SWP is an SME that designs and develops cutting technologies in order to help its customers raise their competitiveness, while taking on various challenges to improve their manufacturing processes and fulfill its customers' most demanding requirements. Serving as an application engineer provider, SWP Corporation provides optimal cutting solutions to its customers based on the advanced cutting technologies and knowhow that it has accumulated over the last twenty-eight years. Equipped with more than twenty machine tools supplied by Doosan Machine Tools, including the VCF 850LSR, SWP Corporation proactively responds to rapidly changing manufacturing environments with its outstanding competitiveness based on its 'spirit of challenge' and 'ability to optimize its machine tools.'
An Enterprise Equipped with Cutting Know-how Beyond the Bounds of Imagination
Launched in 1990, SWP Corporation possesses numerous original technologies for a wide range of areas in the machine industry, including the cutting of parts for semiconductor manufacturing machines and the design, production and assembly of semiconductor equipment based on the cutting technologies that it has built up over the past twenty-eight years. "We have built up our competitiveness by attempting what others have never even imagined trying," declared Hwang Woo-yeon, the CEO of SWP. "When a company wants to try new cutting methods or make improvements to its cutting processes with the aim of significantly upgrading operational convenience or production efficiency, it must possess high-performance machine tools along with the know-how that enables it to maximize the operational efficiency of those machine tools." "Most firms that machine parts depend on a couple of general-purpose machine tools including machine centers and turning centers. They struggle to survive in today’s extremely competitive market with low wages," said CEO Hwang. "We have invested in multitasking machine tools, including 5-axis machine tools, in order to open up a high value-added market and, consequently, we have been able to equip ourselves with competitiveness boasting an operational efficiency ten times higher than that of our competitors." CEO Hwang Woo-yeon wanted to achieve improvements in his company's production efficiency, quality and precision by using multitasking machine tools. As such, he purchased Doosan Machine Tools' multipurpose vertical machine center, the VCF 850LSR, as soon as it was launched. CEO Hwang said, "Right after we procured the VCF 850LSR, we were asked by one of our customers to cut some high precision work pieces with a 5/1000 machining tolerance. If we had not purchased the VCF 850LSR, we would not have been able to meet the customer’s needs." Though actively involved in the development of processes and cutting knowhow to help its customers make further savings in costs and improvements in quality, SWP Corporation has even gone so far as to offer its customers application engineering, thus becoming a more reliable partner for its customers.
Providing the Best Cutting Solutions with the Most Outstanding Machine Tools
To survive an economic crisis, machine tool manufacturers have no choice but to reduce their costs. However, any attempts to reduce costs by making changes to designs or materials without fully understanding the relevant parts’ characteristics or metal cutting technologies could compromise the quality of the finished products. "Many designers stick to expensive materials because they don't fully understand cutting technologies or are worried about the consequences of design changes," said CEO Hwang Woo-yeon. "Our customer companies' executives and design engineers come and visit us in order to find solutions to such a phenomenon." They come to us because we are fully aware of the uses of various work pieces and the quality requirements for such work pieces, and we also know how to achieve cost reductions through changes of materials without compromising quality, and how to help our customers improve their productivity through improvements in various processes.
SWP Corporation gladly accepts the challenge of giving new processes a try in an attempt to meet its customers' needs, which also enables the company to develop innovative products and further develop its cutting technologies. A good example is the vacuum 6-axis robot that is employed for semiconductor stripping tools (Asher), a product that requires precision cutting technology and know-how as well as an outstanding level of assembly technology. "Even if the design drawings of our company's vacuum 6-axis robot are disclosed to the public, I don't think other companies will be able to build it because they don't have the required cutting technologies," said CEO Hwang. He added that in 2008 he supplied a semiconductor stripping tool equipped with the product to company 'S', which still uses the tool without any problems at all. Meanwhile, CEO Hwang heard that one of his company's customers had a semiconductor part that generates particle/impurity during the wafer cleaning process and wanted to change the material of the spare part from stainless steel to titanium. Through a new processing mechanism, CEO Hwang ended up supplying the customer company with a titanium-based spare part at a 60% lower price than the initial price. "The usage of all materials must be based upon a full understanding of a machine tool’s features and tool characteristics," said CEO Hwang. "Even hard-to-cut materials are easy to work on when the appropriate tools are chosen and metalworking is done at the optimal speed." He stressed that a company's technological competence can optimize the performance of machine tools.
It is multitasking machine tools that have enabled SWP Corporation to offer its customers optimized cutting solutions, process diverse-shaped work pieces in one chucking, improve productivity, and realize high precision high value-added processing. Most notably, Doosan Machine Tools' VCF 850LSR is said to have greatly contributed to cutting costs and improving quality in the processing of the vacuum gate valve, one of the company's flagship products. CEO Hwang says, "Without the VCF 850LSR, we could not have made improvements in the cutting processes of the vacuum gate valve and thus would never have found a solution to the need to reduce costs." He went on to say, "Each piece of semiconductor equipment had four parts to work on, and thus multi-tasking machining was absolutely necessary to reduce machining costs. The VCF 850KSR made a critical contribution to helping us make incredible achievements by realizing the 2/1000 machining tolerance required by our customer and reducing our existing costs by as much as 75%."
SWP Corporation, which currently possesses more than twenty machine tools supplied by Doosan Machine Tools including the VCF 850LSR, PUMA 2600Y, and DNM series, is said to be planning to purchase Doosan Machine Tools' PUMA SMX3100L. "Our annual sales jumped from KRW 4.1 billion in 2016 to KRW 5.9 billion in 2017, which is largely attributable to our purchase of Doosan Machine Tools' multitasking machine tools," said CEO Hwang Wooyeon.
"We expect to easily increase our annual sales to KRW 80 billion in 2018." He went on to say, "In 2018, we will concentrate on making inroads into the increasingly expanding collaborative robot market" as part of the company's efforts to continue diversifying its markets.
