Project background
Sanghvi Auto Components Pvt. Ltd. supplies chassis brackets, seat-frame components and battery tray parts to commercial vehicle and passenger car OEMs from Pune, Maharashtra. The plant runs three shifts on the press line and two on the laser cell.
The laser cell was the bottleneck for everything downstream of it. Two 3 kW machines were operating single shift, each feeding a press line manually, and the laser operators were paid for three shifts because the loading could not keep pace with the cutting.
Sheet consumption was 480 tonnes a year across 1.2–6 mm CR and galvanised material. Nesting was done per job because the order book was split by customer programme, so a low-demand programme still consumed a full nest when it was scheduled.
One of the two existing machines failed in December 2024 with a contaminated optics head, and the repair took six weeks, stopping the entire press line for a shift and a half on the days it was down.
The challenge
Manual loading capped the cell at single-shift throughput regardless of how fast the machine cut. The operators were the constraint, and hiring and training three-shift labour in Pune for laser loading is expensive and hard to keep stable.
Nesting per job cost roughly 6 percentage points of material against a cross-programme nest, which on 480 tonnes a year is a material cost line larger than the plant's electricity bill for the cell.
A single machine failure taking the press line down is a real risk with no redundancy — there was no way to run the cell while one source was down.
And there was no room for a third machine: the cell was already at its floor-space limit with two machines and manual load areas.
Our solution
Sanghvi added an LP-F1503-1.5kW for the 1.2–3 mm CR and galvanised work, where a smaller machine is faster on light material and cheaper to run, and an LP-F3015-6kW for the 3–6 mm mix.
The LP-A2000 Automated Loader was installed on the 6 kW machine and served from the existing pallet magazine, so the machine runs through a mixed schedule without an operator at the load position. The 1.5 kW machine was set up with a simple manual load that one operator can cover during the day shift alongside the automated cell.
Nesting was restructured into two weekly pools — a scheduled pool for committed programme work and a floating pool for everything else — so the floating nest can consume the skeleton left by the scheduled jobs. The nested file is released by the planning team on a fixed cadence, and the operators work from that file.
The layout was re-planned to fit the loader into the space freed by consolidating the two manual load positions, so the floor-space constraint was resolved without extending the building.
Delivered outcome
Output from the laser cell rose 38% on the same shift pattern, with the automated cell running unattended for most of the night shift and one operator covering both machines during the day.
Sheet yield across the programme rose by 4 percentage points once the floating nest pool was introduced, which on 480 tonnes a year represents a material saving the plant recovered inside the first year without a single change in order volume.
The plant now has redundancy: if either machine is down, the other carries the load with an automated programme rather than a manual one, and the June 2025 unplanned stoppage on the 6 kW machine cost 40 minutes of press-line downtime against six weeks in December 2024.
Direct labour on the laser cell fell from five operators across two shifts to two, and the three released operators moved into the press line, where the plant had a genuine shortage.
Cutting energy cost per part fell 22% on the light-gauge work when it moved to the 1.5 kW source, and the payback on the full package was 21 months.