First published in the August 1997 issue of Cutting Tool
Engineering magazine.
Understand Your Company Profile
The most basic factor contributing to wise decision-making is your company
type. And when it comes right down to it, there are only four types of
companies using CNC equipment: product producing companies, workpiece producing
companies (contract shops), tooling producing companies, and prototype
producing companies. The most complicated CNC environments tend to be in
product producing companies due to the diversity of machining operations
involved. Additionally, some companies have overlaps that complicated their CNC
environment. A product producing company may have a tool room and/or research
and development department (producing prototypes). A contract shop that gets
the bulk of its revenue by producing production workpieces for product
producing companies may additionally have a product line of its own.
Though company type is the most important factor contributing to your
company profile (and tends to set the trend for how other factors impact the
CNC environment), it is but one of many factors contributing to how you make
wise decisions in your CNC environment. Others include:
CNC personnel utilization
Company location (rural versus urban)
Competency level of CNC people
Machine types owned
Age of equipment
Tooling utilization (cutting and workholding)
Consistency among machines/controls
Lot sizes
Percentage of repeat business
Similarity among machined workpieces
Materials machined
Accessibility/cooperation of product designers
Emphasis on just in time (JIT)
Tolerances held
Emphasis on quality control
In all but the smallest companies, organizing and understanding the CNC
environment is no easy task. The factors just mentioned tend to conflict with
one another and must be prioritized. And the potential for different
combinations of factors is almost limitless. To complicate matters further,
many companies must also face the fact that what is right in one department may
not be right for another. One area of the company, for example, may have 100 %
repeat business, rather large lot sizes, and similar workpieces. Another may
never see the same job twice, small lot sizes of one or two workpieces, and
absolutely no similarity among machined parts. Applying the same methods to
both departments would be wasteful in at least one of the departments.
Feasibility further complicates the task of making wise decisions in your
CNC environment. Of course, anything is possible. But given limited resources,
not everything is feasible. Justification is directly related to feasibility.
Use the amount of repetition to help determine feasibility. Generally speaking,
the more times a task is repeated (any task), the more feasible it is to
improve the task, and the easier it is to justify what you intend to do.
Remember that the feasibility is a double-edged sword. Improvements that
cost you little or nothing to employ can be beneficial even in areas that may
not your of primary concern. A company that runs small lots, for example, may
not be overly concerned with minimizing program execution time, but they should
still implement any program formatting improvements that do so since they cost
nothing to employ.
While the conflicts just described mean specific usage techniques vary from
one CNC user to the next, the general concepts for continuous improvement
remain amazingly fixed. Our objective will be to relate these concepts and form
a foundation on which your CNC utilization improvement program can be built.
While we will show a few specific examples, we do so for the sole purpose of
illustrating the points being made.
