Cirteq is a leading international supplier based in West Yorkshire, specialising in circlips and retaining rings. With over 80 years of experience, they export their products to 500+ customers worldwide, primarily in the automotive industry. Manufacturing millions of spring rings annually, Cirteq works with renowned clients such as Jaguar Land Rover, Volvo, Honda, and BMW, ensuring the precise assembly requirements are met for their 3,800 product variants.
As the automotive industry faces increasing regulations and concerns about safety and environmental impact, Cirteq’s highly sought-after services provide critical engine parts that demand exceptional quality control.
To meet these escalating demands, Cirteq invested in the OGP ZIP 300, enabling precise measurements, repeatability, and error reduction.
Project Brief:
Recognising the challenges of maintaining precision and quality in their components, Cirteq identified two key issues.
Firstly, manual measurements are restricted by their lack of repeatability, caused by operator bias that leads to inconsistent results. There is also a pressing need to align their inspection methods with the stringent expectations of their customers in the automotive industry.
“We were not getting the repeatability that we needed from manual measurements due to operator bias,” said Theo Speller, Cirteq Customer Quality Liaison Manager.
“If you go to a robot line, you’ll see a camera over the top of it photographing every component and sub-assembly to make sure that it meets all requirements. We have to match that by making sure that our components are right 100 per cent of the time.”
The inconsistency of manual measurements raised concerns about the accuracy and reliability of Cirteq’s inspections processes, whilst attempting to match the inspection techniques used in the industry is becoming increasingly more complex.
To address these challenges, Cirteq sought an innovative solution that could provide reliable and repeatable measurements while meeting industry standards.
The realisation that Cirteq needed to align their quality control processes with automotive industry standards, led them to invest in the OGP ZIP 300 machine with its enhanced capabilities providing a comprehensive solution.
The Solution:
In their quest for improvement, Cirteq discovered OGP UK, a renowned specialist in multi-sensor metrology. The OGP ZIP 300 machine caught their attention, offering a multitude of benefits to overcome their challenges.
The ZIP 300 machine’s advanced sensors provided exceptional accuracy and precision, allowing Cirteq to collect highly accurate data even on the most intricate components and features. This ensured that their components consistently met the stringent requirements of their customers in terms of quality and dimensional accuracy.
Theo said: “That’s the main advantage of this OGP machine – we’ve improved the quality and the accuracy of the measurements and the bonus is we’ve actually managed to do it and save time.”
The Benefits:
The benefits for Cirteq in acquiring the ZIP 300 machine are significant, providing more accurate data in real-time, promptly identifying and rectifying quality control flaws, all resulting in reduced scrap, fewer production bottlenecks, and increased overall productivity.
“We’ve seen that initial spend come back in the first year because we’ve saved production time. We’ve proved that with OGP,” said Theo.
OGP systems deliver sub-micron precision, perfectly suited for the era of miniaturisation and challenging component manufacturing. By providing real-time access to accurate data, OGP empowers engineers to swiftly identify and rectify quality control flaws, reducing scrap, minimising bottlenecks, and boosting productivity.
OGP UK’s core values lie in exceptional customer service, offering turnkey packages including installation, calibration, fixturing solutions, program creation, applications support, and tailored training, ensure seamless project set-ups and experience the benefits of multi-sensor metrology from day one.
Theo said: “A specialist from OGP was on site to support us for the training needs and did a bespoke training package for our exact requirements, and that allowed us to then further train another five people from the initial information that we got.”
“They looked at the output files that we needed to make the OGP machine talk to our Microsoft system that we use for recording data, and between the two companies we came up with a text file that imports the data from OGP directly into our own SPC system.”
Why OGP UK?
The implementation of the OGP ZIP 300’s advanced multi-sensor metrology technology has been a resounding success for Cirteq, improving the quality and accuracy of their measurements, ensuring repeatability, saving production time, and driving towards zero measurement errors.
