TUBE NEWS TN December 2018 | Page 18

Stainless Steel Stockholder Boosts Productivity With Kasto Bandsaw Singapore-based Sin Ghee Huat is a prominent stainless steel stockholder with a portfolio of more than 4,000 products that it supplies to customers throughout Asia, Oceania, China and the Middle East. The requirement to cut material has increased significantly over the years in line with the growth in orders and the sawing machinery was not really able to cope with the higher volumes. Cutting times were too long and the sawing function gradually became a bottleneck. The point came in 2016 when Sin Ghee Huat’s management decided to invest to extend its bandsawing capacity. The German sawing machine manufacturer Kasto was the chosen supplier, as it also makes storage systems for industrial materials and had delivered a Unibloc stacking cradle a few years previously to the Singapore facility. It was an exercise that the stockholder’s operations manager Shawn Lim described as very positive. Despite this, we process most orders at our Singapore headquarters. He explained, “While we are now one of the pioneers in our sector, our roots actually lie in the scrap metal trade. Back in the 1980s our management at the time decided to specialise in stainless steel, recognising the enormous potential of the market. Since then, we have grown dynamically and now have a number of subsidiaries including in the Chinese city of Suzhou. At the outset, he was concerned that a manufacturer from Germany would not be able to provide the level of service in Asia that the stockholder expects from its suppliers, but were reassured by the opening of a Kasto branch in Singapore at about the time as the storage system was delivered. So he had no hesitation in ordering a KASTOwin A 4.6 automatic bandsaw 18 TUBE NEWS December 2018 “Before material is delivered to customers, several operations including sawing to length are frequently completed, a task that demands considerable effort because most stainless steels are difficult to cut. It is therefore vital for us to have powerful sawing machines that can ensure short cutting times and high productivity.”