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 that we are among their favored suppliers.  Precision Machining is a relatively tricky 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, large amounts of technical call-outs, and even purchase order specifications.  Even 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 some crucial piece of information.  If you have not checked yet, it is important to check into your supplier’s information management system.

It is important for the machine shop that you are starting out with to ask any clarifying questions necessary to get the complete picture of the machined part that they are producing.  Ideally all questions from the machine shop should have 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 prepare the production router and fixture.  In the RFQ process of a new customer that we acquired we were able to ascertain that they had mislabeled a set of drawings that they had sent out for 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 that we received the initial purchase order.

Another important aspect of the first job is to carefully select what part or parts you will be sending to the new supplier.  It has worked best at CNC Industries to have a new customer order a variety of potential parts in the initial order.  It is good to have a scope of potential work complexities.  If you are to start doing work with a new precision machine shop and only send small simple work to them, you may find that they are not capable of handling the 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.  One way to deal with both of these issues is to give at least a relative expectation of cost to your new supplier, ie: ‘for our simple parts we typically pay half of what we pay for the complex 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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April 14th, 2010|Tags: , , , , , |

Needed: Precision Machine Shop for Custom Machined Parts

Many companies that need custom machined parts are not sure of the process of getting started with a machine shop supplier.  In this post I will go over the basic process.  As I talked about in a prior post about evaluating a precision machine shop, it is important be careful in selecting a supplier of custom made parts.  In society today it is normal to simply  go with the lowest price on pretty much any purchase.  With the modernization of production, it is normally safe to assume that any product purchased will pretty much be the exact same no matter where it is purchased.  With custom machine parts, it is important to ensure that the supplier is qualified and capable of making the part.

Large companies will spend a large amount of time vetting a new supplier that makes custom machined parts.  Two recent companies that have started with CNC Industries, spent an average of 6 months in the process of examining our company before sending their first production purchase orders to us.  In the process of examining our company the new customers looked at our production capabilities, our information management systems, our  inspection processes, and the custom machined parts that we have made in the past.

Now a small company will probably not have a team that is used to handling this process.  Many small companies may never have had to order custom parts before.  For those companies 6 months research of a new machine shop supplier is probably not an option that they can consider.  In that case, an examination of the website of the potential supplier is worthwhile of course, but anyone can have a nice web presence.  It is still possible to feel out a new machine shop without the lengthy process that large companies go through.

One way to start is to simply send out a Request For Quote  (RFQ) to the machine shop in question.  I would certainly recommend not simply going off of the price of the quote as the only determinate of which company to go with.  After receiving the quotes, you will probably see a wide variety of prices come in.  After getting these quotes call up a couple of machine shops from different price levels and ask to talk about how they are going to manufacture your part.  You will be able to  get a feel of the company by how they describe the process.  Some questions to ask them:

  • How did the come up with the price that they did?
  • What engineering steps take place before manufacturing?
  • What process control methods do they employ to ensure quality throughout manufacturing?
  • How is their inspection done?
  • Are they certified ISO or any other appropriate certification?

and one other that has been useful to many of our customers:

  • Are there any changes to the part that the machine shop would recommend in order to lower production cost?

We have been able to save many of our customers considerable amount on their prices by making minor non-functional changes to the part to enable easier machining.  Engineers that are focusing on assembly and pure functionality of the parts that they are designing may add features into a part that slow production time considerably but are not necessary to the functioning of the component (undercuts, overly tight tolerances, odd size material requirements, unusual material types etc)

Of course ask any other questions that you see appropriate.  It is important that you feel comfortable working with the machine shop that you decide upon. Our philosophy is that the most important measure of a machine shop is that of customer satisfaction.  We believe in what we call the 3 legged stool: Price, Quality and Customer Service.  Each of these attributes contributes to the overall value of the precision machine shop.

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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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April 9th, 2010|Tags: , |

Addressing Precision Aerospace Machining Difficulties

In the last post I talked about the difficulties of precision machining aerospace parts.  I would like to address these issues and specifically talk about how CNC Industries handles each of them.

The first issue, namely tight tolerances, is addressed in a few different ways.  The first step is to make sure that the equipment being used is capable of the types and quality of machining necessary.  Proper maintenance is also an important step, many companies lay-off their maintenance staff at the first sign of a downturn.  Maintenance is a key aspect of CNC Industries’ strategy.  The second step of ensuring that tolerances are met happens in engineering.  Engineering staff creates fixtures, work drawings, and machine code to run the part correctly.  Engineering is another key area that CNC Industries believes should not be cut too early.  The third step is to ensure that information about the part flows correctly.  To aid in this we have written our own ERP system.  Job Manager 2 is a real time system that enables information to be updated and transferred throughout the facility so that any changes made are implemented immediately.

