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Increase Quality and Productivity, Simultaneously!
9/10/2010 8:26:56 AM
Customers want the goods they ordered produced to the specified tolerances using the correct materials and on time. Delivering anything less than this will lead to an unhappy customer and potential loss of sales. The ability to consistently deliver the correct products on time helps to cement customer loyalty and will lead to new sales and new customers in the future.
The quality gap diagram is a helpful way to illustrate the possible way that manufacturers may fall short of customer expectations. The quality gap concept was popularized in Juran’s Quality Handbook.
The total quality gap is the difference between the customer’s expectations when they order goods or services and their perception of what was actually delivered.
This gap results from a series of smaller gaps that occur throughout the entire process. In the case of roll forming or folding operations, the gaps can be described as follows:
- Understanding Gap – Results from communication problems between the customer and sales staff. It can be due to the customer not fully understanding what options are available or the effects of choosing particular options. It can be the miscommunication of dimensional information for a custom folding profile or punching pattern.
- Design Gap – This includes problems getting the desired part properly programmed into the machine control.
- Process Gap – Is the machinery statistically capable of producing to the required tolerances
- Operations Gap – This can include data entry mistakes, wrong material selection, incorrect or poor machine setup, and delayed completions
- Perception Gap – Did the correct goods show up on time with good quality and proper packaging based on the customer’s expectations?
Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) is a tool many manufacturers use to minimize the quality gap. CIM connects the office operations to the production equipment with the purpose of eliminating any possible error.
In the case of folding machine operations, AMS’ Order Desk software allows sales staff to accurately capture the exact profile needed by the customer along with the length, thickness, material type, color, etc. This information can be given as a proof-sheet for the customer to sign their approval .
From that point on, everything is handled electronically without further data entry or chance for miscommunication. When the job is released for production, the system coordinates the creation of material blanks and prints labels for each job. The label has all information needed to create the blanks such as length, width, material and quantity (see example of label). It also has a unique barcode that uniquely identifies the specific production item.
When the stack of blanks is taken to any folding machine, the operator scans the barcode and the Pathfinder folding machine controller looks-up the job data, loads the correct profile and sets the part counter. The controller also automatically calculates the optimum bending sequence for that profile on that machine. Once the item is completed, the operator confirms the total quantity of parts produced before starting on the next batch. If the 
machines are also connected to the Eclipse production management system, the job completion information is also reported back to the ERP system such as SAP.
Through this system, the customer is assured of getting the correct part with minimum delay and waste. The machine accurately produces the exact part that was approved by the customer. The blank production and bending processes are coordinated to ensure the correct materials are used for every job. The machine is able to spend a maximum amount of time producing parts and no time is wasted programming parts.
All folding machines at a shop can access a common part library and run any job.
More than one machine can be used to process a large job as well.
Quality doesn’t have to come at the expense of productivity. To the contrary, with an integrated manufacturing system you can achieve consistently high quality and greatly improved productivity.
Time spent programming a machine or filling out paperwork is time the machine is not producing. Many companies focus on machine speed and accuracy but fail to consider the production environment and processes surrounding the machine. (Consider that if you’re racing to get from point to A to point B in a Ferrari, you lose any advantage you might have had if you spend half your time drinking coffee in a rest stop.) In some industries, roll forming machines are running only 25-30% of the available production time. All the workers seem busy, so where does the time go? In many cases the large amount of downtime is spent changing over tooling, exchanging coils, performing quality checks, etc.
Having information about where the time goes can be a great tool for making improvements.
A good CIM system is like having a dedicated process engineer with a stopwatch monitoring all equipment and providing detailed and objective analysis of what’s really happening. The ability to record information about order completions, machine speeds, downtime causes, scrap generation and causes, and quality can be a great tool for management. This information can be used to identify problem areas and opportunities for improvement, direct capital spending, coach operators, hold material vendors accountable, etc.
The information gathering and analysis aspect of CIM is simply a tool. In and of itself it does not provide much value but in the hands of an intelligent and motivated manager it can help produce dramatic improvements.