Technologies to reduce production costs

The day of the dedicated machine is dead. Shops must be lean, flexible, do more with less, and design for manufacturability. To do these, average manufacturers are shifting to lean manufacturing or Six Sigma principles, exploiting the advantages of R&D, putting spot solutions in place, and last, implementing productlifecycle management.

"Technology is U.S. manufacturing's ace-in-the-hole to boost productivity and compete globally. "

Jim Dallum, Cincinnati Lamb

Lean manufacturing
According to William Parr, professor in the Lean Enterprise System Design Institute and faculty director of the Greenwood Lean Enterprise Center at the University of Tennessee, lean manufacturing is a powerful tool that helps shops both large and small slash leadtimes and eliminate waste.

He says, "Most manufacturing processes are like riding on an airplane. Passengers usually are in the air moving toward their destination only about 20% to 25% of the time. Similarly, product is typically not moving toward getting ready for sale — it's waiting in a batch somewhere. With lean, companies reduce batch sizes, cutting the time parts are lying around waiting to be worked on. In fact, cutting leadtime by 1/2 is not unusual."

In the traditional manufacturing system, central planners send out memos that dictate which raw parts go where. They also send out work orders, describing what is to be built at the assembly and fabrication stations. Parr explains, "If the plan is perfect, with no variation, things are fine. What happens more often, though, is a lot of costly waste because there is always variation."

Lean, in contrast, operates using a "pull" system based on JIT delivery, in which parts are made and delivered only as needed.

Parr says, "Traditional push systems continue to grow inventory until shops go broke. Or until executives send out memos declaring an inventory-cutting binge for the next three months. I've seen this happen a lot in American industry. But pull systems inherently have low inventory because they put a bound on it."

Software that optimizes product design
Companies can slash costs by improving the design process at its beginning. Design for manufacturing and assembly (DFMA) software includes a design-formanufacture module, with which engineers obtain early cost estimates on parts or products, and a design-for-assembly module, which they employ to determine the best methods to manufacture products.

Engineers use the software where a design idea might still be scribbled on a napkin. Or, they use it to re-examine fully finished products to ensure design efficiency. For example, engineers take a part's geometry and determine whether the part should be made from a casting, or be machined, or injection-molded. During this process, the software draws from its large database, containing thousands of manufacturing processes, materials, and machinery, which was developed over many years in conjunction with companies such as GM and Ford.

"In lean manufacturing systems, the upstream process is triggered by downstream consumption."

William Parr, professor in the Lean Enterprise System Design Institute and faculty director of the Greenwood Lean Enterprise Center at the University of Tennessee

Engineers also evaluate each assembly's function and the relationship between parts. They simplify and streamline designs repeatedly until achieving a minimum per/piece cost. For example, in one application, engineers slashed labor time by streamlining a product design to eliminate assembly screws.

Miles Parker, president of the Parker Group, Providence, R.I., says design houses can use software to design products efficiently and thus beat-out OEM design departments that may have more resources.

He says, "Too many companies outsource overseas based on comparative assembly rates, without looking at overall organizational costs. Companies doing innovative design and removing assembly labor don't have to go overseas to be competitive." He explains many Tier-ones and Tier-twos currently use the software but even small companies can compete if they make great designs.

In the past, design engineers designed a product and then gave it to the manufacturing engineers. Often, the product could not be manufactured easily or sometimes it couldn't be made at all. Parker continues, "DFMA solves these problems because designers use it in conjunction with service, quality, and production."

Smart machines
The Smart Machine Pilot Project is a collaborative R&D project run by the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences (NCMS), Ann Arbor, Mich. The project helps the U.S. military depot system improve its productivity and reduce per/piece costs. One site, the Red River Army Depot (RRAD), in Texarkana, Tex., needed help with outdated machinery that molds rubber onto the links for tracked vehicles. For one, the depots couldn't handle increased demand due to the war in Iraq.

During this project, engineers equipped facility machines with sensors and provided an electronic log to automatically capture data on each machine's performance and health. In the next phase, engineers will use this data to develop prognostics algorithms for a predictive maintenance system.

Project partners include the depots, NCMS, and several companies such as Advanced Technology Services Inc. (ATS), Peoria, Ill., and Cincinnati Lamb, Hebron, Ky.

"Collaborative R&D projects such as the Smart Machine Pilot Project enable technology suppliers and users to work together for mutual benefit."

Jim Dallum, Cincinnati Lamb

Automatic probing and inspection
According to Steve Logee, director of business development, Wilcox Associates Inc., Elgin, Ill., connecting design to downstream operations optimally involves electronically integrating inspection plans with CAD files. The improved inspectionprocess accuracy and efficiency supports lean manufacturing , thereby lowering programming labor and cutting costs

"Our Enterprise Metrology Solutions (EMS) system works in much the same way as Microsoft Office. Components feature a similar look and feel and share data and inspection reports among themselves. Thus, the system is suitable for Mom-and-Pop shops up to GMs and Fords," explains Logee.

He believes a truly universal metrology system must work on more than just a few types of measurement machines and with more than one kind of probe. And systems must be dynamic, changing in concert with new developments in manufacturing and metrology. Wilcox's system works with a variety of CMMs and a range of touch trigger and non-contact probes. For larger parts, it also works for CNC machines, vision systems, and articulated arms.

With the software, design engineers develop-and embed electronic inspection plans within the CAD model. They then use this to generate a part-inspection program. The software creates probe paths among each feature, optimizing these paths.

