Aerospace Machining Archives - Page 2 of 3

Precision Aerospace Machining and the seven wastes of lean manufacturing (part 4)

The 4th waste identified in lean manufacturing is Motion. Motion concerns the ergonomics of the workers in a process and any unnecessary steps or movement that they have in the process.

To again look at the difference of a high mix / low volume precision aerospace machining facility and a high volume production we will see a difference in the ability to reduce motion. In a high volume production environment you can count on a particular workstation being focused on a single task – even if that task is performed over a variety of individual parts, the motions and the ergonomics will be similar. In a low volume precision machine shop, the task on one day may be entirely different than the task of the prior day. While they will be related still – depending on the functionality of the machine at the workstation – the individual parts may require a significant difference in motion or handling.

To compensate for this changing process, CNC industries has designed it’s facility to accommodate a high mix of precision parts easily. While the information and documentation may vary from one part to another, we have standardized the method of getting that information into electronic information stations which are uniformly located near the workstations. Each worker in our facility may count on being able to get all necessary work instructions in the same way.

We have also standardized our machine setups with the tooling being handle off of the machine to eliminate unnecessary motion in the setup process. The advantages of removing extra motion include more productivity, less stress on the people involved in the process, as well as lowered chances of errors and mistakes being made. So even with a facility dedicated to fully custom machined parts and prototypes, we can easily remove unnecessary wastes.

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CNC Industries is a Fort Wayne, Indiana based machine shop specializing in precision CNC machining, fabrication and assembly of application-critical and custom machined parts for the Aerospace, Defense, Medical, Industrial and Transportation markets. The company presently employs approximately 55 people.

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June 14th, 2010|Tags: Aerospace Machining, Document Management, Lean Manufacturing, Precision Machining, Technology|

Precision Aerospace Machining and the Seven Wastes of Lean Manufacturing (part 7)

The final of the seven wastes that we are looking at is waiting. Any time that a part is waiting is additional time that you are holding the costs of the part without receiving the income of the part. Waiting, as we have identified it internally comes from three main places: 1) having a part or batch finish with one machine and the next machine required for the part is not available and 2) any part that is in a batch but is not currently being machined, 3) inventory.

The first of these items is very self-explanatory. A batch of parts sitting by a machine waiting to be run through that machine is very obviously waiting. What is a bit less obvious is that even while the batch is being machined, the majority of the parts are still waiting. If there is a batch of 500 parts that each take 1 minute to complete an operation then at minimum each part will have 499 minutes of waiting while the rest are getting machined.

In any production facility where resources are shared between multiple batches / parts, it is extremely difficult to schedule all of the jobs so that no part is ever waiting at all. In fact this scenario is used to illustrate a difficult to impossible problem to solve with computers – known as the Job Shop Problem. This problem may be especially difficult in the aerospace machining industry. With long lead times and large numbers of operations requiring many different resources, scheduling jobs to move through the shop at the best possible rate is exceptionally difficult.

At CNC Industries we address the problem of time wasted while a part is waiting in several different ways. One of the main approaches is our design of a universal fixturing system. We have designed a system of attaching fixtures to our milling machines that will allow a fixture to be machine independent in it’s use. We may design a fixture assuming that the part will be run in one of our Haas VF-2 Superspeed machines, but find that our Toyoda Horizontal is a better choice. With our universal fixturing system we can easily move the part to the most appropriate machine at the correct time and with minimal disruption.

Additionally we focus on redundant machines. Our capacity for production needs to be unaffected by any downtime that a given machine may have. We keep all of our machines well-maintained to prevent any problems, but there is on way to completely prevent down-time. With redundant machines we have the security of knowing that we are not going to be in trouble meeting our deadlines if a machine has any unexpected down-times.

Finally we have worked very hard to get our batch sizes as small as is reasonably possible while also reducing the setup time of each batch. This allows us to eliminate a sizable portion of each part waiting while the rest of the parts in the batch are being machined. The smaller batch sizes also help us to reduce our inventory and prevent the third source of waiting that we have identified.

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CNC Industries is a Fort Wayne, Indiana based machine shop specializing in precision CNC machining, fabrication and assembly of application-critical and custom machined parts for the Aerospace, Defense, Medical, Industrial and Transportation markets. The company presently employs approximately 55 people.

