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By: Paul Van Metre
There are few more potentially challenging things an organization can go through than an ERP implementation, especially when it includes a total digital transformation, moving to a 100% paperless workflow.
By: Paul Van Metre
In a recent blog post, I wrote about what to do when you have rejected parts from a customer. From the customer’s perspective, it’s all in the response and how you handle the situation and provide them with confidence that it won’t happen again.
By: Paul Van Metre
Your company tries SO hard to make everything perfect, but occasionally, something slips through the cracks, and you send some parts to a customer that get rejected.
By: Paul Van Metre
You have a new shop with less than 10 people, (or perhaps you have a 20+-year-old shop) so why would you possibly need an org chart?!?
By: Paul Van Metre
The topic of time tracking in job shops is a sensitive one in many shops. Machinists and others sometimes feel that time tracking is nothing more than “big brother” watching them, looking for mistakes, or ways to get them to work harder.
By: Paul Van Metre
Non-Conformances (NCs) are unavoidable in any job shop or manufacturing process. Some are related to setting up and proving out new jobs or processes.
By: Lacey Hill
For a prospective or existing customer, a shop tour is an excellent way to connect with their supply base and review the operations, systems and processes of a given supplier.
Author: Paul Van Metre
For many shops, UPS, or FedEx overnight shipments are a way of life. Those packages show up virtually every day, or sometimes multiple times per day.
Author: Paul Van Metre
I read a really great book when my machine shop was just a couple of years old. It was called The E-Myth by Michael Gerber.
Author: Paul Van Metre
I talk with hundreds of CNC machine shops every year and I’ve seen a very common thread among nearly all of them. They spend an inordinate amount of time and money fighting fires, expediting late jobs, scrambling at the last minute to solve problems, and just generally dealing with havoc in their shops.
Author: Paul Van Metre
When our shop was about 6 years old, we went through a massive Lean Manufacturing transformation. We went all in – Kaizen events, 5S, Kaizen Newspapers, Value Stream Mapping events, and more.
By: Paul Van Metre
The machining industry has thousands of CNC machine shops. Many of them struggle to stay profitable and deliver on their promises, and as a result, don’t grow as fast as they want to.
Author: Paul Van Metre
Machine shops are a hotbed of research and development (R&D). Yes, you heard me right. R&D isn’t just scientists and equipment working in a lab.
By: Lacey Hill
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!
Author: Paul Van Metre
When I started writing this blog post, it seemed oddly familiar to me, and I had a feeling I had written something similar before.
Author: Paul Van Metre
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.
Author: Paul Van Metre
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.
Author: Paul Van Metre
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.
Author: Paul Van Metre
“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.
Author: Paul Van Metre
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.
Author: Paul Van Metre
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?
Author: Paul Van Metre
As I write this post, the Coronavirus is sweeping the world. Schools, borders, events, gatherings and workplaces are being closed at a rapid pace.
Author: Paul Van Metre
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.
Author: Paul Van Metre
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.
Author: Paul Van Metre
Discrete manufacturers are too often lumped in with process manufacturers, but you know that your operations are different and require separate support systems.
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.
By: Paul Van Metre
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.
Author: Paul Van Metre
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!
Author: Paul Van Metre
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.
Author: Paul Van Metre
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.
Author: Paul Van Metre
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.
