Implementing shop flow and organization, good ideas? what is too much?

[Northwestfab]

Our shop has grown to the point of requiring concrete organization, standardization and procedures to put in place, from both my standpoint as an owner, and the requirements of customers we're pursuing. We produce our own product line, and products for customers in other high end industries, so while some of our incoming work is very predictable, others not as much. The next year is going to be one of drastic change and growth, and I wanted to reach out and get some feedback on what works, what doesn't, and what's a complete waste of time to put some intelligent and useful procedures in place.

I have some known tools we're currently putting in place or already using:

Job Setup sheets
Standardized Tool Lists and setups for similar jobs
Standardized Location of part files (AKA the server hard drive isn't a clusterf*ck)

What I know I need:
Paperwork and Data (pricing, revisions etc) Flow from quotation to PO to shipment on contract work
Material certs and storage of raw stock to follow specific job.
Quality assurance on paper (First article sheets) At this point our operators are doing QA. It works, our parts are good, but for some of the bigger customers they want to see more.

What I think I need:
Job Carts. These carts are used to carry raw stock, all the way to a finished part with specific tooling and prints in tow.
More visual aids, wall files? workstations on the shop floor?
ERP??


We're a small shop, 3 CNC's 5 employees. So we're keeping a handle on everything decently right now, but I want to learn from what is proven to work, to save myself and my workers time so I can focus even more on growing my business. I can see moving towards ISO, but I hear a fair share of pissing and moaning there, so I'd rather know what is too much to avoid unneeded redundancies.

 

[Guest]

How about a little more input on what kind of CNCs you have and the type of work you do, 5 employees and 3 CNCs sounds like a strange ratio.

 

[doug8cat]

A Different Perspective

I work in a small shop of 7 people +/- 1, but he is usually not there or out there, so call it 5 excluding the receptionist.
Things run pretty well for the most part, but organization is a BIG issue in my mind, mind you I come from a medical Scientific back ground, so take this into account.

Ideas for greasing the gears so to speak:

A) A white board: jobs coming in, projected ship date, who is working the job (can change certain people will due diff ops on it, what machine(s) running on) and hdw we don;t have that needs to be purchased.

B) Second white board with employee names: what they are working on, what they need to do i.e. in my case fix a machine, repair a cord, run a job. This board can be updated by any employee, as opposed to the former which is the boss's(s) only thing we could touch would be hdw, tools and consumables needed.

C) ORGANIZATION: shelf(s) that contains all jobs in various states of completeness all item associated with job would be in a container labeled how the big cheese wants.
Cabinet with all in stock hdw labeled, Second storage device with large assortment of nuts bolts etc. for odd jobs i.e. maint.
I waste so much time looking for say 1/4-20 bolt it is ridiculous.

D) Receiving area, things delivered stay until check in by designated person and signed off on separate sheet.

E) Job tracking we do a lot of very large things so tags would be on every piece that is not in a fore mentioned box. See(H)

F) Tooling for each machine that stays by it, we use a lot of tools such as drills, taps and fixturing devices that a clip board would be on machine to indicate who "borrowed" tooling. Initials and for which machine it was for.

G) Inventory sheet / system (other than oh shit we are out).

H) Maybe even a time tracking system. Card with each job, start work on it, clock in on ticket, brief description of what is / was being done; upon finishing clock out. Allow boss(s) to see where money is going and track employee progress so some extent.Allowing him to see wow it took so & so 4 hours to tap 10 holes. Initialed by person doing it, improve accountability thus quality of work.

I) Staff meeting 1x week, get all issues on table.

J) Match person to job i.e. Bob is the best welder so jobs that need welding include him.

K) "Foreman" take a big load off boss, after all the is needed to quote, solve some problems and having one go to guy would take load off him.

AA) ORGANIZATION in many aspects again ease load on boss.

I could go on but ya get the idea. Would make things go much smoother and DEFINITELY save $$$. Improve here less chaos, jobs out more efficiently and take major load off boss.

 

[Tonytn36]

The large manila envelopes are your friend in this situation, as are the whiteboards mentioned above. In our prototype shop, which does the prototype jobs for all of NA, this system is very successful. Each job has the job sheet, prints, order sheet, any special specifications or instructions etc placed in one of the large manila envelopes with the job #, customer ID, etc on the outside. This envelope travels with the parts throughout production.

The large whiteboards are used to track job #'s, where they are in production, due dates, etc. You can even use the whiteboards to track production sequences for each order so that you know where a certain job is in the production process if you want to.

