Precision Machining Archives

The community responds to our “Occupy A Job” sign

Since putting up a yard sign which says – Occupy A Job, We’re Hiring! – we have received a significant community response to it. We’re very pleased to say that most people accepted the sign in the spirit that we intended it – that we’re growing and we have several positions available for qualified people.

Although admittedly the sign is a play on the “Occupy” movement which is spreading around the country, we didn’t intend for this sign to be interpreted as an anti-Occupy Wall Street message. In fact, we agree with some of the issues that the OWS groups have. We just happen to believe that rather than Occupy public land in protest, the best thing we can do as a small business is to work at growing our business and create new jobs.

Kevin Leininger of the Fort Wayne News Sentinel newspaper was the first to pick up on the sign. He interviewed Steve Deam Sr. and Steve Deam Jr. and wrote

[this article]].

As you can tell by some of the comments on the article, some people take exception to the message on the sign. I’m not sure how a message that we have jobs available is a bad thing, but apparently to some people it is…

The following day WANE TV contacted us for an on-camera interview and aired [this piece] on the sign.

Exactly one week later Indiana News Center requested an interview and aired [this piece] as a follow-up to the story.

As a result of the unexpected media exposure, we were flooded with résumés and applications.

Reaction to the sign was overwhelmingly positive. We received numerous emails from people, as well as had people stop in, who wanted to let us know they loved the sign. We even received emails from people in Arizona and Utah who said they saw the story on their local news.

We also received positive reaction from many of our own employees, and in fact, it was a couple of our employees that suggested we add tents to draw more attention to the sign. Our office staff told me that out of the well over 100 applicants, not one person had anything negative to say about the sign. We even had at least one person from the “Occupy Fort Wayne” movement stop in to apply!

CNC Industries would like to thank all of those people who have applied for a position. Due to the strong response, we expect to be able to quickly fill the 5-7 positions currently available and will draw upon these applicants for future positions as they become available. We are in the process of reviewing each and every application, and will be contacting people very soon for an interview.

We wish we had jobs available for every applicant who truly wants a job, but unfortunately we don’t. We’re working on it though. Going forward we anticipate creating anywhere from 10 to 30 new jobs each year.

December 19th, 2011|Tags: CNC Industries, CNC machining, Lean Manufacturing, Occupy A Job, Occupy Wall Street, OWS, Precision Machining|

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.

– – – –

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.

– – – –

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

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|

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.

– – – –

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.

– – – –

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.

– – – –

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.

– – – –

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

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|

What is aerospace machining?

Aerospace machining is a subset of CNC machining. Specifically aerospace machining (as you can tell from the name) deals with parts manufactured for use on airplanes, satellites, the space station, or other aircraft. Aerospace machining is defined by its complexity, use of lightweight high strength materials, rigid requirements and specifications, and the strict precision necessary for the manufacture of the parts.

Components made by a cnc machine shop for use in the aerospace industry will typically be designed to be assembled with other components – whether machined or stocked parts. As such, it is vitally important for a machine shop focused on aerospace machining to be able to produce high precision machined parts every time.

Parts may be made from a variety of different materials. At CNC Industries, we have focused on aluminum which is a major component in many types of aircraft. Aluminum machining has it’s own areas of complexity and is very different from steel machining that may be more familiar to automobile manufacturers. Aluminum is a focused material in aerospace machining because it is lightweight yet still very strong. Titanium is also used for many space oriented components, but due to the cost and increased difficulty of machining, is not as prevalent in traditional aircraft.

April 19th, 2010|Tags: Aerospace Machining, Custom Machined Parts, Precision Machining|

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.

– – – –

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.

– – – –

April 14th, 2010|Tags: communication, Information Management, Ordering, Precision Machining, RFQ, The First Job|

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.

– – – –

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.

– – – –

April 5th, 2010|Tags: Aerospace Machining, Custom Machined Parts, job production, Precision Machining|