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MAG Cincinnati, a company of MAG Industrial Automation Systems, designs, builds, and integrates advanced manufacturing solutions for the global aerospace, heavy equipment, energy, and general machining markets. The company's broad machine tool line includes automated composites processing equipment, profilers, routers, and large horizontal and vertical machining centers, including 5-axis, multi-tasking, and cells.

As one of the world's leading suppliers of innovative, highly-productive machine tools, manufacturing systems, and composite processing systems, MAG Cincinnati needs to precisely measure many large cast or fabricated machine components. Some of these components can range from as small as 3 inches to as large as 225 feet long. To perform these critical measurements, the company used transits, precision levels, aligning bars, and spanner bars. These traditional measuring tools, however, proved to be an inefficient solution for MAG. For the tolerances that they hold on their machines they needed to perform a lot of work to remove gauge error caused by spanner bar sag and the shortcomings of transit accuracy. These additional steps added a considerable amount of time to the overall assembly process.

MAG Cincinnati decided to implement two FARO Laser Trackers into their operations. With traditional methods, they would have to set up and tear down a variety of tooling in order to capture the measurements needed to get 1-D and 2-D results. With the Laser Tracker, they can now capture a 3-D measurement quickly and easily, which allows them to see a much larger picture of how their products move. They also realized that implementing the FARO Trackers posed the least risk. The ease of use, durability, ability to easily ship the unit worldwide, and the global support were all reasons they chose the FARO solution.

MAG not only inspects parts with their Laser Trackers, they also use them to build product, and for many other daily applications on all three shifts – the units never sit idle. They also found it very easy to implement FARO Tracker technology into their operations.

"It was like a snowball rolling down a hill," said Mike Noel, Composites Product Manager at MAG Cincinnati. "Once we had it rolling, it just kept gaining support. Our company started to see how easy and fast we could accomplish some of the more strenuous tasks, and more and more personnel wanted to be a part of it."

Time-savings as a result of using the FARO Laser Tracker has been the biggest benefit to MAG Cincinnati. Since eliminating traditional measuring tools, they have already saved four months of labor time and costs. They have also realized a complete return on their initial investment in less than one year.

The support FARO has provided has also been a big factor in MAG Cincinnati's commitment to the FARO Laser Tracker.

"One of the biggest reasons that we keep returning to FARO for solutions is because of the support that has been provided to us over the years," said Noel. "This support has been unsurpassed."

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