The second issue, the amount of material removed, is a prime engineering problem.  The fixture created for each part must take into account the changes in strength that the material will go through during the machining process.  With fixturing being such an important aspect of creating a good custom machined part, we go through a process we call the Pre-Flight Meeting.  In this meeting our top management, quality assurance, engineers, and shop floor supervisors meet to discuss any issues that we see as important to the manufacturing of the part.

The third issue, external quality standards, is again addressed through information management.  Our ERP system allows each part to have an unlimited amount of quality standards.  The part routers created in Job Manager 2 allow for any and all detailed information to be added to an individual operation.  The amount of detail contained in each router, in addition to the real-time ERP system allows us to ensure that all of the information needed to complete a job to the full satisfaction of our customer is accessible at all times.

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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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April 5th, 2010|Tags: , , , |

Difficulties with Precision Aerospace Machining

Machine Shops that work on a variety of different types of parts will know that custom machined parts for one industry may have drastically different issues than those machined parts for another industry.  Aerospace components tend to have similarities in what makes them difficult.  A few of the issues that face  include: extremely tight tolerances, large numbers of machined features, large amount of material removed during machining, and multiple quality specifications.

Let’s look at the tight tolerances.  Airplanes are assembled from a huge numbers individually manufactured parts.  Each of these parts needs to be manufactured to a precise tolerance in order to facilitate assembly.  By themselves tight tolerances are merely a norm in the precision machine shop world.  it is when combined with the other factors that the tight tolerances cause difficulties.

The second difficulty of custom aerospace parts is the large number of machined features.  An individual aerospace component may potentially have several hundred individual features.  When you will have hundreds of dimensional checkpoints, even a single feature that is at the edge of tolerance can cascade and cause future dimensions to be further off.  The only way to ensure that a part is going to be good is to hold the earliest tolerances even tighter than what the prints call for.

Implied in the second point is the amount of material removed.  Removing a large amount of material causes it’s own difficulties and stresses on the machinery.  Additionally the material itself will change dramatically as it loses the tensile strength of it’s original form while being  machined.  The programming and fixturing of the custom machined part needs to account for the changing strength of the material while simultaneously ensuring that tolerances are kept throughout.

Finally, in addition to the other issues, aerospace parts tend to have many external quality standards in terms of fit and finish.  The cosmetics need to be pristine and the painting or plating needs to be done exceptionally well.

The 2 parts pictured below exemplify some of the complexities of custom machined aerospace parts.

Here are some additional custom machined parts that we have made.

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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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March 25th, 2010|Tags: , , , |

Document Management in a Precision Machine Shop

Document Management is a very tricky and important skill to have in a Precision Machine Shop.  At CNC Industries, we deal with a wide variety of custom parts.  Some are simple and some are very complex parts.  Either way, each part that we machine has a variety of dimensions which may be very critical to the part.  In addition to the physical dimensions, in dealing with aerospace or military manufactured parts, there may be a large number of quality specifications which need to be followed.

CNC Industries uses a component of our ERP system to handle our document management needs.  Job Manager tracks all pertinent documents for all of the thousands of custom parts that we manufacture.    The Doc Manager Module is fully searchable, indexed, and has security implemented.  All uses may see only the documents that they need to, and any documentation that is needed is available quickly.

Gone are the days of the 50 page Job Router.  With our Paperless Doc Manager system, we have been able to save time and money while ensuring that all of our information is kept up to date at all times.  All documents are updated in real time allowing us to quickly react to any engineering or customer changes that occur.

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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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March 9th, 2010|Tags: , , , |

Evaluating a Precision Machine Shop

At CNC Industries, as a precision machine shop are very interested in how we are evaluated for performance.  Traditionally machine shops are evaluated on the basis of
their ability to make the parts to specification.  While this is still a critical component to a machine shop, we do not feel that it adequately addresses all of the issues.

Precision Machining is certainly based on the actual manufacturing of the parts, the intangibles are as critical to the overall performance of the machine shop itself.  Questions that should be asked include:

  • Is the company adequately addressing any problems or concerns that come up?
  • Does the company follow best practice guidelines?
  • Does the company maintain it’s manufacturing equipment well?
  • Does the machine shop treat it’s customers with honesty and integrity?
  • Does the company perform to it’s promised delivery dates?
  • if a delivery date is going to be missed for any reason, does the shop notify the customer of the delay?
  • Does the company follow industry standards such as ISO 9001 and others?

Of course there could be many more questions that need to be addressed to fully evaluate a company.  But the main issue is that, even in a precision machine shop, it is important to look at the customer service given.

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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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March 3rd, 2010|Tags: , , |

Continuous Improvement and Precision Machining

There is a lot of buzz about continuous improvement in the business world today.  As a precision machine shop that focuses on contract manufacturing, CNC Industries has a different perspective than am office or a production machining facility.  While we do have several production jobs, the bulk of our work comes in short term contracts.

