The Fabricator - November 2013

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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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.