One of the big factors in our decision was timing.  Every machine manufacturer was very busy.  Some companies had told us they waited 12 – 18 months for their machines.  We wanted to have something in place by late July.  Emmegi assured us we could have our machine by early June.Several weeks prior to the shipment we received a call from our sales rep. indicating that we needed to go to Italy to sign off on the machine.  This was never discussed in any of our meetings and was a compete surprise to us.  Chris (our shop manager) and I planned a last minute trip to go to Italy to see our machine in action.

We had been given copies of the CamPlus, Job and Drill software from Emmegi and we decided to try to program some of the parts from our first targeted job for the testing.  Chris in our shop had several extrusion shipped over to Italy so we could use these when we were there.

As we tried to program our parts for the test, we had many issues.  Phone calls back to Emmegi in New Jersey did not answer the questions we had.  Emails to Italy were also not very helpful.  At this point, I’m getting worried.  If you can’t program your parts, or if you are getting tons of errors and no one knows why, it scares the hell out of you.  We did manage to program several parts and sent these to Italy ahead of our trip.

We arrived in Italy and were schedule to go to Carpi first (this is where the main Emmegi plant is and their software division) and then to Piacenza where they manufactur the Planet machines.

The trip could not have gone better.  We spent an entire day with their software group and they answered all of our questions.  We were able to see all of the equipment they make and it was quite amazing.  We were able to visit some glass companies there and see what they do and how the utilize the Emmegi equipment.  But the best part is that we were able to see our machine manufacture our parts.  We even had them try some things on the fly to see how easy it would be to adjust the machine and there were no issues.  We signed off on the machine and they loaded it for shipment the next day.

I’d like to say after having been in this industry for over 25 years that it is refreshing to see a company exceed your expectations.  The trip to Italy was really amazing.  Everything was handled very professionally and all of our questions and concerns were answered easily.  Despite all of the people who told us it wasn’t possible, they produced our machine and shipped it right on time.  Any limitations we had found with the software were reallyu mis-understandings on our part.  A few of the bugs we did find were corrected the same day and our machine was updated prior to shipment.  Most of those revolved around the metric to english units.  Some parts of the software were still displaying dimensions in metric.  These small things were corrected and the machine performed perfectly.

So we received quotes from Emmegi, Mubea and Elumatic for machining centers.  We spent several weeks creating an outline of the positive and negative aspects of each.  We also contacted several customers regarding the machines they had purchased to see what they thought of them.The Mubea machine was the least expensive of the group.  They had excellent sales representation and we really liked the software.  The fenestration company that we visited in Hayward that had their machine was very happy.  We also contacted U.S. Aluminum because they had purchased a machine and were using it for door fabrication.

Emmegi had the most expensive machine.  We spoke to several of their customers also.  Everyone was very happy both with the machines and the service.  We weren’t as impressed with the software.

In the end, we made our pitch to Randy regarding our findings.  The Emmegi machine was really built to do curtainwall.  It had the profile capabilities that we needed, it could fabricate from the underside of the profile (Mubea could also, but it had to be lubricated in the spindle where Emmegi is lubricated at the tool.  This was a limitation we discovered very late in the game), and we could find very few limitations.  It was very expensive.  You could almost buy two Mubea machines for the price.

One thing we found in speaking with the other companies that had gone through this process was that if they were to do it over, they would have gone with the better machine.  We didn’t want to spend less money now only to spend a lot more money in the long run.  As my brother says: “Buy nice or buy twice”.

Despite all the homework and all of the information, we weren’t really prepared to speak to Randy’s concerns.  I learned a new lesson in this process.  When selling things to the boss, you better know the return on investment numbers back and forth.  Features and benefits are great, but when someone is going to invest 3/4 of a million dollars in a machine, you better know how long it will take for it to pay for itself.  After meeting with Randy the first time, I went back and did all of the math.  We took the upcoming backlog and spread the numbers in fabrication improvements and created the back-up we needed to really speak  to Randy’s concerns.  In the end, using very conservative figures, we felt the machine could pay for itself in 3 years.

With those numbers and a bit more discussion, we got released to make the purchase.

We contacted the five manufacturers we had identified and invited them out to our office to discuss the equipment they offered.  We thought we knew what we were looking for, but it is always best to get additional opinions from the people who really know their industry.  The difficulty was finding people who really knew our industry.  Most companies focus on the fenestration business because it really lends itself to automation.  Fenestration companies that manufacture operable vents have limited numbers of profiles in a specific number of colors.  The windows are all manufactured the same with the exception of sizing.Curtainwall on the other hand has a limitless number of profiles with unlimited color options and is rarely manufactured the same way on any two projects.  Most projects have their own unique set of design parameters and the projects are large enough that creating a completely custom system with 80 new dies is actually very common.

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.

The first step in our process was to define the scope of the changes.  We do a mix of stick built, field assembled curtain wall systems and shop assembled unitized curtain wall systems.  Our first task was to decide what our focus would be.  We have two shops in Fremont.  Shop A is located directly on the property of our main office.  We do most of our field assembled fabrication here.  We have also fabricated most of our stock length material for our unitized curtainwall systems in this building.  Shop B is located just down the street (actually adjacent to our precast facility) from shop A.  This facility has more open space and also quite a bit more yard space.  We have been doing our unitized assembly in this building.After much discussion, we decided to focus on our unitized curtain wall fabrication.  We are doing more and more unitized work lately.  This is due to the fact that our company is growing rapidly, both in terms of size and geography.  We are doing more urban high-rise construction today than we ever did in the past.  This type of work is more condusive to unitized construction. We split the task into three groups.  One group would work on how we would receive and stage our stock length material and glass from our vendors.  The second group would focus on the equipment and fabrication of the stock lengths.  The third group would look at the assembly glaze process.  The goal is to be able to fabricate, assemble and glaze two projects concurrently in shop B.  We need to complete approx. 30 units per day per project. My group is working on the fabrication portion of the project.  We began by doing some research on the different major equipment manufacturers for our industry.  The goal was to contact these companies and get a representative to come out and discuss their products with us.  This way they could see first hand what we are doing and make suggestions on the type of equipment they could supply. Our feeling is that we needed some type of machining center.  This is a multi-axis CNC machine that can fabricate the long lengths (approx. 24′-0″ to 30′-0″) aluminum extrusions. After much research, the companies we fould were: Elumatec – Germany FOM – Italy Mubea – Belgium Emmegi – Italy Tekna – Italy