, we load the infeed, operator makes the program, runs the material, and then if needed, it gets separated on our outfeed by job or by part and just move along. The expansion is going to grow. Our plan is to add another BDL, another saw, and another Liberator. So we'll have two lines in this building basically back to back, two operators running all six machines. It's going to be very important that this line stays up and running to provide that PeddiAssembler with plenty of material.

The profit software behind it for itself is amazing. That's kind of like the meat and potatoes to the system right there, and how they integrated that to control the robots and be able to make that so user-friendly.

The other features that we like about the peddiAssembler are the rotation. And be able to rotate that beam 360 degrees and not have to put a lift in there or a chain or a crane or the crane hoist and turn that piece, that's really nice, and it's in position every time. And you're guaranteed the part being put on the right place.