With short term contracts we do not have the luxury of being able to improve upon our performance throughout a physical run of a job.   Our customers demand a high level of precision, so we also cannot ‘dial the tolerance in’ over time.   Instead we need to focus on getting a repeatable general process developed which allows us to quickly and efficiently switch between our various contracted jobs.

Our continuous improvement initiative needs to account for the fact that our machines may be running different custom parts tomorrow than they are making today.  With all of this in mind, we allow each person in our company to suggest improvements both to how we run an individual machined part, as well as suggestions for the overall process of machining, how we get ready to machine parts, ability to keep precision, and any other facet of how our company works.  Our Process Change Request system ensures that each employee has the ability to express their thoughts for improvement in a way that will be reviewed in a timely manner.

Through the use of technology – specifically our ERP system Job Manager, we are able to monitor how effective we are from day to day.  We are able to track overall shop performance as well as any individual  job performance.  We make sure that all of our machinery is kept up-to-date with maintenance and we regularly purchase new equipment as needed.  As we see areas that are lagging in performance we are able to quickly remedy any deficiencies.

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CNC Industries is a Fort Wayne, Indiana based Job-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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March 1st, 2010|Tags: , , , |

Preparing for AS 9100

We are full bore getting ready for our AS9100 audit which is coming up in a few months.  We have been operating well above the ISO9001-2000 standard for years now and feel that AS9100 will improve our company as well as improve our ability to attract new aerospace customers.    As a precision machine shop, we are very focused on continual improvement — it is an essential focus as the industry becomes ever more competitive.

In a nutshell AS9100 certification ensures that we follow a high level of standardization in documentation and in our processes.    Since we make a large number of custom machined parts it is imperative that our documentation is under tight control.    We focus a lot of our effort on our internal ERP system and other technology.   Job Manager allows us to very easily meet AS9100 standards while still performing very efficiently.

info_station_brother

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CNC Industries is a Fort Wayne, Indiana based Job-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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February 26th, 2010|Tags: , , |

The importance of Information Management in the modern Job Shop

First I think it would be good to define what a Job shop is.  According to Wikipedia, Job shops are typically small manufacturing operations that handle specialized manufacturing processes such as small customer orders or small batch jobs. Job shops typically move on to different jobs (possibly with different customers) when each job is completed.  By nature of this type of manufacturing operation, job shops are usually specialized in skill and processes. In computer science the problem of job shop scheduling is considered strongly NP-hard.

A typical example would be a machine shop that makes components for the aerospace industry.  Most parts on airplanes are made in relatively small quantities compared to iPods. Other types of common job shops are grinding, honing, jig-boring, and gear manufacturing shops.  The opposite would be continuous flow manufactures such as textile, steel, and food manufacturing.

Because Job Shops do not know from one day to the next exactly what jobs they may receive from their customers, good information management is extremely important.   Consider that a typical 50 person machine shop might have 100-200 jobs flowing through their shop at any time.  Then consider that each of those jobs has anywhere from 100 to 500 or more details associated with them.  Details such as dimensions, MIL specs, customer specifications, delivery information, outsourcing information, special notes, etc, etc…    It’s easy to see that the volume of information that must be managed can become overwhelming without extremely good information management.    If even one piece of information is missed, the shop has a potential quality and/or delivery problem.

CNC Industries, Inc. a medium sized job shop in Fort Wayne, Indiana has developed a proprietary information management system.    Comprised of a software and hardware solution, their ERP system has been custom written to very precisely meet their needs.   The ERP system, known as Job Manager II tracks all aspects of every job as it moves through the shop.    The system collects as well as disseminates information to every person in the company in real-time.

Now in its second version, Job Manager II has given CNC industries, Inc. a very distinct advantage in quality and on-time delivery performance.

Reference:

Wikipedia – Information management (IM) is the collection and management of information from one or more sources and the distribution of that information to one or more audiences. This sometimes involves those who have a stake in, or a right to that information.  Management means the organization of and control over the structure, processing and delivery of information.

Throughout the 1970s this was largely limited to files, file maintenance, and the life cycle management of paper-based files, other media and records. With the proliferation of information technology starting in the 1970s, the job of information management took on a new light, and also began to include the field of Data maintenance. No longer was information management a simple job that could be performed by almost anyone. An understanding of the technology involved, and the theory behind it became necessary. As information storage shifted to electronic means, this became more and more difficult. By the late 1990s when information was regularly disseminated across computer networks and by other electronic means, network managers, in a sense, became information managers. Those individuals found themselves tasked with increasingly complex tasks, hardware and software. With the latest tools available, information management has become a powerful resource and a large expense for many organizations.

In short, information management entails organizing, retrieving, acquiring and maintaining information. It is closely related to and overlapping with the practice of Data Management.

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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 30th, 2009|Tags: |
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