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Purchase orders (POs) are legally binding contracts between your company, and the company placing the order. If you aren’t treating each PO as a formal contract and reviewing the details of it as such, it’s time to!  

When I started writing this blog post, it seemed oddly familiar to me, and I had a feeling I had written something similar before. So I went searching in my Google Docs, and sure enough, I had written a blog post on this exact topic for Production Machining Magazine not more than 6 months ago, with a focus on how Covid has forced many shops to look for new clients.  

I don’t know a single CNC machine shop that has an easy time hiring machinists, and would say they have enough well-qualified candidates. The fact is that there is more demand than supply, with not enough young people coming into the industry to fill the positions that are needed by machine shops today.  

I haven’t talked with a single shop that loves having job travelers, but so many of them can’t imagine running their shop without them. It’s hard for them to imagine a different way because they’ve done it for so many years, or they believe that trying to eliminate travelers will not be well received by their employees.  

Nearly every CNC machine shop I’ve talked with or visited always has a bottleneck in their QA room or inspection department. It just seems like it takes anywhere from several hours, to a few days for jobs to move through the QA room before they can move to the next process, whether that’s internal, or leaving the company to an outside process or to the customer.  

“But Paul, it’s too expensive to put a computer at each of my work centers! I just can’t afford that. Right now my employees track their time with a shared computer we already have out in the shop.”

I hear this objection all the time when discussing what’s involved with going paperless and using ProShop.  

Cybersecurity in 2020 is a huge issue. We all know a company who has been subject to a virus, been hacked, had data held hostage in a ransomware attack, had data stolen and more.

In a machine shop, you’re only making money when your spindles are cutting chips. Any time a machine is sitting idle, it’s a liability, not an asset. It’s costing you money, not making you money.

How many times has it happened in your shop that you go to set-up a job, only to realize that you’re missing a special tap?  Or maybe a thread gage, or a custom ground tool?  

As I write this post, the Coronavirus is sweeping the world. Schools, borders, events, gatherings and workplaces are being closed at a rapid pace. It’s an uncertain and ever changing situation.

Written By: Colin Gilchrist, Applications Engineer, Selway Machine Tool Company

The following story is based on an experience I had giving advice to a client last year before I joined Selway Machine Tool Company as an Applications Engineer.

Written by Proshop customer, David Pannell of Faircloth Machine Shop

I will never forget the day that my production manager, who is a friend as well as an employee, and about whom I care a great deal, came into my office and said, “I am dying a little bit every day.” He said this because of the onerous burden that our so-called quality system and so-called ERP software placed on him.  

Work instructions are the heart of running a shop, but they can also be a two-edged sword. A client once told me his team pulled printed work instructions from a toolbox.  

Discrete manufacturers are too often lumped in with process manufacturers, but you know that your operations are different and require separate support systems. Thankfully, many manufacturing ERPs are now designed specifically with discrete in mind.

When people hear the term “paperless,” they typically associate the elimination of this office resource as an act that helps the environment. And while this is true, adopting a paperless manufacturing solution can do so much more.  

Ouch! Missing the mark on time estimates hurts. So fix it. Estimating accurately and pricing work right is critical to the success of every shop. Many shops don’t put enough focus on accurate time estimates and send targets that are too low to the shop.  

Here are three indisputable facts about manufacturing employment in 2019: Manufacturing workers are in high demand, and there aren’t enough current employees to fill all the job openings. Young people are not entering the manufacturing workforce at a high enough rate…  

A friend of ours, and ProShop customer Joanna Boatwright recently sent us an excerpt of a paper she wrote for a Change Management class.  In the paper, she outlines how a fictitious company – Parker Manufacturing, can evolve itself from a traditional organization to a learning organization. 

Got a checklist? We wouldn’t have designed our Manufacturing ERP without one. Does your ERP system have checklists built into the workflow? Probably not.  

IMTS 2018 just recently finished. It was a record-breaking event with over 129,000 attendees. The energy was palpable – things were hoppin’! It was our first time exhibiting in our own booth.  

It’s hard to deny the shifts that are happening within the industrial manufacturing world. With younger generations coming into the work force, rapid improvements in technology, and Industry 4.0 in full swing, the cultures of manufacturing organizations are finding that they either need to adapt or die.

As Jim and Jason always say on the MakingChips Podcast, “If you’re not making chips, you’re not making money!”  We all know it’s true, yet precious few shops have formal systems for increasing uptime. 

Let ISO-9001 and AS9100 help you to improve your business! Running a business in 2017 is all about exceeding your customer’s expectations, developing deep relationships built on trust and continuously improving your company to add more value to clients. If you aren’t doing this, you’re going backwards!  

When you get a new order in your job shop, the clock starts ticking. You’ll never have more lead time to get that order delivered on-time than you do today. 

Tips to lean out your QMS. Running a regulated manufacturing company is difficult. Aside from the normal daily challenges of getting product out the door, managing employees, keeping quality high, you have the added burden of keeping perfect records of everything you do, doing it exactly as you say you do, keeping up with training employees in the never-ending changes of process, regulations and more.  

Tribal knowledge can be a killer. For a smaller, stable company not on a growth path, it probably isn’t the worst thing ever – unless you lose one of your long term employees who is the only one that knows how to do a lot of things.

Lots of shops have difficulty getting metrics on the quality of their planning or manufacturing engineering and then translating that into more profitable jobs in the future. It is a critical step to ensure that work flowing onto the shop floor is doing so as consistently as possible, therefore setting up the shop for success in executing the work.