Rosti

Rosti’s Customers

Rosti customers are also stakeholders and we have developed a strategy of providing cutting edge support services with the aim of creating greener products through design excellence and manufacturing efficiencies. Many of our customers like Rosti have publicly committed their businesses to improving environmental sustainability.

Many of Rosti’s customers have strategic goals for managing the environmental impact of their new products. These goals manifest themselves in Design & Development policies with which Rosti interfaces. The details are commercially sensitive and cannot be discussed but we can consider the appropriate response to this evolving “Market Led Sustainability”.

Market Led Sustainability

Improving Sustainability at Source is Rosti’s response to the challenge of delivering environmentally efficient products? The issues of waste, consumption and emissions have to be addressed at source with Manufacturing and Product Development strategies.

Manufacturing Strategies are required which can deliver high volume and high variety product mixes without the excessive resource consumption such as that which arises from capacity and material losses. Installed capacity must reflect industry best practice which in Rosti’s case means lower energy and higher flexibility in its Injection Moulding Machines and secondary processes. Each business unit must also create zero PPM cultures. Our progress on this journey is reflected in our CO_² reduction strategy and will be elaborated upon in a further paper.

Product Development Strategies have also been reviewed at Rosti. The key questions are how can we eliminate the waste and cost drivers at source in Product Creation, Product Development, Tooling Development and Process Optimisation? Rosti takes it’s “Solution Provider” role seriously and its answer has been to identify and measure the costs of development across a spectrum of markets. Rosti is perhaps unique in the development experience it has gained across its diverse market sectors and the number of new components and modules it creates each year. Our core is in the development of processes for the manufacture of Business Machines (BM), Domestic Appliances (DAP), Medical Devices, Automotive Cockpit and Under Bonnet worldwide.

Rosti has established a tool box of state of the art product and process development software with a value of more than $430,000 USD.

Rosti has in its “product creation” portfolio; Ansys Finite Element Analysis, Moldflow Part Advisor, Moldflow Plastics Insight, design suites Siemens NX, Pro/E, Catia and Auto Cad. Such a flexible “product creation” suite was conceived because of the need to integrate Rosti’s engineering teams with that of its many international customers to eliminate waste.

Case Study One

The major functional and cosmetic component on the left has many thin sections that will lead to recurring quality issues in production. Rosti has corrected and optimised this part through design improvement and mould tool optimisation.

The problem described above if allowed to enter into production will lead to a sub-optimal moulding process these issues can typically add 15% to cycle times but the compounded waste accumulates as follows:

- Higher machine overhead rates to pay for lost productive capacity which impacts depreciation costs and facility costs.

- Higher operating overheads to manage smaller processing windows impacting costs of quality and costs of attention to critical m/c parameters.

- Higher total business overhead resulting from unnecessary capital investment and finance costs.

- A business that applies Design for Manufacture disciplines rigorously will over time generate typically 15% more output without additional investment, when this is coupled with the savings in direct expenses we get compounded and significant reductions in energy, material resources and cost. Sustainability makes economic sense.

Environmental Sustainability

Clever solutions are not enough Rosti recognise that they must also deliver an optimised total cost. A design which is not optimised will carry a lifetime burden of waste and CO_² emissions. This is not acceptable from an environmental or a commercial viewpoint. Rosti gives high priority to savings and waste reduction. Material type, Material weight and volume, Process selection, Process energy, Cycle time, Process yield, all of these factors and more can be optimised by Rosti TP’s software and technical teams.

Case Study Two

- For many moulders material is the major cost of a component in the range 45% to 65%. If the part is not optimised before the tooling phase it can be uneconomic to correct after tool trialling. Thus the component the product and its market price will carry a life time burden of material obsolescence and an unsustainable CO_² impact. Concurrent engineering should deliver part weight reductions and detailed analyses will deliver manufacturing efficiencies with CO_² benefits. A 5% weight reduction of a material that represents 50% of the part cost will reduce the total part cost by 2.7% when energy costs are also considered.

- The moulding cycle time advantage achieved by eliminating thick sections will further reduce labour costs and energy consumption delivering a saving of 5.1%.

A business that consistently optimises its components and therefore its costs of processing delivers a virtuous cycle of improving sustainability. Total business overheads are also optimised over time adding further cost down leverage to the principle processing savings.

Conclusion

Rosti is bringing the highest quality of technical support to its entire global operations a benefit to its customer’s environmental goals in every region.
The systems that Rosti operates and its ability to deploy them on a 24 hour basis will deliver a step change in customer realisations of Sustainability and Competitiveness at the concept stage of product development.