Unison Opens New Facility

The manufacturer of all-electric tube bending machines, Unison, has opened a new facility in Scarborough, U.K. Purpose-fitted for machine design and manufacture, the building more than doubles the production capacity of this fast growing company, and accelerates machine building times by around 15%.

Located close to Unison's previous building, the new facility gives Unison more than 24,000ft2 of manufacturing space, along with two acres of surrounding land. The building interior has been remodeled to increase Unison's manufacturing efficiency and capacity.

One of the most important new features is a dedicated flow line for building machines, fitted with a gantry crane to simplify handling and installation of large components. Tube bending machines now progress through six sequential assembly cells with application-specific tooling for each stage of the build cycle, from the basic preparation of the mechanical chassis and equipment cabinets, through the installation of electrical and mechanical components, to cabling, system commissioning and test, and finally customer acceptance. At the end of the line, machines can be rolled into containers for shipping. In the old facility, assembly time for a typical machine was 12 weeks. The organization and higher efficiency of the new flow line will reduce this to 10 weeks for a majority of the smaller machine sizes that Unison builds.

Another key new feature is an expanded metalworking machine shop, including a brand new $470,000 investment in a very large laser cutting machine center, to speed the fabrication of the metalwork components and tooling required for the bending machines. This brings in-house some components previously made by sub-contractors, further helping to speed delivery times.

Unison is growing rapidly, thanks to its focus on the most advanced sector of this metalwork machinery market - all-electric machines with their computer-controlled bending - plus the company's willingness to invest in design which has continually extended the scope of the bending technology into larger tube and pipe sizes. All-electric bending machines, rather than the traditional hydraulically powered machines, have now become the de-facto standard in all of the precision metalwork fabrication markets that Unison specializes in, including aerospace, automotive production, shipbuilding, oil and gas, and small-batch manufacturing.

In addition to larger size machines, a key element of Unison's philosophy is to assist clients in re-engineering their manufacturing processes alongside the acquisition of a new machine - to multiply productivity. This is achieved by Unison's vision of their machines as elements of the wider manufacturing process, and the availability of Unison software and hardware engineering development resources to enable new bending machine investments to form part of more integrated design-to-manufacturing solutions, and to optimize bending performance.