In our company and others that I have worked for, the typical critical path through the office is engineering. From the time I kick a project off, the critical path is profile drawings, shop drawings, material takeoffs and fabrication drawings. Even the material lead times (metal 12 weeks or high performance glass) don’t seem to be the issue. By the time we are done with the material takeoffs, the fabrication tickets can take as long as the materials.
We have done a number of things to try and simplify this process. I thought I would spend the next couple of posts documenting our ideas and achievements to help others.
So, first, let’s define the problem. I find in most process improvement the biggest issue is getting the question right. We all can come up with good answers, but will it really fix the underlying problem?
To start with, we are a manufacturing company. 95% of all of the projects we do, we design, engineer, extrude and fabricate our own systems. We don’t buy systems from outside vendors very often and all of the engineering is done in-house by our own employees. This is probably different from most companies that either do not do their own systems or have some type of mix of outside and internal systems.
By doing this, we are able to control our own destiny. We are not at the mercy of outside resources. We are a customer focused company, so our ability to meet the schedule needs drives this business decision. But it creates its own problems also. When the market gets hot and there is lots of work, our ability to scale is limited by this decision. When times get tough and there isn’t much work in the marketplace, you also have to make some tough decisions.
For me, the issue comes down to people. In our business, there is a huge amount of specialized knowledge. When I came to this company 8 years ago, the people doing fabrication tickets were the most experienced people in the company. They knew how the systems worked, what they could do and what they couldn’t and how to represent it to a less experienced shop worker. Finding more people in our industry with this knowledge is difficult if not impossible.
The second issue we face is time. There never seems to be enough of it. In our process, everything was still being done by hand. The estimating was done with some type of spreadsheet and manual takeoff. The shop drawings were digital, but then pushed into an analog (paper) format. Takeoffs were done from the paper and put back into excel for processing. Fabrication tickets were done from paper and then pushed out into another analog format for the shop.
We also needed to make the flow of information to the machinery easier. I already have an engineering bottleneck, now the new machinery actually adds a process to the steps. How do we make this easy?
So, the question we were trying to answer was:
- How do you create a seamless “once generated, constantly refined” data set that can flow from sales through operations to the shop?
- How do you make this system scale? You want to have a process that requires less people so it can survive the down times, but be able to scale it up with the same people during the really busy times.
- Can the system encorporate enough Knowledge Management (KB) so you can have new bright less experienced people able to do the work?
- Can the system provide a more consistent output? Our shop is our least experienced staff and most do not have a good grasp of english. If we can standardize the fabrication tickets, cutting lists and packaging it makes it easier to avoid “interpretation” errors.
- Can the system speak directly to the machinery? If we can make it mostly digital, can the data flow to the machines without additional steps?
- Can it accomodate existing processes? We had already developed specific Excel formats that worked for our vendors. Can we keep these forms as the output with a new system?