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June 9th, 2010|

Precision Aerospace Machining and the Seven Wastes of Lean (Part 3)

In continuing on the Lean Journey, we will talk about the third of seven wastes: Inventory. Historically, inventory was not considered a waste. Large batch manufacturing was a necessity at the beginning of modern machining and manufacturing. Inventory stocks were considered healthy as they indicated that a business could ship to their customers quickly. The story of Inventory becoming considered a waste starts in post WWII Japan. Japan underwent a transformation in their productivity and processes after WWII and began to compete well on the world market. Unfortunately Japan does not have the land area that America does, and therefore the cost of holding inventory was much greater – due to the higher property costs, etc. Toyoda quickly realized that smaller batches, when made efficiently, lead to lower overall costs than large batches do.

In a precision aerospace machining environment, a balancing act is needed. Since CNC Industries machines a large variety of precision parts we cannot afford to have a specialized machine for each part or process that we do. Small machine shops also do not have the luxury of a rolling assembly line between our machines. With these restrictions, and the large amount of processing and manufacturing time that it takes to make a single aerospace part, we are put into a more difficult position that a production facility. We cannot truly operate with no inventory as the goal would be, so we must decide on the ideal inventory to keep on hand.

Precision aerospace machining processes typically have rather long setup times relative to simpler machining processes. This causes the ideal batch size to increase in order to compensate for the lost time on the machine while it is down for setup. At CNC Industries we have worked long and hard to decrease our setup times and have successfully lowered our setup time by 75% over the last 5 years. This has enable us to lower the ideal batch size as well, which in turn allows us to hold less inventory.

In addition to the setup process improvements that we have made over the years, information management is key to efficiently running small batches. Smaller batches will mean more switchovers, more setups, and more jobs running at the same time. With all of these issues, scheduling is both critical and difficult. Job Manager II allows us to have a visual reference of the schedule at any computer throughout our facility and quickly identifies and problems or potential problems at an early stage of the process which allows us to quickly make any necessary adjustments.

June 7th, 2010|Tags: Aerospace Machining, Custom Machined Parts, inventory, Lean Manufacturing, Precision Machining, the seven wastes|

Ordering custom machined parts with a new machine shop supplier

In continuing the last post on finding a new precision machine shop for custom machined parts, I am going to go over a bit of what to expect with the first order or two.

Communication is still the key to the process. At CNC Industries, we have often been told that our communication is a large part of the reason we are a favored suppliers. Precision Machining is a relatively demanding process still today. The information overload that comes with each part drawing can often lead to overlooked features or specifications.

Aerospace components often contain numerous mil-specs, customer-specific specifications, large amounts of technical call-outs, and even separate purchase order specifications. Parts that are less complex than aerospace components may have critical details that are easy to overlook. Part Revisioning can cause increased complexity and another chance to overlook a crucial piece of information. If you have not checked it yet, it is important to carefully evaluate into your supplier’s information management system. The Boeing Company has stated that they consider a supplier’s information management system an important part of their selection process.

It is important for the new machine shop supplier to ask any clarifying questions necessary to get the complete picture of the machined part that they will be producing. Ideally all questions from the machine shop should come out during the RFQ process. However, it is not uncommon for the engineering team to take a deeper look at the part as they plan the production process. For example, during the RFQ process for new customer that we recently acquired we were able to ascertain that they had mislabeled a set of drawings they had sent us to quote. Through our examination of the part we noticed that some of the details seemed to be wrong for the stated use of the part. We consider our discovery of this error on their drawing to be a large part of the reason we received the initial purchase order.

Another important aspect of the first job is to carefully select which parts you will be sending to the new supplier. Looking toward a long-term relationship, it has worked well at CNC Industries for a new customer to order a variety of potential parts in the initial order. That way we have a good feel for the potential piece-part complexities. If you are to beging working with a new precision machine shop and send only small simple parts to them, you may find that they are not capable of handling the more complex machined parts that you want to order down the road. Likewise if you are sending only complex parts and you want to have a single source to deal with for machined parts, you may find that the machine shop is not price competitive on simpler parts.

As you can see from our parts profile page, CNC Industries works with a large variety of complexities and quantities on a daily basis.

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CNC Industries is a Fort Wayne, Indiana based machine shop specializing in precision CNC machining, fabrication and assembly of application-critical and custom machined parts for the Aerospace, Defense, Medical, Industrial and Transportation markets. The company presently employs approximately 55 people.

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June 1st, 2010|

Precision Aerospace Machining and the Seven Wastes of Lean Manufacturing (Part 2)

In continuing on the topic of lean manufacturing in an aerospace machining environment today I will look at how CNC Industries handles the second waste identified in lean manufacturing. The second waste is typically identified as unnecessary transportation. At CNC Industries we look both at internal and external transportation as areas that can cause waste.

