Zamil Air Conditioners

Location: Dammam - Saudi Arabia

Zamil Air Conditioners are one of the largest manufacturers of air conditioning equipment in Saudi Arabia, and the Zamil Group is one of the main employers in the Dammam region.

In 1999 Zamil Air Conditioners acquired an Austrian company named Clima Tech Airconditioners GmbH, who have been using Automatic Machining for a number of years to program their Amada Pega machine tool. Clima Tech introduced Fleming Software to Zamil, who subsequently purchased licenses to program three Wiedemann turret punch presses using Automatic Machining, and also Reverse Engineering systems for both Wiedemann and Amada NC programs.

Prior to the installation of Automatic Machining the programming of the first two Wiedemann machines was performed manually by a department of 6 people. Each part was cut from a guillotined blank, and turnaround from completion of design to a proven NC program was about three weeks.

After the initial installation a third Wiedemann machine tool was purchased, and now one man generates all of the NC programs required to drive all three machine tools with a lead time measured in hours rather than days or weeks. The system still generates NC programs to cut parts from Guillotined blanks where appropriate (mainly very large parts), but most components are now nested and this has lead to a significant reduction in scrap and a substantial improvement in the throughput of the machine tools.

Modern electronic communications make the geographical location of Zamil almost irrelevant. Minor updates and support are provided by E-mail, whilst major upgrades are provided on CD-ROM. Fleming Software has only made two visits to site, firstly for the initial installation, and then for the setup of the third Wiedemann.