Innovation Success Story

TurboCombustor Technology Turns Up the Volume

TurboCombustor Technology, Inc. (TCT), founded in 1965, manufactures complex sheet metal fabrications for turbine jet engines in the aerospace and industrial markets throughout the world. A subsection of its products include a family of subassemblies of rolled formed, laser drilled components, which constitute the combustion surfaces inside aircraft engines. In order to better serve TCT’s customers and increase gross sales by 60 percent, the company began searching for ways to improve flow, reduce defects, improve delivery, reduce cycle time and increase capacity.

To make this a reality, TurboCombustor Technology, Inc. teamed up with the University of Central Florida (UCF), Time Wise Management Systems (TWMS), and Florida Manufacturing Extension Partnership (Florida MEP). Through an H-1B Advanced Manufacturing Grant, funded by the US Department of Labor and administered by Brevard Workforce Development Board, the company was able to carry out an evaluation of its business practices and products, as well as provide training for their employees, in the areas of lean production and advanced production technologies.

The Innovation Program training sessions led to a breakthrough that introduced new approaches to laser assisted drilling and titanium alloy material processing, as well as how to change the flow for components produced for two key customers, created primarily within the same work cell. Through the discovery processes for existing cells, they re-engineered the entire flow to yield the positive results sought. These results are transferable to other work cells on our production floor.

As a result of these partnerships, TCT saved $61,000 in direct costs through identified grants, reduced floor area required for key production result by 33 percent, maintained employee and physical resource levels, simplified production flow using visual lean and reinforced ERP, reduced defects by 50 percent through inventory and WIP reduction, achieved on-time delivery and eliminated the need for overnight shipments.

“Creating a modified flow, where all production output moved within the cell, improved delivery, reduced defects, reduced overtime, reduced shipping costs and helped TCT converge toward the goal of dramatically improving output while holding our resource loading constant,” said Dean Stapleton, human resources director of TurboCombustor Technology, Inc. “The ‘Advanced Manufacturing Grant’ gave us a way to train on the integrated implementation of lean, with our key customer, to sustain and improve our relationship. We expect to utilize similar flow improvements with our other sub-assemblies, customers and future offerings.”