The costs of external transportation (shipping) are easy to identify. With external transportation we can easily see the cost of the transportation in dollars as we receive bills from the shipping companies. Any extra shipments obviously incur additional charges and it becomes important to keep the number of shipments required to an absolute minimum. To facilitate this we often work with our outside vendors to have our parts shipped directly from one vendor to another in the case that we have multiple outside operations back to back. As often as possible we find outside vendors that handle multiple processes to save both on the cost of production as well as the cost of transportation. In addition our AS9100 compliant procedures for selecting and purchasing from our vendors allows us confidence in the quality of the parts that we have outsourced.

Internal transportation costs are often more difficult to quantify. Many times companies will both start and stop their efforts on cycle times and overproduction as I talked about in the prior post. Transporting the parts internally more than necessary is also a form of wasted efforts. The cost of moving the parts throughout a facility may seem minor but all forms of transportation take up time and do not add anything to the value of the part. In addition every time a part is moved it is another chance for the part to become lost or damaged.

Extra transportation can occur due to a number of factors in the manufacturing process. If the parts were not scheduled correctly they may need to be moved aside to allow a different part through the machine. Poor routing of the operations that the part takes through the manufacturing process may mean that a part is scheduled through machines that are far apart in the factory. Poor engineering of the part machining process itself may mean that the part has more machining operations than necessary. Any of these items may add additional internal transportation and raise the cost and potentially lower the quality of the part.

Our ERP System – Job Manager 2 – allows us to schedule our parts with confidence that they are engineered and routed correctly. In addition to the initial engineering and routing we have a comprehensive corrective action system and Process Change Request system that allow us to continually improve our processes. Each time we manufacture a part we are able to review and adjust the process and operations as necessary to make the parts even better and more efficiently than the last time.

Aerospace machining and the high mix / low volume work that comes with it creates additional challenges in scheduling. Our engineering processes are designed to quickly work through the numerous issues with new parts and smaller batches. Our scheduling module in Job Manager 2 has a visual scheduling board that allows us to quickly determine the best routing of each part and quickly determine any problems with the processes involved. Job Manager 2 also allows us to analyze each part and quickly find any areas that have lower efficiency so that we may quickly focus our efforts in the appropriate places.

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CNC Industries is a Fort Wayne, Indiana based machine shop specializing in precision CNC machining, fabrication and assembly of application-critical and custom machined parts for the Aerospace, Defense, Medical, Industrial and Transportation markets. The company presently employs approximately 55 people.

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May 14th, 2010|Tags: Aerospace Machining, Lean Manufacturing, Precision Machining, the seven wastes, transportation|

Aerospace machining and the seven wastes of lean manufacturing pt2

Due to a few issues on renaming the old post I am repeating the original post with the original title.

In continuing on the topic of lean manufacturing in an aerospace machining environment today I will look at how CNC Industries handles the second waste identified in lean manufacturing. The second waste is typically identified as unnecessary transportation. At CNC Industries we look both at internal and external transportation as areas that can cause waste.

The costs of external transportation (shipping) are easy to identify. With external transportation we can easily see the cost of the transportation in dollars as we receive bills from the shipping companies. Any extra shipments obviously incur additional charges and it becomes important to keep the number of shipments required to an absolute minimum. To facilitate this we often work with our outside vendors to have our parts shipped directly from one vendor to another in the case that we have multiple outside operations back to back. As often as possible we find outside vendors that handle multiple processes to save both on the cost of production as well as the cost of transportation. In addition our AS9100 compliant procedures for selecting and purchasing from our vendors allows us confidence in the quality of the parts that we have outsourced.

Internal transportation costs are often more difficult to quantify. Many times companies will both start and stop their efforts on cycle times and over production as I talked about in the prior post. Transporting the parts internally more than necessary is also a form of wasted efforts. The cost of moving the parts throughout a facility may seem minor but all forms of transportation take up time and do not add anything to the value of the part. In addition every time a part is moved it is another chance for the part to become lost or damaged.

Extra transportation can occur due to a number of factors in the manufacturing process. If the parts were not scheduled correctly they may need to be moved aside to allow a different part through the machine. Poor routing of the operations that the part takes through the manufacturing process may mean that a part is scheduled through machines that are far apart in the factory. Poor engineering of the part machining process itself may mean that the part has more machining operations than necessary. Any of these items may add additional internal transportation and raise the cost and potentially lower the quality of the part.

