A professional manufacturer of complex tooling and composite parts
The success of Kramski Group began in 1978, when Kramski GmbH was founded in Pforzheim, Germany. The founder of the company is Wiestaw Kramski, with the goal of developing and manufacturing innovative stamping dies and progressive die tools. Just one year later, the company became one of the winners in a competition. This competition aims to recognize successful entrepreneurs in startups and is organized by Capital magazine. Kramski was awarded a prize of 30000 German marks (the official currency of West Germany at the time) as a result.

Since then, many things have changed, but Kramski's success has continued.

In the 1990s, this company transformed its business strategy and became a leading supplier of micro metal and plastic parts. Most of the high-speed progressive dies, mold fixtures, and manufacturing systems used by Kramski in internal component production are self-developed and manufactured in-house. In fact, Kramski produces all of its own tooling, and 95% of the tooling produced internally is used by itself.

Based globally
As a global enterprise, Kramski has established development and manufacturing facilities in Germany, India, and the United States. The company supplies 2 billion parts to customers around the world, such as connectors, electrical contacts, and switches. The company targets the automotive, electronics, telecommunications, and medical technology industries. The company has rich market experience and technical capabilities, which can ensure that each production line consistently provides high-quality products, thereby benefiting customers in the above-mentioned industries as well as some other industries. Its products include professional golf clubs designed and produced by an independent business unit in Germany and the United States.

For products designed and produced in Kramski, excellent precision and production efficiency are essential. The company's tooling and manufacturing system achieve extremely high production efficiency, allowing it to produce parts in Germany and sell them at competitive prices around the world. This also applies to all its other institutions. Although the institution located in Florida, USA, mainly produces products for American customers, Kramski's main customer base is still in China. In addition, Kramski Lanka Pvt. Ltd., located in Sri Lanka, also supplies molds, die fixtures, and composite parts to customers throughout Asia, Europe, and North America. In addition, Kramski's decentralized manufacturing strategy means that both it and its customers can achieve excellent cost-effectiveness.

Be brave to take the lead in using advanced technology
Putting innovative ideas into practice requires not only the knowledge and dedication of employees, but also the use of advanced technology. For manufacturing companies like Kramski, such technologies include computer numerical control (CNC) machines used for drilling, milling, or discharging, which have excellent accuracy and production efficiency; And high-quality information technology (IT) solutions for supporting and optimizing design and manufacturing processes.

Like many other manufacturing companies in the 1980s and 1990s, Kramski was also one of the early pioneers of computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) software. The management pointed out that during that period, people often exaggerated the advantages of CAD/CAM systems when promoting them, which meant that there was no truly comprehensive solution that could fully meet specific product development needs. In 1995, Kramski deployed a 3D CAD system. In order to fill in missing functions and automate time-consuming routine tasks, the system has a high degree of customization.

Although the system was quite successful, as time passed, more and more obstacles emerged. For example, due to the lack of functionality to define complex three-dimensional surfaces, it is difficult to reliably manufacture parts that meet consistent quality standards. In addition, the lack of an integrated software system for managing process and product data makes it very complex for multiple designers to operate the same fixture simultaneously, increasing the risk of data control and revision issues.

The Era of PLM: Utilizing Integrated CAD and PDM
Due to a series of limitations arising from customized systems, Kramski began deploying Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) technology from Siemens PLM Software in 2005. This includes NX ™ This comprehensive 3D CAD technology, along with the high-quality product data management (PDM) system used in conjunction with it, Teamcenter ® Software.

NX has rich functionality and overall flexibility, supporting progressive die and mold tooling design applications for specific processes, including progressive die guides, mold guides, and electrode design, which are the key factors for the company to choose NX. Of particular importance is the seamless integration between NX and Teamcenter.

Kramski has deployed Teamcenter to improve parallel engineering processes, manage product data, and version status. This includes clear control over the publishing process and access permissions, automatic creation of Bill of Materials (BOM), and optimization of workflows. The company also hopes to provide corresponding access permissions for designers, manufacturing engineers, workshop workers, and other personnel to easily use the 3D model visualization function.

From a business perspective, the purpose of investing in NX and Teamcenter is very clear, which is to improve production efficiency, shorten development and production cycles, and enhance the quality of processes and products.

Improve automation level through customization
Due to the complexity of Kramski's progressive tooling and the fact that metal forming work can no longer be completed solely by sheet metal stamping and bending, Kramski has hired an internal programming team to further leverage the advantages of NX and Teamcenter. In fact, with the help of molds used for deep drawing, laser welding, and assembly functions, the company is able to produce its own fixtures more efficiently. The intention of this customization project is significantly different from the projects implemented by the company through previous systems, which only added functionality. The customization of NX aims to further improve the automation level of routine workflows, shorten design time, including adopting a simplified method to incorporate proprietary standard parts into the resource library.

Designers should focus on their design tasks and not be disturbed by routine work, "explained Kramski's NX and Teamcenter system developers." For example, the system automatically assigns part numbers, location information, and other material control information to parts and checks them for accuracy in the information exchanged with our ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system. ”

Shorten development cycle through concurrent engineering
Shortening the development cycle of new fixtures requires multiple designers to utilize their own abilities and work together on the same project. The progressive die consists of an assembly and multiple sub assemblies, used for different steps required, "said the head of the Kramski tooling design team." Now with Teamcenter, we can control access permissions and allow different designers to process different sub assemblies in parallel. Usually, a designer can handle a specific sub assembly at a time. Once the work has entered a specific state, another designer will start to create details or drawings of the same mold. Teamcenter also controls access permissions in this area. ”

Improve transparency through visualization
The idea of replacing technical drawings with 3D product models for visualization has sparked a heated debate in the manufacturing industry that has lasted for several years. In Kramski, people approach this issue with a pragmatic perspective. They did not aim to achieve an absolute paperless factory, but only wanted to reduce the number of drawings. Their first step was to switch to 3D CAD and high-quality PDM, the seamless Siemens PLM method. In this way, all parties involved can access updated 3D models, manufacturing systems, and final products at any time. This not only makes the entire product engineering process fundamentally transparent, but also reduces the possibility of erroneous concepts and routine queries.

Improve the quality of all products and processes
Overall, the development of PLM has led to measurable improvements in product and process quality. There are many examples of this success. With the integrated 3D surface design function, the precision and consistency of tooling parts have been improved during repeated manufacturing. Previous systems often required manual adjustment of areas containing free surfaces. The team leader said, "Through this feature, we have gained a lot of added value. Without 3D technology, we would not be able to manufacture our parts to the required quality. In addition, we can flatten 3D parts to automatically produce flat billets and obtain their shapes. Based on the billets, we can easily define the width of sheet metal and feed. This feature is not available in 2D systems. Another advantage of 3D systems is that the bars correspond to the bars in real fixtures. With this feature, users will not ignore notches or depressions and can accurately design different workstations

In addition, there is another advantage. In almost all cases, it is necessary to adopt an adjustment process to transform theoretically accurate final products into actual products, and using NX can significantly simplify this process.

Use Teamcenter to further improve processes. With Teamcenter, we can create drawings for the tooling every time. ”The team leader pointed out that the established workflow ensures that data is always updated. After combining NX and Teamcenter, we have a well-defined list of updated tooling parts at all times. Our colleagues in the workshop cannot access outdated or incorrect data, even if there are old drawings, they can quickly detect them. ”

Teamcenter uses stored data to automatically generate tooling sheet metal, which includes key tooling parameters. In addition, a bill of materials and other important documents related to the process will be generated.