Barrier bollards as required

Intuitive dialog control increases flexibility in production

Happy to have manufactures high-quality barrier bollards made of V4A stainless steel in its own CNC production facility. The bollards are individually assembled from more than 100 individual parts according to customer requirements. In order to be able to offer this in an economically attractive way, Happy to have develops all individual parts itself and produces them on CNC machining centers from HURCO.

A business idea and quality requirements that exceeded the expectations of his suppliers were the trigger for Michael Braun to establish himself on the market with his own production. Without further ado, he ended his import business and set up his own small production facility for retractable bollards. Customers can now assemble “their” bollard in an online store. Each one is assembled from over 100 individual parts according to customer requirements. Thanks to its own production facilities, Happy to Have can also manufacture custom-made products, such as bollards with thicker walls or a different drive system. Braun uses three CNC machining centers from HURCO so that it can offer this to customers at an attractive price and still be economically viable.

The company specializes in the manufacture of products that are quickly assembled individually from an existing catalog of individual parts. Michael Braun was therefore looking for robust machines with high performance and a great deal of flexibility. “And ones that take up little space,” he adds, thinking of his small production hall. Three criteria for which HURCO has suitable machines in its portfolio. But the decisive factor for the decision was ultimately the intuitive control system of the machines from the supplier from Pliening near Munich. “Even the first impression of the control systems from other manufacturers was very complex,” recalls Michael Braun of the initial phase. A YouTube film about HURCO’s dialog control aroused his interest and after a visit to the machine tool manufacturer’s stand at AMB 2014, his choice was made.

All HURCO machines are equipped with the “Max 5” dialog control. Its powerful WinMax CNC control software simplifies programming. The control is self-explanatory, so that a brief introduction is all that is needed to understand how it works. Even semi-skilled employees are quickly able to work with the control system. This reduces the time required for new programming or reprogramming enormously. Braun and his wife, with whom he runs the company, visited the HURCO training center in Verl in order to be able to utilize the machine’s full potential. There they watched application engineers at work and benefited from their experience. They then tried things out and gained their own experience – until the processes were perfect, simple and economical, recalls Sabrina Braun: “So good and reliable that we were able to pass them on to our first employees.”

The prototypes that Braun produced on his first purchase, the entry-level VMX 10i model from HURCO, already proved to be very promising. He quickly realized that he could produce at a price that was acceptable on the market, and in a quality that he could not import. The result was a retractable bollard to protect driveways, parking lots or similar areas made of V4A stainless steel with an LED warning light. A 10 bar lifting cylinder, which can be used at temperatures from minus 30 to plus 80 degrees Celsius, is located in a housing encapsulated against dirt and water. The bollard is designed for 80,000 cycles without a maintenance interval and can be installed by the customer.

Michael Braun answers the question about the comparatively expensive stainless steel in his very own way: “The customer should be happy to have the bollard – hence our company name ‘Happy to have’. With the right tools on a HURCO, machining the material is no problem: “The design in conjunction with the control system and clean programming makes it possible to machine the workpieces economically and produce high-quality parts. After all, the company does not produce complex parts, but solid, robust components. However, they have to fit exactly, explains Tobias Hillebrand, operator at Happy to have.

The team at Happy to have has now grown to eight employees and more than 85,000 components for bollards in four different configurations are produced annually on the HURCO machining centers. Braun was able to realize his vision of producing high-quality but easy-to-install bollards for parking lot, house and garage entrances himself and keeping the distribution channels narrow. Architects, planning offices, gardeners and landscapers as well as homeowners call him, explains Braun. “I started producing my own products because I want to offer high quality at a good price. And that’s exactly what I can do in Germany with my idea and the machines from HUCRO.”

www.braun-antriebe.de