You do need a flow. As mentioned, you need a receiving inspection area, a flow through the shop and a final inspection / shipping area. Preferably these are separate areas. Customer QA folks will want to see separation between incoming and outgoing. They will also want to see separation of in-process parts to reduce the likelihood that operations get skipped or parts mixed.

 

[Northwestfab]

How about a little more input on what kind of CNCs you have and the type of work you do, 5 employees and 3 CNCs sounds like a strange ratio.

Sure, we got our start 9 years ago making automotive aftermarket parts for the offroad truck industry. 3 years ago we started branching out adding job shop work.

We currently have one salesman for our product line, one fabricator, two Cnc operators, a book keeper and myself.

We have a 4020 fadal, 2016 fadal, and. Bar fed daewoo puma 240mc /w live tools. We will be adding another machine this spring, either a pallet pool horizontal or a y axis lathe. Still have to decide there.

We're getting to the point that I am having to, and want to, invest in time saving procedures to add consistency for my employees as the numbers grow. I want to add specific procedures so that there is checks and balances in place to produce quality products without my direct Input at all times.
The reason for the post is to understand what procedures are typical and compare that to what is already in place.

 

[Jorgo]

I love my ipad for staying organized. I can access my network with it and pull my drawings into edrawings (the great thing here is there are no old drawings floating around the shop anymore, all my setup sheets are there, I take all my setup and general notes including a detailed list of any tweaks to programs and pictures of setups in Microsoft One Note which is automatically synced on skydrive so I can get those notes on my phone or computer, work orders and time tracking are on there to. It has the battery life to stay on all day which was the final nail in my decision to try it, now I can't live without it.

I also can't say e nough good things about shadow boards. Every bench every machine should have one. I'm working towards that in my shop. Being organized and tidy doesn't come easy to me but shadow boards kind of force me to put everything back where it goes because the big orange tool shape on the board haunts me until its covered

Jordy
Jorgo Metalworks

 

[Bobw]

KISS.... Keep It Simple Stupid.

sounds like you went to a seminar recently. "procedures", "growth", "invest", "time saving", "quality", "standardized", "flow", "redundancies".

You sound like a vacuum cleaner salesman, or a typical asshole in a suit. Sorry for saying that, you are asking for
solutions using absolute bullshit "buzzwords", and haven't identified a single problem for any of us to give advice on or help you solve.

Here is a typical scheduling procedure for a place with 2 shitty slow mills (I have Fadals and love'em) and a lathe.

"What's due this week?"
"X,X,Y and Z"
"Shit... Z uses the same size jaws that are already in there, and the material won't be here until tomorrow, LMNOPQ is due tomorrow, should we swap it out and run
LNMOPQ, or let it sit until the material gets here, then swap over and run LMNOPQ, and get it there early the following day, which is for all intents and purposes is actually
the previous day, because if we start running LNNOPQ, we have 5 jobs that will use the same tool set and stock size, and will take a week".

It goes on and on. a small job shop is by design a complete fluster cluck. 2 guys here with more machines than you have and its midnight on a Saturday, and I'll have a free
machine at 1am on Sunday, and I'm still not sure what's going on next.

"Time saving procedures", no such thing, everytime some asshole writes a "procedure" to "save time", it involves filling out some BS paperwork which wastes time, but makes the
procedure writer either hard or wet (depending on gender).

Keep it simple, though it sounds like you don't want to...

 

[Matt G.]

Bob,

I'd agree with what you're saying for the most part, and the situation you give sounds all too familiar. It's a constant battle between scheduling for efficiency, and hitting the due dates. Especially with the insane lead times everyone seems to expect these days.

The problem is, if you intend to grow, without coming up with some sort of plan for it, then you end up in the situation my shop is in now. We still operate exactly as you described, like we did as a 2 man shop, but now we are a 20 man shop, with 5 lathes, 12 mills, and a waterjet. You think you have clusterf*ck now, try multiplying that by 10.

People spend an hour wandering around the shop trying to locate the tooling they need for their next job. Everyone just keeps the tools they use often at their machines so that they don't have to go hunting for them. This means that if someone else needs that tool, they have to go from machine to machine looking for it.

Everyone saves their program files on the server differently, so if you give the job to someone else, they can't find it. So they write it again and save it somewhere else. You end up with 20 different programs for the same part. The last time I decided I was going to go through and organize this mess, there were well over 100,000 files there to sift through. I gave up.

We might have 3 different orders for the exact same part sitting in the rack, and the guy on the floor is handed the next job due, not realizing that there are more orders for that part. So we end up setting up and tearing down the same parts 3 times in a week. I've even found 2 guys working on the exact same parts at the same time on 2 different machines. I'd guesstimate we are losing somewhere between 10 and 20 hours a week in wasted setup time due to this.

