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#Product Trends

AGT excited about the GreCon FORMATOR

"Small investment with tremendous cost reduction potential"

AGT is one of the leading international wood-based panel manufacturers in terms of product quality and management philosophy. The 1000 employees of the company have set ambitious goals which they want to achieve until 2020. Thus, the company aspires e.g. to receive the award "Best place to work", it intends to enthuse its customers by service components of the augmented reality field and at the same time to achieve a reduction of the manufacturing costs of 6 m € per year.

To implement the cost reduction objectives, AGT mainly relies on the forming optimisation by the GreCon FORMATOR. Only few months after commissioning of the FORMATOR, 1 m € material savings could be realised already. Mehmet Semih Söylemez, AGT's CEO, is confident that there is still more potential for savings. "We have achieved our original objective to realise 1% material savings already after a short period of time. We are confident that 1.5% material savings are also possible, especially for material thicknesses of 16 mm and 18 mm."

Since AGT did not only want to implement material savings with the FORMATOR but also quality improvements, the production team first had to build up confidence in the FORMATOR. After having this confidence, for example the safety margins which were usual before were abandoned and the savings and quality improvement potentials which the FORMATOR offers could be fully exploited.

Human values instead of human resources

For AGT, the people are the most important success factors. Therefore, it is not surprising that AGT applies for the "Best place to work" award this year which presently is only granted to international groups in the Turkey. "We, at AGT, do not talk about human resources, we talk about human values. Our employees have to use the resources made available to them efficiently. Therefore we need employees who are eager for knowledge, who permanently want to learn new things and who are open to continuous improvements", Mehmet Semih Söylemez says.

Things that are not measured cannot be improved.

"Despite the good quality of our products, we, at AGT, had the vague feeling that it could be possible to do it even better. We relied on it and in 2015 we decided to use the X-ray scanner GreCon DIEFFENSOR. Already beforehand, we made very good experience with the raw density profile gauge GreCon STENOGRAPH and wanted to win other data for an optimisation of production", Oguzhan Ötztürk explained. With the DIEFFENSOR, the system operator receives a meaningful idea of the material distribution directly after forming. These data were so convincing that only few months later the DIEFFENSOR was converted by installing the segmented scalper into the FORMATOR.

This system expansion became more difficult than originally expected due to the AGT specific specialities. Thanks to good cooperation between Fagus-GreCon and AGT all problems could be solved and the project could be completed successfully. "We always had great trust in the technological competence of Fagus-GreCon. We always had the feeling that Fagus-GreCon cooperated with us in solving the problem. Whenever we needed support, a service technician was on site. We never felt left alone!" the factory manager Oguzhan Ötztürk said.

During the implementation phase of the FORMATOR, the values determined in the lab were compared regularly with the values recorded by the FORMATOR. Already after a short period of time, the correlation of both values was impressive. The team gained confidence and reduced the set value step-by-step. The investment for the FORMATOR amortised in less than a year.

Details

  • 31061 Alfeld, Germany
  • Fagus-GreCon Greten GmbH & Co. KG