Mahinder Narang, senior assembly associate JCB in India, stands next to a loader at the Ballabgarh plant in Haryana, India.

The challenge:
To ramp up production of gearbox casing units and at the same time reduce wear and tear to the milling machine spindles and bring down the manufacturing cost per component.

The solution:
Replace the existing 14 carbide inserts in the cutters with five of the newly launched Sandvik Coromant ceramic inserts, thus enabling the cutters to achieve far higher cutting speeds.

The result:
The cost of inserts per cutter was lowered, wear and tear to the spindles was reduced, and the manufacturing cycle time per component was cut by half.

Construction Boom in India

It’s difficult to find a corner of India these days where construction work is not in full flow. Roads, flyovers, housing estates and shopping malls seem to be springing up overnight in cities and towns across the country.

It is not surprising, then, to discover that companies that supply the equipment required for this building boom have seen a huge increase in demand. One such company is JCB India, a fully owned subsidiary of JCB UK. JCB started business in India in 1980 and today manufactures one in every two pieces of construction equipment sold there.

Utkarsh Agarwal, deputy general manager of the Transmission Business Unit at the Ballabgarh plant, has first-hand experience of the booming Indian demand for infrastructure equipment.

The JCB plant in Ballabgarh, Haryana, specializes in the production of two of the company’s worldwide best-sellers, the 3DX and the 4DX backhoe loaders – multitasking giants that in three minutes can complete work it would take 40 men to do in the same number of hours. The company currently leads the backhoe loader market in India with a 75 percent share.

But toward the end of 2009 the plant found it was struggling to keep up with demand. India was emerging from the global economic downturn, and orders were coming in thick and fast.

Subir Kumar Chowdhary, JCB’s executive vice president and business head, backhoe loaders, and Utkarsh Agarwal, deputy general manager of the transmission business unit at the Ballabgarh plant, remember how it was. “Demand went up substantially,” Agarwal says. “The number of excavators we produced every month almost doubled. All over India infrastructure was booming. In addition there was a lot of work being done in preparation for the Commonwealth Games [held in October 2010] in Delhi. We quickly realized we had to do something to increase output.”

Reallocating Milling Resources

Although JCB sometimes outsources production of body parts and panels, its high-quality gearboxes are always made in-house. To keep pace with demand, the plant focused on ramping up output of its cast iron casing units.

DInesh Sharma, junior manager, transmission business unit, loading the gearbox casing at JCB India.

This was not an easy task, as four of the plant’s 12 horizontal machining centers had been diverted for use on a new project, and JCB did not want to invest in new machining centers. To meet the increased targets, a way had to be found to produce the components faster – and, ideally, at a lower cost. The Ballabgarh plant faced another challenge as well. The cutters used in the machining centers were placing heavy loads on the spindles, resulting in heavy wear and tear and shortening the working life of the spindles.

Agarwal had joined the Ballabgarh plant a few months earlier and had an impressive track record in the industry. During his time with other companies he had worked with Sandvik Coromant on a number of problem-solving projects and realized that he needed to enlist the company’s help again.

“They have supported me in India since 1994 in many different ways,” he says. “I was confident they’d be able to help us find a solution to this challenge.”

The finishing of an excavator in late 2009, the demand for excavators at JCB almost doubled.

Sandvik Coromant did indeed come up with a solution. Company specialists recommended that JCB invest in one of its latest milling products – CC6190 inserts made of silicon nitride ceramic, an exceptionally tough synthetic material tailor-made for high-speed cast iron machining, instead of the carbide inserts JCB had been using.

“We knew we needed a radical approach but we were apprehensive,” Agarwal recalls. “We had reservations about using ceramic because we thought of it as a brittle material, and there were concerns that it would break.”

Sandvik Coromant Solutions

Amit Raina, sales manager for Sandvik Coromant in Delhi, says: “We knew they were apprehensive and realized we had to demonstrate the benefits of this new technology. So we put together a team – some people from JCB, some people from Sandvik Coromant – and we worked with the cutters on the shop floor. The first trials we did were unsatisfactory, but we made changes in the tool path and optimized parameters on the machines. This enabled us to achieve the results we were hoping for.”

Ceramic’s toughness and capacity to withstand far higher cutting speeds than carbide brought impressive results. Just five ceramic inserts were needed in place of 14 carbide ones, and the milling cutter became a much more powerful tool.

As a result, the cost of inserts per cutter was lowered, wear and tear to the spindles was reduced, and the manufacturing cycle time per component was cut in half.

In February 2010 the number of produced excavators in the Ballabgarh plant rose to the highest levels at any JCB production line anywhere in the world.

From left: Soumik Sarker, productivity improvement engineer, Utkarsh Agarwal deputy general manager transmission business, and Dinesh Sharma, junior manager transmission business unit, discuss the problem that JCB India faced in milling operations.

The massive increase in productivity sent waves through the entire plant.

“I was constantly being asked to procure more and more cast iron for the gearbox casing,” says Shivani Jaitley, assistant purchasing manager. “I was ordering almost twice as much as before. I’d been asked to get in more materials on previous occasions, but never before had it gone up by this amount.”

The success of the venture has now led Agarwal to ask Sandvik Coromant to work with JCB Ballabgarh on a Productivity Improvement Program.

“They are extended partners to me,” he explains. “We’re working together as a team to come up with a common solution.”

Subir Kumar Chowdhary, JCB’s executive vice president and business head, backhoe loaders, agrees. “Our relationship with them is a strategic partnership,” he says. “They bring in innovation, support in key areas of opportunity identification, and support for our lads here too. Working with them helps us learn and understand about the latest in cutting tool technology. There are enormous benefits all round.”

Three times faster than carbide

Soumik Sarkar is a productivity improvement engineer with Sandvik Coromant India and a key member of the team that came up with the technical solution to JCB’s challenges.

“Once we’d clearly identified JCB’s objectives, we did a detailed analysis, which demonstrated that they could best be achieved by using ceramic inserts in the milling cutters instead of the existing carbide inserts,” he says. “We followed this up with shop-floor trials.

“Ceramic is such a hard material; it can withstand cutting speeds of between 900 and 1,000 meters [3,000 and 3,200 feet] per minute, three times higher than carbide. So this results in a far more powerful cutter.”

Previously, using a cutter with 14 carbide inserts, the rough milling of a transmission casing unit was taking around 1.1 minutes. The team was able to show that the same operation could be done in 30 seconds using a cutter with just five ceramic inserts – a 50 percent reduction in time.

Originally published in Metalworking World 1.2011, a business magazine published by Sandvik Coromant.