A Moment of Great Opportunity for Manufacturers (Part 1)

(Recently Jim King was invited to be the Opening Keynote Speaker at the NTMA’s Engage 2020 virtual conference. Following are some of the highlights from his presentation, in Part 1 of this two-part series.)

For the most part, the manufacturing industry has survived the various stages of the Coronavirus so far, while surely, many challenges lie ahead. After a period of such drastic and intense change, it’s useful to take inventory and make sure we capture important lessons learned so we can strengthen our organizations and make them more resilient, while planning for future growth.

It’s critical to recognize that today we stand at one of several forks in the road as we negotiate the highs and the lows of our path forward. While negotiating these forks, a few questions come to mind: 1) will I continue to do the same things I’ve always done and reactively ride the waves, hoping to survive, or 2) am I going to become more proactive and intentional in steering the course of my business? If you choose the status quo – good luck. For those who decide to forge ahead, there are so many choices.

I have encouraging news for you. Right now, we exist in a moment of great opportunity for the manufacturing industry, and therefore opportunity for you. You can participate to your advantage if you take some simple steps to elevate your shop to the next level. These steps include: 1) taking inventory of your shop, 2) catching the slow fat rabbits, 3) leaning out with automation, and 4) leveraging data. We’ll explore the first two steps in this article and address the additional steps in the next article in this two-part series.

START SMALL, KEEP IT SIMPLE

I have always believed in incremental change. Take a step, then build on your successes. Do not overcomplicate the challenge. Be intentional in your actions by focusing on the key initiatives that will drive efficiency, customer satisfaction and revenue. Starting out slowly is beneficial because it’s typically lower risk, lower investment and quicker ROI. In the spirit of simplicity, I believe there are four steps that will be quite useful in helping you maximize opportunities for your business.

STEP 1: TAKE INVENTORY OF YOUR SHOP

Start with a complete examination of your business processes, machining processes and material flow, and look for ways to weed out waste. The list of potential areas of improvement could include things like document workflow, organization and placement of raw materials, WIP, tooling, workholding, and taking advantage of the embedded technology that comes with every CNC controller.

Engage your entire staff and empower them to speak freely. This way you will get the unfiltered feedback all leaders and owners need to hear. The bottom line is, make sure you have a complete understanding of your current situation and what you and your employees believe needs to improve. This sets you up with a good foundation for the future.

STEP 2: CATCH THE SLOW, FAT RABBITS

Many of you may recall a presentation given by Larry Schwartz, past president of Okuma America, where he introduced the concept of “Slow Fat Rabbits.” Nearly every shop has Slow Fat Rabbits, to one extent or another. These are areas of your company that you know are opportunities for improvement, but for whatever reason you have not gotten around to resolving them.

One of the easiest ways to gain efficiencies is talk to your machine tool builder or distributor and take inventory of the control. Are you taking advantage of all the efficiency tools you already have access to, right on your machines? Examples include:

Servo Tuning: Improves cycle times and accuracy when machining parts of varying weights on milling machines and turning centers. With optimized servo control, you can maintain machining accuracies for surface quality.

Conversational Programming: Quick, easy, and interactive on-machine programming for inexperienced programmers or operators. No need to worry about correct machine posts for the machines, or incorrect syntax.

Tool Load Monitoring: Monitors and stops a process before workpiece or machine damage occurs. You can set load limits in the part program to maintain better control of your cutting tools, and automatically switch to redundant tooling when limit levels are met.

Tooling Consumption: This software will optimize your tooling usage, eliminate scrap and reduce costs. Additionally, there are third party companies like Caron Engineering that can help you monitor what is happening during the cut and predict when the tool will expire based on adaptive feedback to the CNC controller.

Collision Avoidance Software: Monitors the 3-D machine environment in real-time to prevent collisions before they happen.

5-axis Auto Tuning: Automatically tunes machines with ease, from the control – no need to schedule paid service, as your team can easily achieve this task in minutes with on-machine guides and automatic cycles built into the control.

Listed above are just a few of the CNC control features that can improve your efficiencies and productivity. Other opportune areas we tend to overlook are:

Removing Bottlenecks: Are there areas of your facility that always seem to have material backing up? Document these areas and focus on removing bottlenecks. As an example, if your Quality Assurance area experiences backups, you can use in-process gaging to assist in reducing the pressure on quality departments by making offsets in real-time.

Streamlining Work Instructions: There are companies that have all the documentation for the operator on the CNC. There is no paperwork, and the work instructions are readily available. They scan the raw material, and the CNC calls up all of the tooling, programming and any notes from the prior shift regarding the last time the part was run. This creates efficiencies on many levels.

Before you proceed with the next steps I’m going to suggest, these pests must be caught and eliminated. Removing the Slow Fat Rabbits in your organization (and, the more elusive Fast Skinny Rabbits!) will immediately reduce your costs and increase productivity.

IMPORTANT FIRST STEPS

There’s another reason we do Steps 1 and 2 before anything else. If automation or leveraging data are in your future (and they are, for all shops), you must trim this fat BEFORE implementing these changes. If not, you’ll simply be wasting money because you’ll be automating faulty processes. It’s important to remember that automation does not make a bad process better. It just automates a bad process, and that’s not progress.

Stay tuned for my next article, where I’ll share Steps 3 and 4 in the process of taking your shop to the next level, so you can make the most of today’s manufacturing opportunities.

About Jim King
Jim King is President and COO, Okuma America Corporation.
Connect with Jim on LinkedIn.