Most of the sales reps that came out to visit did not understand this. They had not really sold much to the curtainwall industry and their input was less than helpful. Elumatic is probably the most familiar with what we do, but they were new to the machining center world. When we did our analysis, a lot of time was being spent in between activities. You might have a cutting station, a drilling station and a notching station. Each activity was pretty efficient, but it took time to move parts from one area to another and to be sure the right parts received the right fabrication. Our vision was to eliminate these steps and be able to fabricate an entire stock length into multiple parts in one step.
Elumatic kept pushing their SBZ150 machine because they had sold a lot of these in the past. The problem is that you have to pre-cut the parts before the 150 can do the holes and notches. We didn’t want to add this step. Mubea and Emmegi had machines that could process an entire stock length. Elumatic had one also, but they had never sold one in the states.
In the end, we based our decision on which company could meet our needs, not only today, but in the future. We weren’t looking at this as purchasing a piece of machinery, but as purchasing our first piece of machinery. Emmegi had the best track record and was the most familiar with our industry. They had an amazing array of equipment and a huge company to back it up. After visiting their showroom in New Jersey and visiting several of their customers, we knew they were the company for us.
