Why Shops Experience Low Throughput (and how THIS ERP can help)

Written by: Paul Van Metre and David Vuyk

ProShop recently made a post on Linkedin stating that we can help machine shops get parts out the door faster. This prompted a contact of mine to send me a quick message asking a very important question. Here are his exact words:

“Please explain how the ERP system is going to help cutting the metal (Value-added processes)… Getting the parts out the door faster.”

I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this question. Let’s get something straight: There should be a healthy skepticism to suggest that any ERP solution can directly impact the manufacturing process and ultimately increase shop throughput by a meaningful amount. 

The fact that ProShop can and routinely does help manufacturers dramatically improve throughput (a 25% increase is quite common) is quite honestly the crux of a semi-identity crisis that ProShop has had since day one. But why? 

While ProShop has many of the traditional ERP functions you’d expect, it also has a vast number of functions that would be better classified under the terms Manufacturing Execution System(MES) or Quality Management System (QMS) as opposed to general ERP functions. These are the features and functions whereby ProShop can significantly contribute to the value-added processes – aka cutting the metal. (I love that specific focus from the person asking!)

But why does ProShop even have those features in the first place? 

Before ProShop existed, my co-founders and I launched a precision machining company and grew it from zero to over 75 team members and 30+ machines. During those 17 years we developed ProShop to help our company solve the most significant issues that we faced as a manufacturer. As disciples of Lean Manufacturing, we had an acute focus on removing waste. This naturally had an effect on the software we were building – In fewer words: We developed a software solution that allowed us to increase the amount of time we were engaged in value-added processes – aka, cutting the metal.  Let’s dig in to those:

There are really two main categories of downtime that reduce a shop’s ability to actively cut metal: Having machines sit totally idle, and long set-up times where the machine isn’t actively running. 

A machine might sit totally idle for any number of reasons. Let’s tackle these one at a time, in no particular order.

Having machines sit totally idle for one of many reasons:

• No material
• No cutting tools
• No inspection gages
• No program
• No fixture
• Nobody to run machines
• No Job Traveler
• The machine broke down or is in service
• Waiting for QA to finish the FAI

No Material: Many ERPs can help solve this basic problem. But those systems often still have gaps. For Example: A job needs to run on a different machine than typical and requires a different material or stock size – like an extra ¼” of stock because of an alternative fixturing method. Most ERPs don’t have features to solve that common situation. ProShop has selectable build scenarios (or “routings”), which include unique material specifications for each selectable routing. This feature can automatically queue the proper material to procurement when a routing change is made. This ensures that the correct material is available on time. ProShop also has very sophisticated material inventory and allocation functions, so even when you have hundreds of work orders coming and going that consume hundreds of different material types, ProShop will ensure you always have what you need, not more and not less, so you can spend more time…cutting the metal.

No Cutting Tools: How often do you have employees walking around for hours looking for tools? It happens every day in shops. The machines sit idle during all this time, not cutting metal. In an attempt to solve this, you could awkwardly put consumable cutting tools on the BOM of a traditional ERP system, but that would be…awkward, and for many nuanced reasons doesn’t work well. ProShop’s Tooling and RTA (Rotating Tool Assembly) modules can not only catalog and inventory tools, but associate them to the Part routing. We can nearly guarantee that the proper quantity of the exact cutting tools will always be available. When a work order of a given quantity is generated, the accurate tool demand is pushed into the purchasing system, with the proper dates, so that the team can ensure that the correct tools are ready in inventory when the job hits the machine. This helps to reduce setup time and lets you…cut metal.

No Inspection Gauges: Here’s a scenario: You either quoted a job that has a special gage you don’t yet own, but the need to order said gage didn’t make it on anyone’s list, so when you go to make or inspect the part, you don’t have what you need, and the machine sits idle for hours or days – not cutting metal. Or perhaps the gauge you need is owned, but it’s not currently calibrated or is out being calibrated, so you can’t use it anyway.  So the machine sits. ProShop’s Part module can itemize the specific inspection gauge requirements for any part number. Our Process Development feature can help estimators and planners ensure that those special gages get identified early on, and purchasing is tied in to ensure they’re procured on time. This is a pain-point we personally encountered on the shop floor at our shop, Pro CNC, which drove the development of these features into ProShop. When you have the right gages on hand… you can cut more metal.

