At the cutting edge of production

These days, there are two production units about a kilometre away from the old cutlery mill, where scissors, gardening tools, knife sharpeners, and axes are assembled. The older one of them was built as a scissors plant in 1973. When the demand was at its best – and when not every household in the Western world had a pair of them – over seven million pairs of scissors were manufactured there, says Carl-Olof Holm, technical director at Fiskars.

High quality as a competitive weapon
“Today, we manufacture about a half a million pairs of scissors here, but also 850,000 axes, and hundreds of thousands of gardening tools, to name a few of our products. A knife sharpener has the biggest production, measured in units produced,” he says. Fiskars is a global player in its niche – 91 percent of its 535 million euro net sales come from outside of Finland – and high quality is its weapon against the cheaper manufacturing. High quality in everything: products, processes, R&D, marketing.

Success built on innovation
Good and practical design and innovative solutions have been one of the cornerstones of Fiskars products, and the company’s products have claimed dozens of awards at design fairs around the world. “Our success is built on our ability to innovate. Our products are unique, not quite in the mainstream, and simply the best cutters in the world,” says Holm, and gives an example. “When you’re trimming a tree, you need most power when you’re about 60 percent through, and our trimmers work in a way that helps you get that power where you need it,” he says. The success story, or at least the modern part of it, started with a successful marriage of plastics and steel, and that’s still in the core of it.

There are eight robots in the injection moulding section of the production. They typically lift the handles of the gardening tools, feed them to the assembly, print the company logo on them. The biggest, and newest robot cell, has two robots working in harmony, putting together garden cutters. The IRB 2400L feeds the handles onto the line and again onto packaging while the IRB 140 adds the blades and bolts into the mix. And then the IRB 2400L takes over again and sends the finished product onwards to be packed. With close to a dozen different phases, the speed and accuracy is impressive.

Vision guided robots
Making scissors may sound simple. A pair of scissors is a pair of scissors, right? Wrong. Fiskars makes close to thirty different kind of scissors, in different sizes, and blade shapes. They are loaded on a conveyor belt to be examined by an IRB 140 with 3D “vision” that enables it to pick the blades up from a pile and then sort and turn them so that they enter the heat treatment correctly. The blades then enter a gigantic oven with a temperature up to 950 degrees for a heat treatment that guarantees the perfect curve for the pair of scissors. They can’t be just two straight blades, because then the paper, or whatever you’re cutting, gets stuck between them, explain Johan Holmberg and Harri Engström who make sure that the production robots stay in shape. Before the two blades meet the plastic and become a pair of two-handed garden cutters, they go through another IRB series robot that sharpens the edges.
“It does an edge that’s only about some fractions of a millimetre in a tiny degree angle,” says Holmberg about the robot, also known at the plant as “Little Johnny” – the identical twin next to it is called “Little Daisy.”

Flexible for fast change overs
Even though the products are fairly similar, they’re not the same, and that poses challenges for the manufacturing. “We like to build the robot cells as flexible as possible so that we could switch the lines fast or assemble several products at the same time,” says Holm. “The latest one has two different shaft lengths, and three different blades, so we can manufacture six different products quite easily,” he adds.

30% reduction in Teflon used
At Fiskars, past and present meet. The axe is one of the first tools man has ever made, but the seven different axe models that Fiskars manufactures are state of the art. “The latest development is the Teflon coating that makes it easier and lighter to use,” says Engström. The axe blades come to the coating station attached to large hangers. The robot, an IRB 540, sprays the Teflon, the hangers turn, another coat on the other side, and so on, until all twenty blades have got their coating. “This robot is so accurate that it uses 30 percent less Teflon than the one we had before,” says Engström. “Not only is it great for us financially, it’s also made the process safer for the employees and it’s more friendly to the environment.” A truck stands at the shipping area waiting to be loaded. The newly built warehouse is only half full, but in this case it’s a good thing. The old lady of Finland manufacturers still has it. A "Cutting edge".