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Our company just celebrated 50 years in business. The company was started primarily as a service
organization. We didn't necessarily manufacture items that couldn't be gotten other places,
but our charge was to get them to the customer faster than everybody else was doing.
We manufacture tooling for the punch-press industry. It ranges from punches, dies, strippers,
to accessory items, to special assemblies for special forming and different punching
applications, or forming applications. In the earlier years, we worked with standard
2-axis lathes, and 2-axis mills, 2-and-a-half-axis milling, and it became a lot of work-in-process
at all the individual steps, so we have advanced with the machine tools to where they're "put
bar stock in, take a completed part out," with the milled and turned features all complete.
Then the part could be ready for heat treat or other operations, but saves all the staging
and the relocating of the work-pieces and the fixtures for the next operation. So ESPRIT
is great in that it helps with mill-turn machines with, like, B-axis. We have some mill-turn
machines with nine axes. The post processors can handle that, and they have factory representation
for post processor development, and it really has been a great support system for us.
My experience with ESPRIT goes back to approximately 1993, in which we started automating some
of the wire EDM processes. Through that development, we're able to automate punches, dies and strippers
with variable shapes and variable sizes, and ESPRIT helped us attain that capability of
variable shapes and sizes on our customer direct orders. And we're also able to also
automate it with ESPRIT's support and guidance. One of our chief goals is speed of delivery,
engineering and customer satisfaction. ESPRIT has helped us with this in many ways. The
EDM machines and the automation of the EDM machines was one of the primary factors in
selecting ESPRIT. Also, the expectation of quality is quite a lot different than it was
50 years ago. People don't just consider themselves lucky to get quality. It's an expectation.
You don't get second opportunities and third opportunities like you might have in years
past. Also, the new machine technology has required that we step up our game as far as
how we manufacture, what types of equipment we use to manufacture. ESPRIT has been very
helpful in matching what we require to keep going forward.