Proving the naysayers wrong 

Sushil Prakash, co-founder of Omega Renk Bearings in Bhopal, in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, took on a lot of naysayers when he branched off from his father’s company 15 years ago.

When everybody else was struggling to make rough-and-ready bearings for the domestic market, he invested in the best technology to compete with the world’s leading manufacturers for European customers. “There were many people who believed that setting up such a plant in 2000 was a recipe for disaster,” Prakash recalls.

The naysayers proved wrong. In 2003, its first full year of operation, Omega Renk’s turnover topped a million euros. Today, it sells around 10 million euros’ worth of slide bearings every year for use in power generation turbines, generators, motors and gearboxes, and it counts Alstom, Andritz, General Electric, Renk AG and Siemens among its regular customers.

Sandvik Coromant has been a key partner from the beginning, supplying some 65 percent of Omega Renk’s cutting tools, as well as end-to-end solutions for everything from tool management to the recycling of inserts – a service that Sandvik Coromant added in India at Prakash’s request. Thus, when Prakash needed to boost productivity in his company’s guide pad manufacturing process in 2015, he turned to Sandvik Coromant for the answer.

Until 2013, Omega Renk had been purchasing forged steel rings and cutting them into 16 sections with a bandsaw, then milling each guide pad individually. But cost pressure from competitors forced the company to rethink the process so that the milling could be done on the ring itself. Using a slitting cutter, the almost-finished guide pads could then be sliced off the ring in the final step of milling.

At that time, however, Sandvik Coromant’s product range didn’t include a parting off tool that met the needs Omega Renk. And even though the change in process had resulted in a cost savings of around 15 percent, Prakash still wasn’t happy. The tool he’d settled for from a Sandvik Coromant competitor could only cut at very low speeds; at higher speeds it would get stuck. The machine had to make two or three passes, and there was so much noise and vibration that the operator was always worried about the impact on the costly equipment. “With a CNC machine, you want it to run smooth,” Prakash says.

That’s when Omega Renk’s partnership with Sandvik Coromant came into play.

In 2015 Omega Renk was given an early look at Sandvik Coromant’s newly launched CoroMill QD grooving cutter at the new product showcase held at Omega Renk’s facility every year.

“Our relationship with Omega Renk is like a partnership, so we understand, study, propose and implement new solutions to improve productivity,” says Ramchandra Soni, the sales representative who handles Omega Renk’s business for Sandvik Coromant. “It is a continuous process.”
Prakash’s gut told him that the new tool would be gold, and it has been.

With the CoroMill QD and the Coromant Capto® C8 adaptor, Omega Renk achieved a cutting speed increase of nearly 60 percent, resulting in an improvement in feed rate from 200 millimetres to 320 millimetres and an added overall cost reduction of around 4 percent – excluding any potential savings in broken inserts or wear and tear on the CNC machine. “The biggest gain was that the process became very stable,” Prakash says.

Compared with the earlier 15 percent, that added 4 percent savings might not sound huge. But it could be.
Omega Renk’s aim now is to penetrate the high-growth bearings markets in India and China, both of which are “very, very price sensitive,” Prakash says. Already, the company won a 100,000-euro order from India’s Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd that he says proved CoroMill QD’s worth in spades. “In Europe, you always have an advantage when your quality is high,” Prakash says. “In India, this is not possible. People only go on price.”

Technical insight

After redesigning its guide pad manufacturing process to improve productivity, Omega Renk Bearings was dissatisfied with the slow cutting speeds and unstable milling operation it achieved with a Sandvik Coromant competitor’s slitting cutter. The tool required two or three passes to complete the parting off of the guide pad from the steel ring, and there was so much noise and vibration that the operator was always worried about damage to the equipment.
To further boost productivity in the new process – important if the company wanted to tap cost-sensitive markets in India and China – while simultaneously increasing stability.
After studying the application, fixture and problems with the existing setup, Sandvik Coromant sales representative Ramchandra Soni suggested the CoroMill QD with the Coromant Capto C8 adaptor. “This product is the only grooving cutter on the market with an internal coolant, optimized milling geometries and periphery-ground inserts,” Soni says. “Those features ensure high-quality grooves and eliminate the chip-jamming issues Omega Renk was previously facing, so we were able to improve the feed rate from 200 millimetres to 320 millimetres and decrease the number of required passes with the new tool.” Other benefits included a smoother finish on the part surface, which reduced the amount of final polishing needed after milling.
Sushil Prakash, Omega Renk’s co-founder and managing director, says the resulting improvement in efficiency has already helped the company lay the groundwork for its assault on Asia’s fast-growing, cost-focused markets. “Cost-effectiveness will not come out of cheap raw materials or cheap labour,” he says. “It will only come out of productivity.”

Omega Renk Bearings

In 2000, Omega Renk Bearings co-founders Sushil Prakash and Dipa Prakash, a husband-and-wife team, split from the business started by Sushil’s father to build slide bearings for export to Europe. In 2003, its first year of operation, the company’s turnover was around a million euros. Now its annual turnover exceeds 10 million euros. Some 80 percent of its sales are for export. In addition, about 80 percent of the products it manufactures are based on engineering drawings provided by the customer, while 20 percent are designed in-house to meet customer requirements. The company has supplied more than 135,000 shells of RENK E-type bearings to Germany, and it is a supplier and service partner for RENK in India. In addition to Renk products, it manufactures slide bearings and guide pads for customers including Alstom, Andritz, General Electric and Siemens.