A manufacturer of personal care products is saving money and reducing time to market by switching to a low-cost computerized numerical control (CNC) router that makes it possible to produce point of purchase displays internally. When contract manufacturers produced Kiss Products’ displays, there were delays in getting new designs to retailers and the cost of producing the displays was continually rising. Kiss made the decision to make their own displays and the company searched for an inexpensive and easy to use new router that provides the ability to produce plastic and wood components to high levels of accuracy. "With the router we can now design and begin to produce new display designs in a single day," said Mike Llewellyn, Shop Supervisor for Kiss Products. "The router has features normally found in more expensive machines like ball screws and servo motors that make it possible to produce a very professional looking product. We could afford a more expensive machine but we don't believe in throwing our money around. We are saving money and we can now turn on a dime to meet the changing requirements of the retail market." Ball screws have a number of advantages over racks. They don’t have the play or the requirement for adjustments that racks do, they also do not wear as easily as racks do and they are far less likely to get debris in the mechanism than racks to cause skipping and errant motion. Servomotors, unlike stepper motors do not "lose position" and cannot skip steps. Servos are also far better for 3D applications because they can change speed on the fly without losing power as steppers do.

Kiss is the world's largest manufacturer and distributor of professional quality nail products. The company originated in the lucrative beauty supply market. As the popularity of the products soared, distribution was quickly expanded to the mass-market arena. Capitalizing on this success, Kiss became the first company to bring professional nail care directly to the consumer, creating easy-to-use, all-in-one kits that make it possible to achieve salon results at home. Today, the Kiss line of professional products has expanded to include nail care, nail color, nail jewelry, nail art, and pedicure products. More recently, Kiss launched its second brand, called Broadway to allow women to achieve salon-like manicures at home, quickly and easily. Each of these ingenious products originated from Kiss's innovative thinking and vast salon experience. Kiss Products Inc. is located in New York just 20 miles outside of New York City on the exclusive north shore of Long Island.

Displays were outsourced in the past

The company’s products are manufactured in Kiss Products’ factory, then shipped to its Long Island facility where they are packaged. The company ships them to retailers with displays made of acrylic sheets that hold the individual products. The displays range from approximately 9 inches high, 8 inches wide and 8 inches deep to as much as 24 inches high by 12 inches wide and 8 inches deep and have either two or three tiers of shelves. The product is placed loose in the shelves and shelves are tilted backwards slightly so they don’t fall out. The shelves are held to the walls with acrylic solvents. The company frequently develops new styles of displays in order to accommodate a new product or promotion. In the past, some of these displays were built by subcontractors. One problem with this approach was that a considerable amount of back and forth was required in order explain the company’s concept for the display; get the initial prototypes right and then go into production. Another problem was that the cost of producing the displays was continually increasing.

Kiss’s local operation, called JC Solutions, had considered for some time the possibility of producing the displays internally but was unable to find a manufacturing method that met the company’s cost and quality requirements. "We first bought a table saw and a band saw but we didn’t like the results we were seeing," Llewellyn said. "The cut edges are displayed when the displays are assembled and the ones we were making were much too rough. We also had a lot of difficulty holding the tight tolerances that are needed to make a professional-looking display. The quality and appearance of the finished product depended on the ability and attention of the saw operator so the shelves produced by this method often just weren’t right. We were looking for CNC routers but the ones that we had seen were either expensive and complicated machines that cost $30,000 or so which was more than we could justify for this application. On the other hand, we also saw a lot of inexpensive routers but it was hard to believe that the light weight frames, the looseness of their rack and pinion drives and loss of position associated with steppers would produce the quality and accuracy we were looking for."

Then Llewellyn heard about Techno’s new low cost LC series CNC routing system. This machine provides a number of critical features that allow it to deliver accuracy to a level that has previously only been available from machines at a much higher cost. Ball screws are provided on all three axes, offering smooth motion, a high level of accuracy and repeatability, and minimal maintenance. A closed loop servo control system provides constant position feedback, higher power, and smooth continuous motion that eliminates the possibility of losing position in the middle of a part. The LC series machine includes a heavy steel ground stress relieved base and an aluminum T-slot table that can be easily converted to a vacuum table by installing the Techno vacuum table accessory kit. The machine comes fully assembled and includes Techno’s Windows-based CNC G-code interface with free lifetime software upgrades. The new machine is available in three sizes, with work envelopes of 30 by 24 inches, 50 by 48 inches and 50 by 96 inches. Each of these models provides a repeatability of 0.001 inches, a resolution of 0.0002 inches and a maximum speed of 250 inches per minutes. A wide range of optional equipment is offered including a laser scanning module, CNC lathe attachment, Porter Cable router, vacuum blower, and fourth axis rotary table. Best of all, the 4-foot by 8-foot model sells for only $13,995, a fraction of the cost of purchasing this capability just a year ago.

New in-house manufacturing workflow

"The Techno LC machine was the only one that had all the technical features needed to produce the quality we were looking for at a price we could afford," Llewellyn said. "Techno worked with us to help us get our process right for producing the displays for the new machine. Leon Moy, in particular, provided a great deal of help in specifying tooling and accessories for the machine and helping us get up and running." To begin with, the company’s designer creates a CAD drawing of a new display. The CAD drawing is then reviewed by the general manager of the company who reviews it and turns it back to the designer. The designer makes any necessary changes to the design, then he graphically nests the individual pieces required to make the display onto a 4 foot by 8 foot acrylic sheet and saves the resulting drawing onto a CD. Mitchell Cruz, the CNC operator, generates toolpaths, makes adjustments to compensate for the thickness of the sheet and creates a CNC program for producing the parts. He loads a new sheet onto the router, secures it with vacuum clamp to the table, uploads the program into the machine control and with the click of the mouse starts the machine. The machine then establishes the zero point for the Z-Axis, and then runs by itself for 30 to 120 minutes, producing enough parts for as many displays as is possible to nest onto an acrylic sheet. The operator, in the mean time, is able to walk away and perform other tasks while the machine is running. For example, he might spend the time flaming parts that were produced previously or breaking-up the acrylic left over from the machining operation which the company sells for scrap.

When the machining operation is finished, the operator then removes the pieces and then applies a torch to flame the cut edges to produce a glossy finish. Then he delivers to the pieces to the assembly department where operators put them together by applying acrylic solvent with a syringe. "The higher accuracy of the new machines means that every piece comes out perfectly," Llewellyn said. "The accuracy of cutting enabled us to develop a tab and slot construction in some of our displays which overcame some of the difficulties that assemblers were having in alignment of walls and partitions and provided better positioning in line bending. The new machine is also much faster than the power tools that we have tried in the past. The fact that it works without operator attention is another important advantage. Getting all these capabilities for such a low price means that we can now move the entire display manufacturing process in-house with all the advantages that that entails. The time required to respond to market trends by creating new displays has been cut to a fraction of what was required in the past. In fact, on several occasions we have come up with an idea for a new display in the morning and had several built and assembled by the end of the day. Building our own displays also makes it much easier to respond to special requests from customers. And, of course, the money that we save in contract manufacturing costs goes a long way to helping us stay competitive in this low-margin business."