ANCA- 50 years of innovation in the control of grinding of cutting

Precision manufacturing of cutting tools has been pioneered by Australian business partners Pat Boland and Pat McCluskey, who in 1974 invested in a minicomputer to turn their passion into a business venture, which has become the global ANCA organization.

The computer at a cost of US$4,000 – which in 1974 could buy an inner-city apartment, was a significant investment – springboarding a hobby into a global business.

Their breakthrough idea was to replace the hardwired controls of numerically controlled (NC) machines of the time with a computer.

Adding digital controls to a NC machine created much more powerful and flexible CNC technology than the hardwired logic designs that were current at the time.

Pat Boland was an Electrical Engineer with a First Class degree from Melbourne University and Pat McCluskey was an award-winning technician trained in the latest precision machine tools.

The first business for ANCA was fitting CNC controls to a wide range of machine tools, mills, lathes, robots, special purpose automotive machines, with particular success in the field of laser cutting machines.
In the early 1980s the Pats decided that the future of the company lay in exporting to the world because of the small size of their Australian home market.

Today ANCA is a thriving business with over 1,300 employees and a world leading designer and manufacturer of CNC grinding machines, motion controls and manufacturing solutions.

While the global headquarters remain located in Melbourne, Australia, the company exports 99% of its production to over 45 countries.

It has offices in the UK, Germany, China, Thailand, India, Japan, Mexico, Brazil, Korea, and the USA as well as a comprehensive network of representatives and agents worldwide.

Automotive Industries (AI) asked Boland how the company was established.

Boland: It started more as a hobby than a business.

The munitions company where we were working had a constant failures in the machine tool department where they were trying to use of three axis machine tools to manufacture 5 axis aircraft components. parts.

Working together Pat and I were successful in sorting the problems out.

I certainly had respect for him, and he had respect for me.

And we thought, “this is absolute rubbish we are dealing with. We could do better|.

More as a hobby, we bought a computer and started to write motion control software.

Our first contract was in the automotive field, for a machine drilling truck brake linings.

Then we picked up other contracts to enable us to work full-time and start hiring people.

I could talk for hours about the different zigs and zags we had developing as a company.

We did not have any great business plan, but were driven by the belief that we could always do better than what was currently in the market.

AI: What is the most significant milestone or achievement for the company?

Boland: That is a very difficult question. I think getting to where we are today, getting to the stage where we are a global company with a blue ribbon customer base, with significant global market share.

We could visit virtually any country in the world and find a significant customer base.

Today, going through the mail, we picked up an order from a leading space company.

AI: What has been your model for growth?

Boland: One of the first lessons we learned when we first started to export was that the product, we manufacture is really quite complex. To succeed, we had to take responsibility of the aftermarket.

So, our model is to have our own subsidiaries.

In most countries of the world, we sell directly from subsidiaries.

In the US, which is a very significant market for us, we also have a dealer network.

AI: So, you adapt to the market.

Boland: We are a proud Australian company and we do not hide the fact that we are Australian, but our model is that our American customers should feel they are dealing with a local American company. Similarly, a German or Japanese customers should have the same experience as when they deal with a German or Japanese company.

AI: Much of your company DNA is in the automotive sector, and your first foray into the global market was in Michigan. How much focus do you put on the auto industry?

Boland: The automotive industry is a huge consumer of cutting tools, so it is highly important to us, selling both to the automotive companies and to companies supplying tooling to manufacturers throughout the supply chain.

The uses of the cutting tools we produce are very diverse, including furniture making, aerospace, medical and general engineering. Our strategy is to not be dependent on any particular market and to be as diverse as possible. Automotive is, however, a very important segment.

AI: Why did you choose Michigan?

Boland: We had contacts with another Australian company that was selling in the US company called Laser Lab. We were a very small company and started by renting space in their office, in a suburb of Detroit.

We realized that within a two-hour travel distance to Detroit there was a fantastic market.

