Semco: Mappi furnaces lift performance onto a higher level

Mappi furnaces are an excellent ingredient in Semco’s recipe for success. Semco Group, with a revenue around 217 million EUR, is a leader in Germany’s glass market. The company cover a large range of products, from basic glass to safety glass, from functional glass to curved glass.

Above all the reason of Semco success is in its approach to market and business development. They said, “If you want to be successful in the glass processing industry, you have to invest in staff, plants, and software.”

This is exactly how the Semco Group operates, since in the last 10 years, the owners have invested over 150 million EUR. Recently Semco has bought another Mappi tempering furnace for its Bad Zwischenahn plant.

The need was for a hardening furnace to be dedicated to high quality productions, but not with large volumes. The choice fell on a Fox series furnace, specifically designed for this type of needs. Mappi tempering furnaces for flat glass are universally recognized as being among the best for ease of use, quality of tempering, energy consumption.

Feedback of Semco about their new Mappi furnaces
“We are very pleased with these machines. We achieve results that enable us to lift the performance of our toughening plants onto a higher level.

“We do observe a number of features on these plants. The quality of tempered glass from our Mappi toughening machines, with respect to flatness and surface quality, is very much improved against our other toughening machines. We carefully monitor energy consumption, and have verified the energy consumption ratings given by Mappi. A big bonus is that the Mappi toughening machines can be switched off when not being used, further helping us with energy savings.

“Also, from a maintenance perspective, the design of the machine is optimised for easy understanding of maintenance procedures and provides good access to all the parts that might require service. All parts are clearly labelled, and the appropriate maintenance actions are indicated within the manual. This is supported by a very fast response from the Mappi service department.

“The user interface provides very good control over all features of the toughening machine. Simple glass pieces and bed layouts can be done by processing according to a recipe system, where – when processing more complex pieces – an experienced operator can easily optimise all parameters on the fly.

“Finally, we were very happy with the installation of the toughening machines into our sites. The Mappi engineers did an excellent job during installation, commissioning and training, and completed all installations well on time. We certified these machines though an external auditor, and passed these certifications without issues.”

“We have verified that Mappi furnaces are “user friendly” from three point of views:

• Operator/user interface and training was done by very experienced and qualified staff, which took a flexible approach. If, for example, translations were required to match specific expressions closer to our understanding of the process, these were implemented on the same day. This in particular enabled us to implement a toughening plant into a site that had no toughening experience, allowing the site to run this machine on their own within a matter of only a few weeks.

• Maintenance – the plant layout is optimised to provide easy access to all parts requiring regular maintenance. Labelling guides our staff to very quickly find the parts for service.

• Operation – the recipe system allows for easy operation of standard glass pieces by our operators. For more complex workpieces, e.g. with large cut-outs and screen-prints, our experienced operators can easily modify all relevant parameters in the user interface to provide best quality glass.

“Semco actively implements innovative production concepts over a breath of different machines. We are very positive towards data structures that allow us to analyse our processes in depth. In particular we gain from optimised throughput and predictive maintenance.

“In our view, improvements in information data structures will allow us to bring our experts even closer to our processes, and enable us to optimise these in detail. Our challenge is to integrate our operators into this process, so that we all together can use such benefits. This will accelerate Semco further forward, technically as well as economically.”