Page 26 - MetalForming November 2013

Superior Die Set Corp. is a showcase for the benefits that paperless manufacturing brings, not only to its own facility but to its suppliers and customers. Celebrating its 90th year in business, we spoke with third-generation president Frank Janiszewski about its 10-plus years as a paperless factory.
In paperless manufacturing, tradi- tional paper-based records and travelers give way to electronic records. ERP systems provide infor- mation such as bills of materials and process plans to the shop floor, so that operators manage production tasks in preset sequences to ensure schedules adhere to up-to-date customer-prior- ity rankings and due dates. Need to view the latest product-design draw- ings and related information? All of that and more is readily available at workcell terminals—real time and up to date. You can’t create a much more vis- ible, open and error-resistant process than when you go paperless. Noncon- formance issues disappear, scrap and rework dwindle and customer com- plaints become extinct.
Witness Superior Die Set Corp., Oak
BY BRAD F. KUVIN, EDITOR
Creek, WI, a die-set designer and builder with core competencies in machining, grinding, welding and related processes. Since 2000 the firm has managed production virtually paper-free: “95 to 98 percent of the jobs we enter, as we’re entering them into the system it’s automatically build- ing the job structure,” says company president Frank Janiszewski. With an average of 2500 work orders in its scheduling system at any given time, the value of electronic scheduling— automatic building of bills of materi- als, routings and process require- ments—can’t be overstated.
The Transition
To transition to paperless, Superior Die rode on the back of Epicor’s Avante ERP software, which now resides on
Superior’s virtualized servers. It select- ed the software, after looking at numer- ous options, for its ability to let Supe- rior’s programmers construct its own unique, custom configurators. Janiszewski explains.
“While we essentially function as a job shop, building die sets and mold bases to customer specs, we maintain standard product lines that serve as the primary building blocks for each job. These include a die-set product line, mold-base product line, plate product line, weldment product line etc. For each of these product lines we have a configurator that, for each new job, calculates how many routings we need, what material needs to be pulled for each routing and the sequence of operations required on the plant floor to build the job. We
24 MetalForming/November 2013
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Paperless—It’s All About
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