Page 33 - MetalForming June 2013

can average 3-4 hr. This includes time to tool up a die, as well as sharpen punches and perform other mainte- nance tasks. To quicken the pace, 2 years ago McCullah and Stith institut- ed a pre-changeover team.
“We’ve shifted five people into proactive setup roles on the floor,” says McCullah. The extra labor became available as the additional use of die protection has allowed one press oper- ator to now cover four or five presses, compared to two or three presses before. “This pre-changeover team uses our production schedule to prestage dies to help minimize changeover time. About 65 percent of our dies are prestaged, with the goal being 80 percent.”
Also helping to minimize changeover times is standardizing on sensor setups at the press. While developing a sensor strategy on its existing dies the first time around can take 2-3 hr., once a die-protection strategy has been devel- oped, the technician documents the approach. This speeds the die-protec-
tion portion of the overall setup job the next time the die enters production. All of these moves have added up to a 50-percent reduction in setup times, and McCullah expects at least another 50 percent reduction to come soon. He notes that while setup time might not have been such a critical measura- ble a few years ago, when run size reg- ularly topped 500,000 pieces, today “we’re operating more like a job shop. The goal is to have no excess invento- ry, and more and more often we’re aver- aging release quantities of 50,000 to
100,000 pieces.”
“Now that our production-planning
department has seen the productivity gains we’ve realized,” adds Stith, “they’re pushing us further. While in the past they might have bundled two or three releases from a customer into one huge job, now they give us separate releases. Inventory turns on core prod- ucts have gone from nine to nearly 15 per year. In 2012 we processed 1300 work orders, hundreds more than we
ran the previous year. And this year I expect we’ll run 1500 jobs, and proba- bly 2000 jobs in 2014.”
More Efficient, All the Way Down the Line
Of course, more work orders for smaller batch sizes adds stress to the shipping and receiving department, particularly since every box of stamped fasteners goes out for heattreating and plating. “We have a lot of work-in- process inventory,” notes Stith. “As pro- ductivity has skyrocketed and we’ve been able to remove seven presses from the production process, we’ve lever- aged the gained floor space to improve our shipping and receiving operation. We can pack parts more efficiently, the work flow is more organized and logi- cal, and it’s much safer.
“In fact, since we’ve gained so much additional floor space, we’re exploring opportunties to become a more verti- cally integrated and streamlined sup- plier,” Stith shares. MF
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