APL2

We have increased productivity by 30%

Customer: Sandvik AB
Author: Rune Karlsson, Vice President Tooling Supply
Country: Sweden

The Sandvik CAPP system

In the summer of 1984 a project focusing on computer-aided process planning (CAPP) was started at Sandvik to rationalize design and process planning.

The purpose of the CAPP system is to simplify and speed up the preparation of offers and orders for special products.

The objective was to reduce the quotation time from 3-4 weeks to 24 hours and the delivery time, which in many cases could amount to over 10 weeks, to 1-2 weeks, for each order of a special product. A quotation of a special product could need the skills of engineers and marketing people.

Today CAPP covers more processes such as order handling, inventory control, production planning, pricing of special products and standardization of production methods. It provides answers to queries concerning such areas as delivery time, production cost and recommended base price. With CAPP an offer can be prepared immediately when all prompts have been answered and the salesperson doesn't need the knowledge of how to design, construct or price the product.

When the salesperson makes an order, the information necessary for the production of the order will immediately be sent to the plant that is selected for production.

Some products also have CAD support and for such products, data is sent to a CAD system that will immediately prepare production drawings to scale, NC-programs etc. which will also directly be sent to the selected plant.

Advanced products that earlier took weeks to produce now requires only a couple of hours.

There are about 1,500 users throughout the Sandvik organization, most of whom are internal salespersons and distributors, while others work in pre-production or design. However, there is another group of users who are trained developers. In CAPP, they have their own programming language, in which they can create programs based on their operational knowledge and production logic.

The tool behind the language was created and still maintained by the APL2 development group within Sandvik. This group contains of 5 persons working full time with APL2.

The whole system is built in APL2 under TSO in mainframe z/OS. It is used worldwide but only one version of the system exists in the central mainframe.

The CAPP coordinator at Sandvik Coromant, handles contacts with users in the sales department. He says "They turn to me with questions about tenders and tell me how they wish to work with CAPP. I enjoy excellent cooperation with the guys at the CAPP development team, to whom I pass on technical questions about systems. CAPP is extremely stable and offers short waiting times. It hardly ever freezes and we have not had any performance problems."

Rune Karlsson, Vice President Tooling Supply, says, "We have increased productivity by 30%."