In 1965, Günther Bauer, Horst Lenord, Hans Look and Dieter Westerhoff founded their company, Lenord, Bauer & Co. GmbH in the basement of a building in Oberhausen.
There, these four entrepreneurs developed an industrial, compact controller that can be adapted to individual customer requirements. Since then the company has gone through an entire evolution.
In the meantime Lenord + Bauer have more than 180 people in their employ, spread all over the world. The firm is based at the headquarters in Oberhausen, the production and logistics centre in neighbouring Gladbeck and the sales offices are in Ostfildern (Baden-Württemberg) and Shanghai (China). In 2014, a Turn-Assist 250 was acquired.
Franco Dichiara Gruppenleiter CNC lathe and milling technique; Purchasing: "The delivery times in our industry have drastically reduced in recent years. Today our customers expect delivery within a few days. On top of this, prices are also under pressure and these are lower than a few years ago. That’s why we have invested in a new machining centre, with which we can significantly shorten cycle times. But automation is more than ever on the agenda today, in order to meet the rising demand and shorter delivery times. We approached several suppliers and ultimately chose RoboJob. The operation of the robot is in fact very simple and the machine can be very quickly converted from the production of one product to the next. The working area is monitored with a laser scanner and is not fully enclosed with a fence.
Thus the operator can carry out a check on the machine at any time and the robot automatically slows its speed or stops altogether when people get too close.
We produce high precision gearwheels and did not know how automation would affect the quality. Also we couldn’t judge in advance what the reaction from our personnel would be when we considered automation. We therefore involved them very early on in the process and also took our employees to Belgium when we were invited by RoboJob for a demonstration.
Then we started a three month trial period. When the three months were up, our operators didn’t want to give the robot back! Now we’re looking at how we can further automate our production because our machine can nearly work around the clock, thanks RoboJob!"
