FandMmag.com |

No matter how much money you've got, the financial smart guys tout "asset allocation" as the way to get the most out of what you have to invest.

Arguably, a manufacturer's key assets are the skills of its people. Faced with a dwindling corps of skilled machinists, machine shop managers have to choose the process management scheme that maximizes the return on the skills their personnel possess.

SHRINKING ASSETS

Gary Baldwin has more than 40 years of engineering and manufacturing experience. His firm Practical Knowledge Inc., in Whispering Pines, N.C., provides advanced education programs and consulting in the science of tool application. "So many companies are telling me the same thing," he says. "There doesn't seem to be any place that they can hire very knowledgeable people on the application side … those who truly understand machinability and the tool selection process."

In prior decades apprenticeship programs provided a solid application background through a trial-and-error approach. "They gave you a hunk of metal and told you to make a part," Baldwin says. "They'd coach you through making changes until you understood the process. It was an effective way of teaching the practical side."

In his own four-year apprenticeship (beginning in 1962) at engine maker Fairbanks Morse, Baldwin says, "the first two-and-a-half years we did no machining of workpieces that drew revenue. It wasn't until the mid part of my third year that we spent part of the day on the production floor." Graduates of manufacturers' in-house apprenticeship programs later earned engineering degrees or simply progressed through their organizations into programming and tooling or manufacturing engineering, and "you had a blend of both the practical and the theoretical. You had some very knowledgeable, well rounded people." Now, he says, "I'm reading reports that as much as 80 percent of the knowledge base could be retiring in the next five years."

Presently, with employees changing jobs every two or three years, comprehensive manufacturer-run apprenticeship programs can't be justified. Baldwin thinks many so-called apprenticeship programs today exist simply as "a source of cheap labor, teaching people to run the machines to make their parts."

Further, today's technical-school graduate may be able to write a CNC program, but "he will not have the knowledge of how metal cuts or tool selection," he continues. As a result, productivity improvement or problem-solving becomes a process of trial and error taking place in the production environment. Large shop or small, Baldwin says he sees the problem everywhere: "In general, I don't see any engineered approach to trial and error. Trying to figure out a solution on a production machine is very costly."

STRATEGY DRIVERS

Mike Gugger agrees that the well of expert manufacturing knowledge is drying up. Gugger is manager of the Part Cost Reduction unit at consulting firm TechSolve (Cincinnati, OH) and he works with manufacturers early in the design for manufacturing process planning, to take out costs. As the experienced workforce shrinks, there are fewer mentors available for new young machinists who themselves are few and far between, he says. "So the skill level of the newer person is still pretty low."

He adds that the skills of a shop's employees and the nature and volume of the products it machines will drive its manufacturing philosophy. He discussed three possible directions machining process management can take. One approach involves rigid, centralized process control. He described a visit to a clean, efficient and highly productive shop in China where through a translator he found that one machine operator's job consisted simply of pushing a button when the appropriate light came on. According to Gugger, such a tightly controlled process requires little human intervention and facilitates consistent production, but requires significant up-front engineering and testing. "The expertise exists in the equipment itself and centralized manufacturing engineering process development. It works very well given a certain type of part—certainly higher volumes of parts—and can be very efficient and very cost effective," he says.

Another approach features an experienced machinist who is much more involved in the process and whose understanding of it extends to "where the guy can even hear and perhaps feel the control of the process. The insert getting dull, even the bearings in the machine might be starting to wear." Process control is centered to a great extent on the shop floor. "That too can be very effective, depending on the type of parts being run and the type of production required," Gugger says. "It lends itself much more to the lower volume, higher machining content, more technical part. It also depends much more heavily on the skill and knowledge and expertise of that individual."

A third approach follows the advent of lean-based, cellular driven strategies, Gugger says, and "takes advantage of all of the skills, understanding and expertise on the shop floor up through manufacturing engineering." The strategy focuses on smaller increments of production and lends itself to one-piece-flow concepts and all of the lean tenets, while also relying on the presence and understanding of the individual at the machine or in the cell. "But is also very much driven at the process level by the engineer and the manufacturing planning and programming," Gugger says.

"The lean-based approach really pulls the best of both worlds, in that you nail down the process and eliminate variability as much as you can through the engineering function, but you also build on the talents and rely on the skills of the individual at the machine or in the cell, as a feedback, as a source of ideas, as a talent-pool resource. Really, all boats are raised under that situation," Gugger says.

CO-COMMITMENT

Brian Smith, application engineer/instructor at training and consulting firm Phillips CNC Technologies, Thaxton, Va., says manufacturers today have neither the time nor the money to properly train shop-floor personnel. Shop owners simply "need some more bodies" to run their machines. New hires may get on-the-job training from another operator, receiving "hand-me-down training that's not very effective," Smith says.

Such an approach can put other assets in jeopardy. A shop owner might buy a new machine to increase production capacity, then employ "a guy off the street" to run it, Smith says. He compares that to "taking your 12-year-old and saying here's the car keys:" dire consequences can result.

Smith says his company is in the process of developing a solution that consists of third-party training combined with mutual commitment of the shop owner and prospective employee.