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. We have had new managers come in over the years with big ideas on "Time saving procedures", and they basically received the same response you just gave. We chased them off and continued doing things the way we had always done them. Inertia is a hard thing to break, and it just keeps getting harder as time goes by.

Before too much longer, I am going to be in a position where I am going to have to fix this mess, and I don't even know where to start. And I know damn well that when I do, the guys are going to respond exactly the way you just did, because I did too.

 

[Dave K]

Bobw---- you are so spot on. A job shop is a cluster to run. No matter what your perfect plan is, some customer will call on Monday morning and screw it all up. No doubt, that customer will be one of your biggest, so you'll want to accommodate, rather than say, "sorry, but we're booked for the week. Can't get your rush job in until next Monday".

 

[47nomad]

Since you asked, everthing you are wanting to learn is detailed in Lean Manufacturing.
Visit someone who is practing it and ask lots of questions. Most will be glad to show you how they use it.
It will cost you nothing for a visit and will really open your eyes to what people are doing.
It need not be a facility that does what you do. The principals are all the same.
Don't forget to ask them where they received their training. Good luck.
Let the ney sayers respond below.

 

[iMillJoe]

My shop has about doubled in size since I started their, and we have had many of the same problems you are describing. We are in the middle of "5S"ing the shop right now, and while I can see the benefits, it's implementation is certainly not very enjoyable.

For the server I would recommend every one save their data in a standard format something like

root/programming/jobNumber/component/machineType/program for programs
root/engineering/jobNumber/component/file for cad models and prints

Set-up sheets are a must, but unless you have making them figured out, I'd defiantly recommend putting a list of the tools used at the top of the program.

(T1, 3 INCH FACE MILL) 
(T2, .5 INCH END MILL)
(T12, .5 INCH CHAMFER) 
(ETC...)

some of our posts do that for us automatically.

You probably want to get your key guys together, and have them decide what tools they use the most often, and have them try to standardize them as much as possible. In my shop for example, T12 is always a chamfer mill. T15 is almost always a .5" end mill.

We have had job carts since I started, but we've made a shift from multiple jobs just being placed on a cart some where, to only one set of parts per cart, and added travelers (or routers) that stay with them along with blueprints. Carts are now staged near the machine that they will run on next.

My shop has one problem I can't talk management into changing. Mill program set-up sheets are put into a wall basket hanging on the machine the programmer guesses it will be ran on, and not with the parts themselves. We have families of parts that look quite alike from their picture on the setup sheet, and the only place on the setup sheet that you can see the job number we use to track things, is on the other side of the page you are looking at when you're setting something up (and it's in 9 point font). This has lead to the wrong program getting ran a few times.

We also hired a manufacturing engineer to come in and help us work through a "Value Stream Map" of the shop for our primary product. Most everything that was discussed was at least known by somebody, but to get all the bottle necks mapped out, and put on a piece of paper so large it wraps around the bosses office like wallpaper, has given him some extra motivation to get the solutions we proposed put into play.

 

[patindahat]

Just my 2cents.

Of all the shops I've worked in, or been into as a tooling rep. I see two categories.

1) Those who think their methods can always improve and be better.
2) Those who think "its not broke why fix it?"
Of course we all fall into different ones on different topics.


#1s organization methods aren't static, and many mistakes are made with the new things they try.
But they are consistently getting better.

Extreme case of the #2 are those who refuse to adopt different technology.
I've had customers complain "I can't compete on these small parts, how do they afford this?" and my response is "Swiss-turn machines"... Followed by lists of why that won't work, and them losing the job.



My thoughts
Sit down with your 'core' staff, and get them involved.
Its the attitude/culture that determines success when trying something different.
It only takes one person's rotten attitude to prevent a new machining technique, or way of routing WorkOrders for the whole thing to fail.


No-matter the system you'll have mistakes, but those who have more success have had more failures.

 

[patindahat]

Removed duplicate

 

[303_Enfield]

I love my ipad for staying organized. I can access my network with it and pull my drawings into edrawings (the great thing here is there are no old drawings floating around the shop anymore, all my setup sheets are there, I take all my setup and general notes including a detailed list of any tweaks to programs and pictures of setups in Microsoft One Note which is automatically synced on skydrive so I can get those notes on my phone or computer, work orders and time tracking are on there to. It has the battery life to stay on all day which was the final nail in my decision to try it, now I can't live without it.

