Downtime
Most of the cost of hiring and train-
ing people is almost always hidden
and significant. If you have high turnover, you have higher
costs than you should have. Great companies make it a
very big issue to track the real reasons people leave, simply
because they are aware of the replacement costs. Often
people are fired for inefficiency, but you need to know
what is causing the inefficiency. Is it really the person—or
is it because of some of the factors described here?
Hidden costs abound in any shop, but the ones de-
scribed here are the most common. Every one of them is
solvable. Taken individually or in combination, these hid-
den costs greatly affect a company’s financial and compet-
itive performance.
Everybody notices the big machine
breakdowns, but few really pay attention to the other times a machine
may be down. That’s why machine
downtime is a big hidden cost. It’s a
significant time robber and just as
costly as other wastes. It kills labor efficiency, average throughput, and often has everyone chasing the wrong
thing. Search waste is a contributor;
so is excessive material movement
and changeover times.
Dick Kallage is principal of KDC & Associates Ltd., 522
S. Northwest Highway, Suite UL- 8, Barrington, IL 60010,
847-525-6109, www.kdcconsultants.com. Kallage serves
on the Management Advisory Council of the Fabricators
& Manufacturers Association Intl. and helps lead FMA’s
LeanFab, metal fabrication seminars dedicated to continuous improvement. For more information, visit www.
fmanet.org or call 888-394-4362.
Schedule Disruptions
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MegaFab-3400HVYad_Standard-bleed_OctFAB_flat copy.pdf 1 9/8/13 4:34 PM
When you see inefficiencies in ma-chine-related operations, start with
finding the reasons for downtime on
the machine. You may find a variety
of causes: material movement, material availability, searching for tools,
drawing clarifications, poor preventive maintenance, or unmeasured
and unstandardized changeovers.
This is one of the most common
and costly wastes at custom fabricators. It reduces machine capacity,
causing missed schedules and the
resulting expedites, unnecessarily
adding machines and people to replace the lost capacity—capacity you
didn’t even know you had in the first
place.
This cost is not so hidden but is caused
by the hidden drivers discussed here,
as well as some others. Drivers vary,
and can include rework, scrap, and
expedites. Great companies protect
their schedule sequence like gold because the disruptions cause so much
waste. But to do this in the real world,
you must remove the reasons for the
disruptions. The best way is to have
fast cycle times. To do that you must
eliminate the hidden waste costs and
operate in a lean flow environment:
WIP control, small-lot processing, efficient transfer means, single-point
scheduling.
Ultimate Combinations
LASER PLASMA BEVEL PUNCH MILL
Schedule disruptions have another
name: chaos. The cost multiplication
is huge and pervasive. The goal is no
production meetings: The schedule is
fixed, and everything is in sequence
from start to finish. Believe me, this is
doable and practical.
TAP FORM MARK INTEGRATE
People Turnover
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