Kps: We Made Our First Robot Investment From Tezmaksan, We Increased Our Production By 20 Percent.

KPS, which has been rapidly continuing the production of fasteners for 25 years, receives robotic automation support, which increases its production by 20 percent and minimizes errors, from Tezmaksan, Turkey's technology partner and the leading brand of the machining industry. KPS, which was established in 1996 to produce fasteners with machining method, has been continuing its growth since it met with cold forging in 2001. KPS has become a company that produces materials for the automotive industry directly to the lines, makes daily kanban shipments, and currently supplies fasteners to Tier-1 suppliers and direct automobile factories in Turkey and in the world, with a team of 150 people. Currently producing bolts, nuts, rivets, pins and special cold forging parts with second operation in its 10 thousand-meter factory area, the main machinery group of KPS consists of special part presses called "past former" with 5-6 stations. “Our facility consists of two halls; In the first hall, we produce serial parts with machining and second operation products after forging with our nearly 50 CNC machines. In our other hall, we produce fasteners with our 25 group transfer cold forging machines”, says Gürkan Köksal, Production Manager of KPS Fasteners. And he also makes the following statements about his collaborations with Tezmaksan and robotic automation production:

Our cooperation with Tezmaksan started in 2001 when we purchased our first Goodway CNC machine. Since then, we have created our track mainly from Goodway and Rayfeng branded lathes. As of this year, we started to work with them on robotic projects.

Robot investment was an investment that we had in mind for a long time, but we could not make it due to our prejudices about price and operating the robot. The biggest problem of such innovations is that, since the employees in the environment are not accustomed to it, such in-enterprise initiatives can lead to bad results or start and progress in a painful way. We made the robot decision before a holiday, because in the busiest week, many people wanted to take leave due to annual leave and we had serious problems in terms of production. After this event, we decided to have robots do all the work that robots can do in the enterprise. With the commissioning of our first robot, we stepped into a smooth working process. Currently, our first robot is connecting parts to two CNC turning machines. It increased our production by about 20 percent and minimized errors. After seeing the performance of the robot and our own performance at the end of the first month, we have a plan to install 7 robots and 5 automated fed CNC lines within 1 year in our project. At the end of this project, 19 CNC machines will operate fully automatically and unmanned. We chose Fanuc as the robot brand and agreed with Tezmaksan as the integrator. We chose Fanuc because of parts warranties and long-term spare parts availability. Tezmaksan, on the other hand, is one of Turkey's largest machinery dealers in machining. We chose to start with them because they understand CNC machines well. We reside in Bursa, Tezmaksan is in Istanbul. Despite being in another city, they gave very good support. For this reason, we signed the second project with them.