With more than 100 opticians, Optimax is one of America’s largest optics manufacturers. Optimax leverages its optics manufacturing technology for programs that benefit mankind. Their innovative manufacturing methods and unique corporate culture enable faster production of precision optics. Even with many years of experience providing production optics, Optimax remains dedicated to small volume, high quality and quick delivery. Optimax manufactures prototype optical components for a wide variety of applications and has the capacity to support production requirements.

Since it was founded in 1991, Optimax has grown to over 150 employees and has a well-earned reputation for manufacturing high quality, custom spherical, aspherical, cylindrical and plano lenses. Optimax’s unique promise is rapid turn-around times, and quick delivery of parts, often delivering custom fabricated, coated components within a one week lead-time. Given Optimax’s focus on high quality, fast production, it was vital for the company to eliminate manufacturing uncertainty, reduce yield, and increase process predictably. They stake their reputation on meeting delivery times.

Asphere manufacturing was a notoriously difficult process to constrain. They struggled with low yield, and unpredictable cycle times in each processing step, particularly relative to their spherical manufacture process. Optimax realized that a more deterministic process was needed. MRF polishing was a natural solution.

Optimax wanted to quantify the MRF impact on their bottom line and they prepared the following study to compare manufacturing costs before and after implementing MRF.  The following chart shows the impact on yield, labor and profit for a typical small batch aspheric optic: ~13 mm diameter fused silica parabola with 39 microns of aspheric departure.  

For the first two orders, Optimax did not have MRF involved in the process. The process results show it. Nonetheless, Optimax still made money, but as seen in the yield predictability suffered.

MRF was used during the third order, and the data showed a stark improvement in yield, time per part and profitability. There were two other unplanned but fortuitous outcomes seen during this third order. The MRF process inherently yielded a part with lower form error, at no additional cost in time or money. The customer was willing to pay more for parts with smaller form error, something that did not cost Optimax anything to produce. The other outcome is Optimax did not need to run any parts to satisfy the fourth order. Optimax had started a quantity in line with the pre-MRF yield percentages, so there was a large number of good but unsold parts left after the third order. The prior run had yielded enough overage, an unexpected outcome in light of past yields. The fifth and sixth order shows the effects of learning and yield improvement. The process got more profitable and more predictable. All of this could be done by someone with basic metrology and data entry skills, not a master optician.

After integrating MRF polishing into their production line, Optimax realized:

• Yield increased from 37% to 100%
• Time per part decreased by 5x
• Profit increased by 10x

For Optimax, combining MRF, with conventional or CNC polishing processes brought confidence and predictability to production schedules and enabled more innovative, efficient processes. MRF has helped them to increase throughput and capacity, reduce manufacturing costs and improve their bottom line.

COMPANY CONTACT:

Mike Mandina, CEO
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www.optimaxsi.com