Our ERP System – Job Manager 2 – allows us to schedule our parts with confidence that they are engineered and routed correctly. In addition to the initial engineering and routing we have a comprehensive corrective action system and Process Change Request system that allow us to continually improve our processes. Each time we manufacture a part we are able to review and adjust the process and operations as necessary to make the parts even better and more efficiently than the last time.

Aerospace machining and the high mix / low volume work that comes with it creates additional challenges in scheduling. Our engineering processes are designed to quickly work through the numerous issues with new parts and smaller batches. Our scheduling module in Job Manager 2 has a visual scheduling board that allows us to quickly determine the best routing of each part and quickly determine any problems with the processes involved. Job Manager 2 also allows us to analyze each part and quickly find any areas that have lower efficiency so that we may quickly focus our efforts in the appropriate places.

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CNC Industries is a Fort Wayne, Indiana based machine shop specializing in precision CNC machining, fabrication and assembly of application-critical and custom machined parts for the Aerospace, Defense, Medical, Industrial and Transportation markets. The company presently employs approximately 55 people.

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May 14th, 2010|Tags: Aerospace Machining, Lean Manufacturing, Precision Machining, the seven wastes, transportation|

Precision Aerospace Machining and the Seven Wastes of Lean Manufacturing (pt1)

As I talked about in the last post, I will be examining the seven wastes identified in lean manufacturing and showing how CNC Industries handles each in a high mix / low volume aerospace machining environment. The first of the seven wastes is Overproduction. Overproduction is using more resources than necessary to create and deliver a part to the customer. Overproduction can be further defined as producing more, sooner or faster than what is necessary. Elimination of overproduction is a large factor in Just-In-Time systems that many manufacturers are focusing on. Just-in-time has a goal of eliminating inventory and producing or ordering material to arrive just in time for the operation that it is needed in.

Batch size is a large factor to consider when looking at overproduction. It is important to not produce too many parts – this leads to storing the excess parts in inventory for an excessive amount of time. However, in an aerospace machining environment the complexity of the parts is prohibitive to a true just-in-time system. When a part may take 6-8 weeks to manufacture and only a small amount of the parts are needed each week to create a new batch for every shipment would necessitate setting up a new batch each week and having multiple batches open at the same time. The logistics of tracking all of these batches combined with the costs and time of setting up a machine each week for the same part would be prohibitive. In addition to the setups and the logistics, material orders would necessarily be smaller and more frequent which would eliminate cost savings in ordering and require more time in purchasing and receiving material. Of course a production facility can avoid many of these pitfalls by having specially made machines that are dedicated to a certain process or part. In a high mix environment, machines tend to be needed for many different parts and cannot be dedicated to a select group of part.

Instead for a high-mix low volume aerospace machining facility, selecting the right batch size includes factoring in the setup costs and the lead time to create a batch that is a reasonable multiple of an individual shipment. In the above example it may be seen that a batch that is the equivalent of 10 weeks of shipments is the optimum size to reduce overproduction and minimize inventory storage time as well. The key is to account for holding costs, batch setup costs, and the estimated demand on a given machined part. Our ERP system, Job Manager 2, has a module to handle these calculations and give a suggested batch size in order to lower the overproduction to the lowest feasible amount. Selecting the right batch size is of paramount importance in attempting a lean operation in an aerospace machining environment that tends to have high mix and low volume production.

CNC Industries solves the problem of overproduction waste through efficient information handling and analysis. We have strong visualizations of our production and inventory and we regularly examine our production to ensure optimum batch size. Our ERP system both handles the batch size determination and the scheduling of the new batches to ensure that parts are produced at the right time and with the right quantity. When maintaining a Kan-Ban System for our aerospace customers it is vital that we both maintain enough inventory to handle their surges in demand, as well as minimize our batch size to allow us to produce the wide variety of parts that are requested.

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CNC Industries is a Fort Wayne, Indiana based machine shop specializing in precision CNC machining, fabrication and assembly of application-critical and custom machined parts for the Aerospace, Defense, Medical, Industrial and Transportation markets. The company presently employs approximately 55 people.

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May 7th, 2010|Tags: Aerospace Machining, Lean Manufacturing, overproduction, the seven wastes|

Lean manufacturing and Aerospace Machining, Low Volume / High Mix production

Lean manufacturing is a concept that most businesses strive for and many claim. The primary concept of lean manufacturing is eliminating all unnecessary costs and time associated with production. The primary way most companies will start with Lean is to manufacture parts as fast as possible – to get as much production from each machine as possible. As the cycle time decreases wasted machine time decreases as well. This is a great start to lean manufacturing, but it is also the most common method. Many companies focus on cycle time reduction almost entirely in their lean efforts.

