Schuler Consulting Provides Solutions for HALCON Furniture

HALCON is one of the premier brands of contemporary wood office furniture in the United States. The company designs and crafts precision tailored workplace furniture of highest quality.

Driven by the vision of craftsmanship, excellence and dependability, the company provides veneered custom-built office solutions nationwide.

HALCON is leading and driving the development of design and of smart technical solutions in its segment and has won numerous prestigious awards. Specialties are, among others, a 100% balanced and matched wood grain both on fronts and on corners, a sophisticated miter folding technique and intelligent invisible cable laying. 

The company has been on a growth path for years. In order to successfully mastering the challenges that come with it, HALCON FURNITURE had already undergone several changes. Then it became clear that a good balance had to be struck between the renewal of existing concepts and technologies, and the expansion of the production facilities.

When a company renews or expands its machine park, this does not usually happen for all areas at the same time. Oftentimes, such investments are approached cyclically. Some manufacturing systems are used for decades until market requirements change. A field of tension with the production philosophy arises.

Far-sighted entrepreneurs anticipate this and make foresighted decisions in due course.

For HALCON, it was now time to re-think the entire area of parts machining and milling, as well as the cabinet assembly area. All this with the goal of increasing the output by 50%. 

The absolute prerequisites for any investment or re-alignment were:

• No compromise on product quality.
• Increase output without increasing labor.
• No compromise on flexibility and the possibilities for product customization.

The production organization was rather complex. With parts sorted before and after tenoning as well as before and after the routing processes, the system required a relatively high handling effort.

The processing sequence of the parts happened to be sometimes unclear. Visibility of the part routing was often limited. Sorting decisions were mainly determined by experienced operators. The number of stacks was multiplied after each sorting process and thus the status of a work order with all its stacks was difficult to control.

SCHULER’s approach was to re-structure both, manufacturing processes and the sorting practices. In close collaboration with HALCON’s specialists from manufacturing, engineering and IT, the existing processes were first analyzed in detail. Alternative concepts were jointly developed, calculated and evaluated. Costs and benefits were assessed and finally a set of measures was adopted:

Tenoning was removed. The CNC department was entirely re-designed and aligned. Sizing was transferred from the tenoner to the CNC routers. Sorting was simplified and reduced to the essential. An even higher production flexibility was reached. 

Through the change in machining processes, combined with a smart stack definition and an intelligent part-to-stack allocation, four sorting processes became two.

HALCON’s experienced IT department now took on the tasks of mapping the new sorting rules in the IT concept and implementing it for the shop floor.

The desired effects could be realized:

• Part routings have become absolutely clear.
• Intuitive decisions are not necessary any more
• There is a high visibility of the work in progress.
• The effort for sorting and handling has been substantially reduced.
• The productivity has approximately tripled.
• The investment pays back within two years.

In a next step, SCHULER developed the concept to optimize the assembly area. HALCON’s clear objective here was to achieve significantly higher productivity.

For years, cabinets had been assembled on individual tables in view of their complexity. With HALCON’s production specialists providing detailed data of the assembly approaches and methodologies, SCHULER mapped out an entirely new work flow for those cabinets that can be clamped. Pre-assembly processes were precisely redefined. Material supply and feed, as well as part staging and item kitting was re-organized. As a result, this area will get into a real flow now.

All theses measures led to considerably less material handling efforts, a reduced WIP, highly accelerated throughput times and a substantially higher productivity.

Ultimately, HALCON went another step further and entrusted SCHULER with redesigning the factory layout so that the new organizational principles could be implemented. Here the focus was on designing the material flow in such a way that the building conditions and minimum possible handling are integrated to an optimal result. Machine positions were completely re- arranged. Intralogistics were integrally systematized, and converted to mainly roller conveyors. Cul-de-sacs and manual interruptions were eliminated and the material was allowed to flow.

This project showed once more how the intensive cooperation between the specialists of the producer – HALCON – and the engineering specialists – SCHULER – can lead to truly successful results. The newly designed facility will now enable HALCON to bring the growth of the next few years to the streets. The concept developed by SCHULER has enabled HALCON to make investments with pinpoint accuracy. Misinvestments were excluded. The manufacturing flexibility has been extended even further and finally the productivity was massively increased.

The resulting new manufacturing concept is promising for the future of HALCON and today already meets the requirements of tomorrow.