The company Müller & Biermann was founded in 1937 by my business partner's grandparents. Over time the company has evolved from a mining supplier to a high-performance sheet metal working company. We started thin sheet metal processing in 1990, but since then we've had consistent growth, constantly new customer requirements and increasingly expanding production facilities. Our core business is manufacturing precision sheet metal components in small, medium and large batch sizes. We handle material thicknesses between 1 and 3 mm. All of our production facilities are aligned to this.
We see ourselves as a sheet metal subcontractor and as a subcontractor it's important to keep your production facility state-of-the-art. Our customers are moving us toward automated production. Our partner LVD supports us in this endeavour.
In the past we were faced with having to produce complex components but only in small quantities. As a result, our pricing was often not competitive because of the long set-up times needed to produce the parts. It has always been Müller & Biermann's philosophy to automate as much as possible, simply for reasons of process reliability and production planning. We are a repeat supplier to industries like medical supplies, fibre optics and heat pump construction. The first step in our collaboration with LVD was the purchase of a ToolCell. This press brake automatically changes its tooling, significantly reducing set-up times.
It's actually a little thing that brought us to LVD. Six or seven years ago a customer asked us to bend a simple hat profile with a high degree of accuracy over a length of 2.5 metres but somehow all of our production facilities found this very difficult.
LVD's ToolCell got the job done with no trouble at all.
We had this part demonstrated at LVD's Experience Centre in Belgium and we were impressed with the result. Altogether this production facility has five fully automated press brakes installed with robots, including three LVD bending cells, two Dyna-Press 40/15 press brakes, and a 4.20 m Easy-Form press brake with 135 tons of bending force.
Of course, we also use equipment from other manufacturers at Müller & Biermann. The advantage of combining LVD and a third-party automation integrator was that the system can be custom configured and we weren't forced to buy a standard system.
