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 OE 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 quality-conscientious manufacturer, it was a strategic decision to 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, Winhere purchased the DISA equipment to help to become the world’s largest supplier of brake discs by 2015.
“The DISA 240-B lines are capable of producing 450 molds per hour with the highest precision, and the APC allows high flexibility in our production program,” said Winhere CEO Mr. Jiang. “As such, our purchased DISA equipment has helped us solve our two main issues in production, namely efficiency and accuracy. Where our previous molding 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 molds per hour.
“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.”
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 made a lot of market research in order to qualify the best possible options for future equipment,” Jiang said. “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.”
The DISA 240-B lines have offered the Chinese metalcaster a number of advantages.
“Not only have we saved a lot of labor, we have also achieved a very high level of stability in our equipment,” Jiang said. “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 offered both high quality at lower costs per casting.”
The DISA machines have led Winhere to be more competitive in terms of quantity by allowing production to continue at a higher efficiency than before, leading to savings in labor.
“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,” Jiang said. “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.