Tyco Valves & Controls is one of the world's leading manufacturers and marketers of valves, actuators and controls, providing market-leading products, services and solutions, for the most challenging applications throughout oil and gas, power, mining, chemical, food and beverage and building and construction industries.

Through their portfolio of trusted brands, they deliver a full suite of flow management solutions that bring vital infrastructure to local communities around the globe. Partnering with customers, they help to keep their operations running safely, minimize downtime and enhance lifecycle performance. Together, they are helping to create a more sustainable tomorrow.

Tyco Valve and Controls Keystone Hygienic Valves facility, located at Hamilton in New Zealand's North Island, is a major manufacturer of flow control solutions in New Zealand. They design and manufacture a wide range of valve's and controls for hygienic applications, such as in the Dairy, Brewing and Wine industries, which are exported world wide.

In late 2010 Tyco's Hamilton operation invested in a new coordinate measuring machine from Hi-Tech Metrology to help with their inwards checking of parts and components for the business. The CMM, a Sheffield Discovery Series III from Hexagon Metrology, has been installed since November 2010 and now according to Quality Manager, Les Slone, is producing excellent results.

The quality department at Tyco Flow Control has developed and had manufactured a number of fixtures in order to hold the parts as they are loaded onto the CMM for checking and with the aid of the part programmes, also written by the quality team, inspectors can now simply load the multiples numbers of parts to be checked into the fixtures, push the run button, and the CMM checks all of the critical features required on the parts. Reports are automatically generated after the measurement routines are complete - saving the inspection department further time and energy.

Les Slone reports that the CMM has proven to be a huge time saver for the business with some valve bodies (in groups of four) now able to be checked in under 12-minutes on the CMM as opposed to the 60 minutes that it took previously with verniers and micrometers and other measuring tools. This frees-up the quality assurance personnel within the plant to concentrate on higher level activities such as problem solving and root cause analysis in the production environment.

With regular shipments of components in large quantities from both local and overseas suppliers and with a 5% inspection sampling plan it is critical that a fully automatic measurement system such as the Discovery CMM was in place. Goods can now pass through inspection at a much faster rate than before therefore reducing lead times and providing improved service for their customers.

The Sheffield Discovery III CMM installed at Tyco Flow Control in Hamilton is running the latest industry-standard CMM measurement software - PC-DMIS, supplied and fully-supported by Hi-Tech Metrology in Australia and through the New Zealand reseller for Hi-Tech Metrology products - Industrial Tooling Limited.

Tyco Flow Control's global customers can now benefit from the capital investment made in CMM equipment in Hamiliton with faster response times, shorter lead times and further improvements in Tyco's already high product quality standards and components performance.

Overall Les Slone, Production Manager Tony Clark and QC team leader Craig Coates are very pleased with the purchase of the new CMM at Tyco and appreciative of the on-going level of after-sales service and support from Hi-Tech Metrology on what is now becoming a critical piece of their manufacturing infrastructure in the Hamilton facility.

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