THE CHALLENGE SRPM is a small production job shop located near Cleveland, Ohio. It primarily serves the electronics, semiconductor, power sports and communications industries. Most of the work the company does is in new product development, in aluminum, and often involves large hog- out routines coupled with close-tolerance detailed work on the same part. It’s not unusual for SRPM to take a 90-pound billet of aluminum and mill it down to 17 pounds. The company needed a reliable horizontal machining center that could handle the large volumes of chips produced during hog- out procedures and that would not break down frequently, like its previous machines. SRPM usually handles batch runs from 5 to 5,000 pieces and often has to interrupt work to let priority jobs be completed rst. It wanted

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