AI: Would it be fair to say there was some luck involved?

Boland: We have had our little bits of luck through the years.

AI: ANCA has been a key player in the CNC tool and cutter grinder industry for five decades. How has the industry evolved during this time, and how has ANCA adapted to these changes?

Boland: The most obvious thing is the way the complexity and accuracy performance of cutting tools has increased. Take a simple square end mill. These days it will have complex geometry such as a variable helix, variable tooth spacing, micro cutting edge preparation and finally hard coating. =.

The software we develop enables the manufacture of these complex cutting tools. The mechanical elements of the machine have changed as well, which improves accuracy and machine life.

In tool grinding the approach for programming the cutter paths is t to other CNC machines

Typically, the way CNC machines work is you have a CAD system for designing a part, a CAM system for generating the cutter paths for machining a part.

In our industry it almost works in reverse. You use the CAM system to design the cutting tool after that the CAD system produces the drawings using geometry produced from the 3D simulation in our CAM system.

If you look at any simple cutting tool, the geometry of the surfaces is very complex compared to manufactured parts.The software which we developed enables a small shop with just a trade background to produce these very complex objects.

AI: Is the software developed in-house?

Boland: All our software is developed in-house One of our characteristics is that we are vertically integrated.

This has assisted us in developing exactly the features in our CNC system that simplifies the development of our application software

AI: Has the development of your in-house expertise been customer-driven?

Boland: Customer demand has been a very significant feature, but we also analyze what customers need and design to meet that our analysis of the customer requestsl.

It may not necessarily be what they wanted, because they had no idea of what is possible. For example We were the first in the world with five axis simulation. No customers requested this feature but it revolutionized tool grindingI still remember when customers saw what we could do, they did not really believe it.

AI: Were you pioneers of 3D modeling as well?

Boland: Yes we were. There is another example of which we are proud. It was our very first step into the market.

We developed a four-axis machine which we sold to a company in Indianapolis and was serial number one.

It was a disaster. The customer just could not get our machine to work.

When we looked into it, they were treating the tool grinder like a conventional machining center.

The customer had no idea of the very detailed geometry of the cutting tool. He had been doing it manually, relying on his experience to resharpen the cutting tool.

We looked at that and came up with the concept of measuring the cutting tool inside the machine.

Again, in today’s technology, that is very commonplace. Most complex machines are solid with probes these days.

We were the first company to enable measurement of a cutting tool inside the machine. This made tool reshapening on a CNC machine practical.

This gave us an edge, which was a step towards being number one in the global market.

That came from analysing a customer’s need and developing a practical solution.

Solving that was a crucial step to becoming the company we are today.

AI: Were you and Pat McCluskey directly involved in dealing with those pain points?

Boland: Pat and I were very involved, but we had very high-quality engineers who contributed as well.

AI: You both came from a technical background; how did you learn about the business side?

Boland: Pat and I were both technologists and really, we were not businesspeople.

But we learned pretty quickly to assemble the people around us who could take care of that.

We appointed a financial controller to look after the money and a CEO to run the company on a day-to-day basis to allow us to get on with what we were good at.

AI: The tool and cutter market demands resolution at the nanometer level. How has ANCA maintained its position as a leader in this highly demanding market?

Boland: It is certainly not easy. We have been investing a lot of our turnover in product development. Through this we have managed to lead the market.

On the control system side, we have released what we call our Ultra range of machines which have industry leading performance in terms of the quality of the cutting tool coming off our machines in terms of surface finish and accuracy .

That is a combination of mechanical design and control system  and application software.

Another feature of which I am very proud and is an important step in precision manufacturing is  constant spindle temperature control.

To me this is a very significant advancement in the machine tool industry.

What we can do is to use the spindle drive to maintain the motor temperature as well as driving the spindle at the required speed and torque. We can regulate its temperature electrically to within 0.1 degree.

Intelligent software drives both the motor and regulates the temperature.