Logee explains since there is an important link between design intent and manufacturability, it's most logical to develop an inspection plan in the CAD system. This helps engineers who, though familiar with CAD systems they use daily, typically know less about measurement and inspection software programs. Also the link eliminates manufacturing errors resulting from design modifications not being communicated to production or the quality department.

These capabilities help automate inspection. The sooner critical information is electronically encoded, the sooner manual operations such as point-and click programming is automated. This frees operators from manually inputting motion or measurement commands or information from paper blueprints into inspection routines.

The system also captures data collected from probes and stores it on a database for archiving, statistical analysis, and graphical reporting. Personnel can view the data throughout a plant, organization, or supply chain via an intranet or the Internet. "EMS helps companies cut production costs by closing the loop between design, manufacturing, and measurement."

Multitasking
According to Chuck Birkle, vice president marketing, Mazak Corp., multitasking is a manufacturing technique involving multiple processes such as milling, turning, drilling, tapping, hobbing, and polishing, which performs as many of these processes in as few handlings or setups as possible.

Birkle says multitasking fits a wide variety of industries such as aerospace, medical, tooling, and lower-volume automotive applications, but it is not a solution for a niche industry. He adds it is best-suited for complex workpieces with a multitude of features and geometries.

Birkle believes multitasking gives the average manufacturer a lean weapon to use. "In the purest sense, lean is the reduction of waste. Whenever companies can do more operations with fewer machines, for example, they are exploiting lean principles of having fewer fixtures and tools and reducing part movement, floor space, and energy consumption," he explains.

For a typical five or ten-man shop, Birkle says, " Performing value-stream mapping of a workpiece shows it enters the facility, gets a saw cut-off operation, then sits on a bench to wait for a particular machine. The part goes all over the shop, being touched and handled — it's hard to add value to a workpiece that way."

However, because average shops today don't have the large volume runs shops used to have, a better measure is setup reduction. Shops should shift their focus away from cycle time to processing time.

He continues, "A good question is why do some shops make money on ten-lot runs and some shops don't? Because profitable shops get into and out-of the short-cycle, low-volume-run jobs more efficiently. Their lot sizes are smaller and they ship more frequently, thus getting parts out faster and keeping their customers happy."

Cutting and drilling
John Israelsson, a vice president at Sandvik Coromant Co., Fairlawn, N.J., says one way for shops to cut production costs is to increase the output of their existing equipment. They can do this by increasing their cutting data or re-engineering processes to get shorter cycle time.

Israelsson says, "Shops mistakenly think they save money by buying less expensive tools or equipment. But that is peanuts. The money is in output. So, shops must use technology to more quickly make the same parts. Technology lies both with the machine tool and the competence and skills of the people applying the technology."

He explains Sandvik does R&D both in tools and in how parts are machined. One example of a creative application that forced the company to come up with a new cutting technology was with machining aerospace materials, slow to machine because of the difficult materials used such as Inconel.

"We redesigned the nose radius and wiper on an insert, letting shops increase feeds by 100%. We couldn't use standard wiper technology because of the increased tool pressure," he comments.

"Lights out" and robotic automation
According to Dick Johnson, general manager material handling, Fanuc Robotics America, Rochester Hills, Mich., " lightsout" implies fully automated manufacturing that runs 24/7 with no direct labor and limited indirect labor.

Johnson explains currently there aren't many true lights-out facilities in the U.S. "One limitation has been the ability of robots to find loose parts. Traditionally, shops fixture parts for robots. However, unless the parts require machining, fixtures are too expensive just for handling purposes."

Fanuc Robotics currently offers vision systems that tackle this problem. One is a 2D system for parts that sit flat. Others use 3D sensing technology to deal with parts randomly jumbled in bins.

He continues, "A second limitation has been floorspace. Most of the time, companies have bins of parts, which forklift drivers pick up and then take to a different area of the plant. Shops need robots that can span large areas." Some companies have addressed this problem with floor or linear tracks to extend the robots' reach. Some use special overhead mounts.

The last limitation has been in programming. However, recent PC-based software allows offline simulation of robotic work cells and performs robotic language programming.

Johnson believes that now the tools are in place, more facilities should exploit lights-out manufacturing, or at the least, robotic automation. For example, one small manufacturer didn't believe it could afford robots. It bought one and now has over 150 doing machine tending and arc welding. "The company was surprised how easy the robots were to program and how easily they integrated into its factory," reports Johnson.

"Average manufacturers using point technology should start checking into their data architecture and begin thinking about how to leverage the various kinds of data they have."

Tim Egloff, UGS Tecnomatix

Product lifecycle management

According to Tim Egloff , program manager for UGS Tecnomatix Business Strategy and Marketing, Plano, Tex., there are technologies that give benefit in spot solutions. But he believes companies wanting to slash production costs must first implement digital manufacturing, which, in turn, must be part of a broader strategy that product lifecycle management (PLM) provides.

He says, "Today's world is all about information and the important useful things gleaned from it. For instance, an industrial engineer has his throughput, bottleneck, and ergonomics data. And, the quality engineer and the process-planner have other silos of data."

Using PLM software lets companies, as UGS says, "close the loop. Such shops capture as-built data off the floor and bring it back into the product lifecycle." Egloff continues, "This is mandated by the government in aerospace applications." He also believes it won't be long before safety-data collection on vehicles will be required.

Egloff claims, "Average manufacturers using point technology should start checking into their data architecture and begin thinking about how to leverage the various kinds of data they have. It's a lot easier when the executive-leadership has a product-lifecycle-management focus. Companies not using this strategy will be soon left behind."