No Program: How often have you had a job that needs to get set up on a machine but the CNC program isn’t ready yet?  Yea, as do most shops all the time.  This is because of a lack of planning, coordination between departments, or lack of visibility. Often the first time the team knows a job needs to be programmed is when they pull the paper job traveler out of a pile and realize there is a new part, or new revision that needs to be programmed at the last minute. This is NOT the time to realize a program is needed. (Same with the CMM program) ProShop manages the programming queue, allowing programmers or leads to assign jobs to specific programmers, well in advance. ProShop can even automatically add programming operations when the job is a new revision. Our queued work function or employee scheduling function can allow programmers to see their upcoming work queues days or weeks ahead, and provide real-time updates to when the programming process needs to start and be completed based on fluctuations in the machine schedule. The dates of when CNC programs are needed are directly displayed in the schedule so everyone is aware. The programmer can also tie their programs directly to the list of tools managed in ProShop, further providing absolute clarity about the list of tools they intend to use on each operation, the proper holders, extension lengths, and expected tool life. This visibility and coordination can dramatically reduce the scramble of not having the proper programs and tools, hence, allowing a shop to…cut more metal.

No Fixture: “I can’t find the fixture for this job I’m setting up!” said every machinist at some point, and some poor machinists say it daily or weekly. When shops process thousands of part numbers per year, and many of them need a special fixture, jig, collet, jaws, or something custom or special, it’s no surprise that many go missing. Traditional ERPs don’t typically handle this.  Fixture storage areas frequently turn into piles of never-ending, unorganized, improperly labeled fixtures, some that will only be found once a new replacement is made after the original hours-long search was unfruitful. What happens to the machines while the search is afoot? It sits, not cutting metal. ProShop’s Fixture Module is a simple yet highly effective way to ensure the proper fixtures are made, labeled, stored in a well-defined location, and then proactively moved to archives or recycled when they’re no longer needed.  The result is a far more organized and smaller storage area, and ProShop tells the team exactly what fixture is needed and where to go find it in seconds.  When the fixture is reliably available, setups go faster and you can more quickly…cut metal.

Nobody to Run Machines: An ERP can’t possibly help with this, right?!?  Wrong. ProShop helps remedy this problem in several ways. ProShop is a significant recruitment tool for many of our customers.  When a skilled machinist is deciding where to park their toolbox next, companies who are #PoweredByProShop often have luck attracting employees who crave the organization, and the investment in technology. The prospective employees can see how ProShop will make their jobs easier, allow them to contribute their knowledge of the process in a meaningful way back into the system, and simply eliminate the need to hunt for job travelers. Beyond that benefit, ProShop can help shops better utilize and schedule their teams, identifying which jobs might need higher percentages of manual labor, vs. jobs with lots of automated run-time and little manual time required.  This type of visibility can help with labor plans, ensuring that machines are properly staffed. Furthermore, ProShop’s Training Module and Visual Work Instruction feature can help inexperienced operators get ramped-up to productivity considerably faster than other methods, ensuring that even the greenest staff can effectively make quality parts very quickly once hired. Once again, these features were largely driven by challenges we were facing in our own machine shop, and another way in which ProShop is fundamentally different from other solutions. All of these benefits of ProShop can significantly improve the availability of people with the proper knowledge and skills to run machines.  You know what happens when you do that? Your machines can run more often…cutting metal.

No Traveler: This one doesn’t need a lengthy explanation. Paper travelers suck. A client recently told me they found a long-lost traveler on top of a high shelf in a bathroom. They had spent hours looking for it while the machine sat idle. ProShop is truly 100% paperless on the shop floor which means you can’t lose travelers, setup, or inspection sheets, and you’ll spend more time…cutting metal.

Machine Broke Down or in Service: In the hustle and bustle of a busy manufacturing company, preventative maintenance often falls by the wayside. When PMs are managed on spreadsheets, they are often forgotten about until the machine decides for you that it’s not willing to keep working without an emergency repair. That obviously gets in the way of cutting metal in a hurry! ProShop’s Equipment module makes it easy to set up any machine or piece of equipment on as many fully customizable schedules as needed to proactively alert about preventative maintenance items.  It will even escalate alerts to managers if the PMs aren’t performed in time.  And with the ability to add BOM items for any service, which feeds into the inventory and purchasing module, you can be confident that you’ll always have the necessary items to perform maintenance.  When you can reliably count on PM to be done on schedule, you’ll increase spindle uptime, and more often be…cutting metal!

Waiting for QA to Finish the FAI: QA departments are one of the main bottlenecks in many companies. Jobs get stuck there for all sorts of reasons which often stalls out the manufacturing department. Often it’s just an overwhelming number of jobs needing inspection, but sometimes lack of pre-planning contributes significantly. Waiting for a first article to be completed is one of the main reasons machines sit idle. When a job is submitted into QA without a completed inspection plan already created in advance, it will certainly sit for much longer while the plan is developed, found in a filing cabinet, or the CMM is programmed. 