When you are doing things likedressing a super abrasive wheel, where you are trying to have feeds of a couple of microns, if the temperature of the grinding spindle changes by a couple of degrees, you lose accuracy.

But with temperature control, there is an enormous leap into stability in the machine tool.

AI: Is it all software driven?

Boland: You cannot change the speed because that is dictated by the cutting performance. But you can regulate the losses in the motor. So, you control the spindle servo drive and temperature.

That is the advantage of our vertical integration. We make most of the elements of that machine and that gives us the opportunity to get the elements to work together.

The challenge of being vertically integrated is that you have to maintain expertise in a lot of fields.

To date one of the elements of our success is that we can do things which our competitors cannot.

AI: ANCA has a strong focus on family, innovation, and technology. How do these core values contribute to the company’s culture and success?

Boland: Culture is very important.

The culture to which Pat McCluskey  and I aspire is the combining of engineering excellence combined with high level practical skills.

I came from academic engineering and am very strong in mathematics and so on, and really appreciate the importance of high-level engineering. Pat McCluskey is a great practical engineer with a life time experience of precision machine tools.

Together with that level of academic performance and shop floor experience, we embrace employing  talented people including technical experts with PhDs.

We also have a very good apprentice training system, which means we have generations of people with great skills coming through the organization.

So that culture of high academic achievement and great trade skills has worked for us.

Internationally, we have adapted our overriding culture to the different cultures in the countries in which we operate.

AI: How does this vertical integration contribute to the quality and innovation of your products?

Boland: On the financial side, we capture a lot more value in the sale of machines than our competition because so many of the elements of the machine are manufactured by us.

And then there is the ability to innovate due to the fact that we build the motors, we write the control and application software, which means we have the ability to integrate something like laser probing into the core CNC software.

In 1991, after we released our first five axis machine, we had no real competition for three to four years.

We brought a lot of robotics concepts into the machine, with a coordinate transform module built into the CNC. Redundant kinematics really made a significant difference to the ease of programming a five-axis component.

It took eight or nine years before a competitor finally came out with a similar five axis machine.

AI: How do you ensure you have the right skills?

Boland: In terms of apprentice training, we have a significant factory in Thailand, and we have certainly duplicated the way we handle the apprentice training in Australia, in our Thai factory.

In Germany we have great success in partnering with universities.

AI: Can you share a specific instance where ANCA overcame a unique customer challenge through innovation?

Boland: One of our more recent developments is a gear cutting machine we call the GCX.

With the introduction of electric vehicles in the automotive industry, there is a requirement for production of very high accuracy small gears.

There is a long-standing process called skiving which is a very productive process of gear manufacturing.

But it was very difficult to manufacture the cutters used for skiving at very high accuracy which requires long cycle times.

With the GCX machine we are delivering a turnkey solution for the manufacturing of those skiving tools.

One of the issues is the measurement of the skiving tools. The accuracy of the skiving tool is going to determine the accuracy of the gear, which in turn will be a big factor for how much noise the gearbox produces.

Going back to what we did a long time ago, we developed a technique of having a measurement capability in the machine which allows automatic compensation of the cutter.

We are now selling this machine to most of the world’s leading gear manufacturing companies.

AI: What engineering problem are you still struggling with?

Boland: Temperature is the most difficult thing to deal with because steel expands by 11 microns per meter with every one degree Celsius, so one degree of temperature destroys any ability to produce the very high tolerances so the environmental control of the machine is one of the major issues.

AI: Do you help customers with the choice of material?

Boland: Not really. Our task is to develop the features in our machines to handle any material with which our customers challenge us ..

Another area where we’ve introduced a new product is the preparation of the micro geometry of the cutting tool.

We have been actively working on producing a very controlled micro geometry on the cutting tool.

The performance of the cutting tool is not only its macro geometry, surface finish and accuracy, but the  micro details of the cutting edge are also critical.

This is the very fine detail of the cutting edge.

So, we continue to strive to do everything better.