Cycle Time reduction works best in environments where a machine shop is producing the same part for a long duration. This is typically a full production shop and will have dedicated machinery to optimize a single process to the fullest extent possible. In the aerospace machining industry or custom machined parts production we are not producing high enough volumes of many parts to dedicate an entire machine to a single part. As such aerospace machine shops and custom manufacturing shops (or job shops) will face additional difficulties in going ‘lean’.

Adjusting the cycle time down by 10% is not as effective of a lean tool when machine time may only be 60% or less of the time spent on producing a given part. The lower the proportion of machine time to non-machine time in a job, the more important it is to go lean in additional ways. in connection to that – the more often a machine needs to be set up for a new job the more non-machine cost is in the job – for reference a single aerospace machined part may have 5 or 6 separate machining operations each requiring an additional setup on the machine. Transferring the material to different areas, setting up the machine, inspecting the part throughout production, and other items add to the non-machine time at every step.

Over the next few posts I will be looking at the 7 wastes identified in a typical lean manufacturing implementation and how CNC Industries deals with each on in relation to our low volume / high mix work. We have some production jobs as well, but those are handled in slightly different ways, and will be discussed at a later time.

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CNC Industries is a Fort Wayne, Indiana based machine shop specializing in precision CNC machining, fabrication and assembly of application-critical and custom machined parts for the Aerospace, Defense, Medical, Industrial and Transportation markets. The company presently employs approximately 55 people.

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May 5th, 2010|Tags: Aerospace Machining, Lean Manufacturing, overproduction, wastes|

CNC Value Added Services for Aerospace Machining

Airplanes and other aerospace items need to be ordered well in advance of when they are needed. With long lead times and relatively low volumes – a good jet sells 200-300 units in a year – aerospace companies can get a pretty good read on what their needs will be for the next year or so. To aid our customers of aerospace machine parts we have added several services without increasing our costs to our customers. You can read all about our aerospace services in detail at our aerospace machining page or our aerospace machining definition page.

Our advanced information management capabilities allow us to provide long term stocking arrangements or kanban shipping. In many cases we hold the inventory for our aerospace customers and allow them to draw from our inventory rather than maintain their own inventory. We use various just-in-time production techniques to keep up with our customers’ assembly demands. For one of our customers we deliver parts on an demand-flow basis directly to the assembly line.. In addition we are able to build to an annual forecast, rather than directly to individual purchase orders. Machining the parts to an annual forecast, while we also maintain the inventory, combines to save our customers considerable cost and time.

CNC Industries has the ability to handle many different methods of receiving orders. We have multiple electronic systems, such as Exostar which many aerospace companies use, through which we receive new orders. We also have many customers who send electronic triggers through email to indicate additional requirements.

Some other value added services are more transparent to our customers but are still important. Our standard practice of handling machined parts within our facility is to create unique totes and tubs to protect the parts throughout the entire manufacturing process. We have strict maintenance policies and keep our facilities climate controlled, clean, and well lit. One traditional view of machine shops is that they are dingy, dirty and dangerous to walk around in. When coming to CNC Industries, we expect that you will immediately notice the difference in the care we take in maintaining our facility. Visitors frequently tell us that our facility is the cleanest and most advanced manufacturing facility that they have seen.

April 30th, 2010|Tags: Aerospace Machining, Precision Machining, value added services|

Changes to CNC Industries website

CNC Industries is going to be adding to our main website content. In examining our website we feel that we are not addressing some topics enough on our main site. While I am attempting to add content to our blog to help fill these voids, we are going to be adding many new pages over the next while to fill in the gaps that we see as present.

The first additions that we have made are aerospace machining and the definition of aerospace machining. We are focused heavily on aerospace machining, and we want our website to reflect this. The purpose of having two pages on essentially the same topic is to provide the detail information that not everyone will be familiar with.

While our website is very informative and serves to provide the same information that you will get from most shops, we are not satisfied with meeting the standards. We want anyone that comes to our site to be able to tell right away if CNC Industries will be a good fit to be a supplier for them. Our aerospace machining page is the first in a series of pages that is designed to address this issue.

Our Definitions area of the website will become filled with basic information about precision machining, and other topics which relate to CNC Industries. We will look to explore what defines precision machining and differentiates it from standard machining. We will of course look at what goes into aerospace machining, industrial machining, medical machining, automobile machining, and military machining and why CNC Industries has chosen the focuses that we have.

April 27th, 2010|Tags: Aerospace Machining, Custom Machined Parts, evaluating machine shops, Precision Machining|