Established in 1963, Anchor Electricals Pvt Ltd, started as a family owned business with the manufacturing of Tumbler switches in Mumbai. In 2009, it became a wholly owned subsidiary of Matsushita Electric Works, Japan. Today it manufactures a wide range of electrical products including switchgears, lighting products, water heaters, indoor fans, solar panels, electric cables, home automation etc.  in its nine operating units.

Anchor’s Cable Manufacturing Plant at Bhuj, Gujarat  manufactures cables for household applications. For Cable Insulation Thickness compliance as per IEC60811 and IS10810 standards they previously used a Profile Projector with DRO to measure insulation thickness at six points. The process took an average 15-20 minutes and included marking samples at 60 deg intervals, measuring them and manually writing down reports. Moreover, operator to operator variation in the measured results led them to look for a system that could automatically measure the samples.

In 2012, Anchor procured Sipcon’s Vision Measuring System which could automatically detect the thickness using video edge detection. It eliminated, operator to operator error thus leading to more reliable results.  However, the measurement time was still around 10 minutes which was not a concern back then when only 20-25 samples were to be tested in a day.

With an increase in throughput at its plant, especially the need to ensure that the extrusion process was adding the right thickness onto the copper conductor so that no excess insulation layer was being added led Anchor to look for a solution that could almost instantly measure thickness so that they could take a corrective action in time. With no online measuring systems this offline system had to be reliable enough as well.

In 2019, the Quality Head Mr. Nihar Malik was given a demo of Cable Quickie model SVI-CQ-24  and he instantly realised the usefulness of the product for Anchor.  Additionally, an unexpected benefit came with Cable Quickie’s top light-software module that could measure the thickness of individual color layers in the cross-section. With this knowledge Anchor, could exactly determine and control the thickness of its base color and the thickness of it more expensive top color thereby keeping the overall insulation material costs under control.

Mr. Ram, the operator of Cable Quickie at Anchor is relieved to have a system that could instantly and accurately measure upto 100-150 samples per day, something which was not possible earlier with either Profile Projector or Vision Measuring System.