Similar to CNC programming, this issue is largely due to a lack of coordination and communication. ProShop can solve this in numerous ways:

We believe and advocate for inspection planning to happen at the very beginning of the job. In ProShop, quality departments can be alerted about any new job the moment the order is received. Furthermore, it’s explicitly visible if the order is a new revision or has a new FAI requirement. This allows the QA department to prioritize and create quality plans early, so that they’re ready to go when the parts hit the QA lab.

Furthermore, ProShop can natively contain the inspection plan within each operation of its Part record. Because of this, the exact inspection plan for any manufacturing or inspection operation is accessed with the click of a button directly from the Work Order page. There is no hunting to find the plan. The inspection results can be directly entered into ProShop, and the FAI signed off once it’s complete, which is visible to anyone looking at the Work Order.  

By providing clear planning of what inspection plans need to be created, as well as a queue of jobs needing FAIs, and total clarity about when the jobs are done with inspection, machinists can get back to the job of…cutting metal!

Ok, now on to the second category of down time that reduce a shop’s ability to actively cut metal:

Long setup times where the machine isn’t technically totally idle, but it’s not actively running either. Because of:

• Vague work instructions that lead to cautious and slow setups
• Searching for tooling that is in the shop, but not prepared and ready
• Making the same mistakes over and over because the solutions haven’t been incorporated well enough into the process.

Vague work instructions: When a machinist is trying to figure out what a machine is doing (or about to do) by reading the G-Code, or by looking at an old oil and coffee-stained setup sheet with lots of handwritten notes all over it, it doesn’t exactly instill confidence in the robustness of the setup instructions. Naturally, the result is a much slower, and  cautious setup machinist who doesn’t want to crash the machine. ProShop solves this by completely eliminating the paper setup sheets, allowing clear, rev-controlled, visual work instructions with photos, videos, rich text, tool lists, fixture details, and step-by-step bulleted instructions on exactly how to set up a machine. This clarity not only instills confidence, speeding up the process but is also likely to reduce scrap, further shortening the setup process. This lets the shop get much faster to the value-added process of…cutting metal!

Searching for tooling that is in the shop, but not prepared and ready: When a job is ready to go on a machine, that’s the time to start collecting tools, fixtures, and gauges. Right? Wrong. In that case, you’re waiting far too long to get prepared. ProShop’s Pre-Processing checklist function within the Work Order module can identify all the necessary items the job needs, including which sets of cutting tools are needed for specific machines and dates, so the team can kit and prepare the tools in advance of them being needed for a machine setup. Next, the Workcell Module can help to manage those tool assemblies and facilitate the offline tool presetting process. This includes tracking both the physical and digital movement of those tools and offsets into machines with the proper tool offsets loaded into the machine controller. It’s unique to ProShop and pretty slick. This helps to reduce setup times dramatically. Most important, it helps you….get to cutting metal faster.

Making the same mistakes over and over: When machinists jot down notes about things they want to improve in a process, they often record that information on the traveler, a scrap of paper, a Post-It note, or some other easily lost medium. Guess what happens after that? Those notes get lost or forgotten. In this case, the improvement idea very seldom makes its way into the official process or work instruction.  Consequently, the same mistakes will happen over and over again, or the process will go unimproved for weeks, months or forever. This reduces value-added time. ProShop’s Process Development (PD) feature will virtually eliminate this problem in the first place. Whenever someone has a process improvement idea, they can simply document the idea on the PD page. Here, they can also optionally send a direct alert to the planner or programmer for the job. Proshop’s sophisticated workflow of task-assignments and alerts will ensure that the improvement idea gets handled appropriately.  This focus on continuous improvement, and process development has a powerful impact on eliminating mistakes and waste, and allows the company to spend more time on…cutting the metal.

Alright, let’s take a breath. That was a bit of a rabbit hole.

Hopefully this article sheds some light on why we believe that ProShop can (and does!) help other shops increase their throughput. At the same time, this might also provide some insights into what we, the developers of ProShop, think about when it comes to operating a successful machine shop business. Our origin story as shop owners with problems to solve has driven many of ProShop’s features over the past 24 years. This was driven largely by our fanatical focus on reducing waste in order to focus our resources on the value-added processes of a precision manufacturing company (cutting more metal!). 

The cumulative impact of the aforementioned features often does have a significant impact on the total throughput of a manufacturing facility, and that makes us very happy. Machine shops are the foundation of our economy, and if we can help strengthen that foundation, we can go to bed with a smile on our faces and sleep well. (until we get up and do it again the next day).