Since its foundation in 1996, Winhere Auto-Part Manufacturing Co., Ltd. has grown rapidly to become the largest professional manufacturer of brake discs and drums worldwide. Servicing the automotive OEM and aftermarket, the company produces and ships more than 30 million high-end brake discs annually to its customers located in all corners of the world.
As a very quality-conscientious manufacturer, it was a strategic decision for Winhere to sign a contract for two DISA 240-B lines, including Automatic Pattern Changer (APC) in October 2010. Already being China’s largest and the world’s second largest supplier of brake discs, the DISA equipment was purchased to support and help realize Winhere’s goal of becoming THE world’s largest supplier of brake discs by 2015.
“The DISA 240-B lines are capable of producing 450 moulds per hour with the highest precision, and the APC allows high flexibility in our production programme. As such, our DISA equipment has helped us solve our two main issues in production, namely 1) efficiency and 2) accuracy. Where our previous moulding lines allowed us to reach an efficiency of 170 moulds per hour, DISA has allowed us to increase our capacity by more than 100%, as we are now able to produce the promised 450 moulds per hour”, states Winhere’s CEO Mr Jiang.
“Another important issue that needed solving and, thus, another important reason for choosing DISA, was the fact that our mismatch before was ± 0.5 mm. Today, we have an incredible ± 0.15 mm mismatch, which qualifies as an unparalleled excellence in casting quality and accuracy”, Mr Jiang continues.
Specializing in just one product group, Winhere is renowned worldwide for being a highly attractive company in terms of both quality and price. Therefore, a number of factors influenced the business case when the company started to look at new and more modern foundry equipment.
“Prior to deciding on our two DISA machines in 2010, we carried out a lot of market research in order to qualify the best possible options for future equipment. When deciding that DISA would be the optimal choice for Winhere, we needed time to adapt to our decision, as our engineers were only familiar with single horizontal moulding at the time, whereas DISA opened a brand new world of vertical moulding to us”, Mr Jiang explains.
“It was, however, a very smart business decision, as our DISA 240-B lines have offered us multiple advantages. Not only have we saved a lot of labour, we have also achieved a very high level of stability in our equipment. DISA has been around for many years, and its long tradition for innovation has brought us very reliable equipment from an equally reliable business partner. At the same time, it is very easy to do maintenance on the DISAMATIC machines, which also allows us to stay focused on high quality at a lower cost per casting”, Mr Jiang emphasizes.
“There is no doubt that our DISAMATIC machines have led us to be more competitive in terms of quantity, as they have allowed us to produce with a much higher efficiency than before, enabling us to both save labour and keep the very best labour. At the same time, there is no doubt that they have also led us to be more competitive in terms of quality, as the castings we produce today are of a much higher precision and unmistakably lower mismatch. So either way we look at our cooperation with DISA, it has proven much better for our company than the situation we found ourselves in before”, concludes Mr Jiang, CEO of Winhere Auto-Part Manufacturing Co., Ltd. in China.