<p>&#160;The function of the plant engineering staff and operations management staff can no longer be simply focused on delivering product to the loading dock.&#160;The shipping department is not the customer that needs to be served — it is the end user.</p> <div>While the shipping department may be your “internal customer” focusing solely on them does not ultimately benefit the business.&#160;The end user must be the focus at every level of the operation, from order entry to delivery.</div> <div>&#160;</div> <div>What is the product?</div> <ol type="a" start="1"> <li>components</li> <li>finished product to the user/customer</li> </ol> <div>&#160;</div> <div>How do we best serve the customer?&#160;What does the customer see as value?&#160;While this can vary dependent on specific markets there are some common elements:</div> <ol type="a" start="1"> <li>on-time delivery</li> <li>superior quality</li> <li>customizable product (configurable)</li> <li>designs that are seen as superior in form and function</li> <li>short lead times</li> <li>competitive pricing</li> </ol> <div>&#160;</div> <div>Notice that I have listed price as the last item of this list.&#160;If you are producing product for a commodity market, the importance of price moves up in importance, but if you are producing product that can more likely be defined in a niche market, price becomes less important and many opportunities of differentiating yourself from the competition become available.</div> <div>&#160;</div> <div>Selecting machinery or laying out a factory in the traditional engineering sense is rather straight forward.</div> <ol type="a" start="2"> <ol type="A" start="1"> <li>What machines are required to produce the required product?</li> <li>How can I best layout these machines to produce that product at the lowest possible cost?</li> </ol> </ol> <div>Today’s considerations are not that simple.&#160;The engineering and manufacturing people must take a more holistic view of plant and machinery design.&#160;&#160; Maintaining a focus on the customer, knowing what is of value to the customer and focusing on supplying those “points of value” must be the goal.&#160;</div> <div>&#160;</div> <div>The concept of manufacturing cells is a perfect example of this more holistic approach.&#160;Seldom will a manufacturing cell be able to equal the low production cost obtainable by the traditional departmental large batch size approach.&#160;It does offer significant benefit with regard to the important issues of how to serve the broader needs of the customer.</div> <div>&#160;</div> <div>As lot sizes continue to constrict, setup time becomes increasingly important.&#160;CNC technology is driven by this need to minimize setup time, but does it go far enough to answer this need?</div> <div>&#160;</div> <div>The quick answer is that it can — but we have not yet fully realized that potential.</div> <div>&#160;</div> <div>Years ago we saw advancement in machine performance based on mechanical improvements.&#160;Those improvements, like all things, began to mature and the incremental improvements became increasing less beneficial.&#160;</div> <div>&#160;</div> <div>Improvement in the controls systems — CNC technology was the logical next step to gain incremental improvements — and then higher speed drives and enhanced functionality added to these advancements, but those too are approaching a level of maturity that limit the potential incremental benefit that can be realized.</div> <div>&#160;</div> <div>Most point-to-point machines today utilize drives that are in the 80 to100 m/min. range — and that is up from 30 to 50 m/min. only a few years ago.&#160;While at first glance that would indicate significant reduction in cycle times, the reality is that the improvement for most operations is rather insignificant.&#160;While maximum speeds have increased, acceleration and deceleration rates have remained rather constant and for the short moves common on these machines the maximum speeds are seldom reached.&#160;</div> <div>&#160;</div> <div>These faster speeds have a certain “feel good” quality to them, but they have limited benefit in achieving our customer focused business goals.&#160;The technology of speed is reaching maturity and while we can continue to advance, it will be with diminishing returns.</div> <div>&#160;</div> <div>As an industry we have done a commendable job in exploiting the potential benefits offered by mechanical and control advancements in the machines that we utilize, but the potential for significant incremental improvements in these maturing areas is diminishing and we must look beyond them for more opportunities.</div> <div>&#160;</div> <div>The next fertile area of significant incremental improvement that must be tapped is in how we communicate with and utilize these machines and their advanced control systems.&#160;We must look critically at how we feed information to and extract information from these machines.&#160;We must also look at what information we communicate and the form of that information.&#160;Is the information in the most efficient package?&#160;Do we have to manipulate that data to make it machine specific?</div> <div>&#160;</div> <div>Certainly there is no functional difference between a machine that requires 15 minutes of time to set up up or a program that requires 15 minutes writing or altering.&#160;We need to create data in a form that is more manageable and will minimize operator or programmer involvement to provide the data to the control.</div> <div>&#160;</div> <div>Many successful manufacturers today have looked objectively and critically at the functions that go on in the shop to find and reduce non value added activity.&#160;Many have become quiet aggressive in weeding out these profit robbers on the plant floor — but have we been as aggressive in analyzing what goes on in the office or even at the machine control.&#160;I think not; we have tended to “accept” these activities as part of our business.&#160;They need not to be part of our business, and we need to pursue weeding them out just as aggressively as unnecessary movement of materials on the plant floor.</div> <div>&#160;</div> <div>Both in principle as well as cost, the moving, organizing and restacking of data is no less a detriment to our operations than is the unnecessary moving, organizing and restacking of materials as they move through our shops.&#160;</div> <div>&#160;</div> <div>Many shops today are reaching a level of maturity in identifying and reducing the costs associated with the “visible” non-value-added activity on the shop floor and, as a result, the potential gains offered become increasingly less.&#160;The low hanging fruit now lies in the areas we have not focused on as intensely.</div> <div>&#160;</div> <div>We must move beyond writing discrete programs for each item we produce and move toward creating rules-based programs that will automatically create operating programs without the involvement of an operator or programmer to tailor each program to a specific part.&#160;</div> <p>We must make the exchange of that data between storage points and use points both seamless and automatic.&#160;Machines must have the ability to communicate on common terms with common data forms.</p> <div>Machines must be capable of both determining and acquiring the data they need to function over a network that can supply that data in directly usable format.&#160;This is the difference between an operator keying in the proper program file to run and the machine “seeing” what part to produce and associating that part with the required data that it can then access directly — without intervention or data manipulation on the part of the operator.</div> <div>&#160;</div> <div>Quality must be of paramount importance to achieve our goals.&#160;Rejected parts are lost profit and immensely disruptive to the manufacturing process.&#160;The goal of quality must be zero defects. The less intervention that is required to “manipulate” the form of data required the less opportunity exists to introduce either human or system error into the data.&#160;While quality parts cannot be guaranteed simply by quality data, poor quality data is guaranteed to produce poor quality parts.</div> <div>&#160;</div> <div>We need to focus on data that is optimized “in form” from the point of order entry to the point of delivery.&#160;Optimized “in form” means that all the data required to produce a part or product is contained or referenced in the order entry function.&#160;This information should be entered only once to minimize the possibility of errors.&#160;</div> <div>&#160;</div> <div>The same goals exist whether we are producing complete products of our own design or components.&#160;Part drawings need to be in a form that allows direct conversion to machine programs, with minimal intervention.&#160;“Program ready” files must be available to all production machines in a non machine specific form.&#160;Manufacturing routings should not be constrained by “convention or convenience”; rather by the optimum routing at the time of production.</div> <p>&#160;</p>