I also can't say e nough good things about shadow boards. Every bench every machine should have one. I'm working towards that in my shop. Being organized and tidy doesn't come easy to me but shadow boards kind of force me to put everything back where it goes because the big orange tool shape on the board haunts me until its covered

Jordy
Jorgo Metalworks

Funny you mention this; I'm implementing a paperless router station system into our shop, 30-40 kiosks. Computers and keyboards all mounted up off of the work bench, big flat-screen right at the operator's workcell displaying prints. Totally the wave of the future. I get to do a little welding and fabrication, so no complaints here.

 

[SIM]

KISS.... Keep It Simple Stupid.

sounds like you went to a seminar recently. "procedures", "growth", "invest", "time saving", "quality", "standardized", "flow", "redundancies".

You sound like a vacuum cleaner salesman, or a typical asshole in a suit. Sorry for saying that, you are asking for
solutions using absolute bullshit "buzzwords", and haven't identified a single problem for any of us to give advice on or help you solve.

Here is a typical scheduling procedure for a place with 2 shitty slow mills (I have Fadals and love'em) and a lathe.

"What's due this week?"
"X,X,Y and Z"
"Shit... Z uses the same size jaws that are already in there, and the material won't be here until tomorrow, LMNOPQ is due tomorrow, should we swap it out and run
LNMOPQ, or let it sit until the material gets here, then swap over and run LMNOPQ, and get it there early the following day, which is for all intents and purposes is actually
the previous day, because if we start running LNNOPQ, we have 5 jobs that will use the same tool set and stock size, and will take a week".

It goes on and on. a small job shop is by design a complete fluster cluck. 2 guys here with more machines than you have and its midnight on a Saturday, and I'll have a free
machine at 1am on Sunday, and I'm still not sure what's going on next.

"Time saving procedures", no such thing, everytime some asshole writes a "procedure" to "save time", it involves filling out some BS paperwork which wastes time, but makes the
procedure writer either hard or wet (depending on gender).

Keep it simple, though it sounds like you don't want to...

I have been using cork and white boards for some time with reasonable good success. Lately as fast as I can arrange a schedule on a cork board it changes. Orders increase, divide, get moved up, put on hold. Material doesn't show, comes in early. Rush jobs take precedence, customer doesn't pay and we deflate the urgency. Machine goes down, tool breaks and everything is re-arranged. I cannot keep track of my jobs as well as I would like...never mind scheduling the jobs with the men.



While the Flust Cluck off the hip schedule does keep everyone busy plus keeps Fridays frantic...I prefer to try and figure a way to schedule jobs on a loose agenda. Been playing with ideas and nothing strikes me as being good enough to implement.

Reason to strive for a better method--

That way if good customer A needs some job bumped to put his in...we know what job was bumped and can get back to it.

It would be nice if everyone knew the job sequence and the changes made as they happen and not after they finished the No longer a Rush job.

It would be nice if updated drawings made it to the floor and stayed there...not to have an oldy drawing pop up.

It would be nice if travelers stayed with jobs...

It would be nice if Tooling needed to be ordered wasn't just written on a piece of paper and left on my desk covered in papers.

It would be nice if a master list was available and updated.



It would be nice if I could leave for a day and everyone had a clue as to the schedule.

 

[Grumpy365]

Meetings by nature are a waste of time, A weekly staff meeting for a 5 guy shop is a HUGE waste of time.

 

[Oldwrench]

KISS...Keep It Simple Stupid...a small job shop is by design a complete fluster cluck...

"No plan survives first contact with the enemy."

 

[Spyderedge]

I like to have a lot of space in my shop, have a circle in the middle EMPTY for carts, rolling toolboxes etc.
A wall for the mill, and a wall of things for the lathe would be ideal in a shop. Almost like a store isle.

 

[Oldwrench]

...Set-up sheets are a must, but unless you have making them figured out, I'd defiantly recommend putting a list of the tools used at the top of the program.

(T1, 3 INCH FACE MILL) 
(T2, .5 INCH END MILL)
(T12, .5 INCH CHAMFER) 
(ETC...)

...

This can be the biggest timesaver there is. It's really easy to do this with a product line because you have control over method and sequence from the get-go. I can't imagine not writing the entire job instructions into the program, I mean two pages' worth, even which cabinet the soft jaws are in...at least ON A HAAS CONTROL...

However...put too many parenthetical notes in a Fanuc program and you can get serious data corruption. Half the time it won't even download at all. We have one Oi-TD and three Oi-TCs and the're all like that, the newest one being the worst.

 

[codemonk]

Have you thought of implementing an ERP style system? The one we use keeps material certs in the system and follows the material to what ever jobs the material goes to. Also we can upload pictures / programs to a part number and if a program is changed the old one is still there but but not selectable. Route sheets are written per part, so repeat orders are very simple. It covers most everything from quote to invoice. If you like I can give you the info, just msg me.