Askon Demir Çelik A.Ş. is one of the leading steel service centers and stockholders for wear resistant, high strength and structural steel in Turkey. It can trace its roots back to 1932 (90 years) and today has over 420 employees at its 5 premises of 40.000 m2 in Denizli and Gebze.As well as processing steel and manufacturing products for clients across Turkey and worldwide, the company also distributes world class manufacturers’ high strength and specialty steels for high wear applications.
At its Denizili factory, the company has 35 metal processing machines including 12 laser cutting machines, six oxy-cutting/plasma machines, 6 press brakes and 3 guillotines. Özkan Özker, Steel Plate Processing Production Manager says, “We have been using Lantek software for about 3 years and we have built up a close collaborative partnership with their technical support team with Professional implementation of the Lantek Expert systems and rapid response to any problems or queries we have had over the years.”
Now, Askon Demir has 18 Lantek Expert licenses and programs 6 Nukon laser cutting machines from 4 to 12 kW, 2 LVD Phoenix laser cutting machines 10 and 12 kW, 3 Bodor 2kW laser cutting machines, an Ajan plasma cutter and an Ajan oxy-cut machine.
Özkan Özker adds, “Lantek Turkey has helped us centralize our Lantek programming onto a central server system, bringing together the programming for a range of different machine makes, models and technologies under one umbrella.”
Programming all these machines with server based Lantek Expert has made a huge change to the way in which the company works. 20 engineers share data and work on the Lantek Expert systems importing customer’s models and assemblies. Lantek Expert is able to import design data from almost every CAD system in the market and can interpret and unfold components in an assembly ready for manufacture. Because Lantek Expert can program and share data between engineers for all of Askon Demir’s machines, it is now easy to move jobs from one machine to another to meet the daily changes in production requirements. Additionally, since the engineers are all working from the same database they can operate much more flexibly and efficiently, sharing workloads as necessary.
Lantek’s fast automatic part nesting is particularly important for Askon Demir due to the large volume of material that the company processes. Özkan Özker says, “Our most important objective for nesting is obtaining minimum scrap. Lantek’s rapid and advanced automatic nesting technologies deliver minimum scrap and increased productivity. We can see the number of parts required and all the materials on the same screen, which makes it easy to optimize nesting resulting in reduced costs, faster production and increased profit.” The system also handles remnants of material, keeping track of what is available and nesting parts in the irregularly shaped sheets, further reducing material wastage. Özkan Özker concludes, “The server based Lantek system is essential for our production, and we would definitely recommend it. In fact, one of our machine suppliers now collaborates with Lantek after we recommended the software to them.”