Being in marketing has its advantages. I get to watch our engineers work on complex projects every day and since I am the one that puts movies together, I decided it would be cool to watch them go from a clean sheet design through to the machine being assembled by the shop. When the engineers started working on a concept for a new machine I took pictures every day of the white boards where they were sketching out their designs. They start here so that they don’t have to keep going back and changing a model in SolidWorks. Then when they did start to design on the computer, I had the lead designer take a picture every day of the machine.
It was really cool to see the design changes that resulted in a much more compact design than the original idea that they started out with. After the machine was fully designed I hooked up a camera to take pictures at intervals throughout the day to watch our assembly crew put each component onto the table and see the machine come to life.
This clip takes a machine from concepts on a white board through design and build of a machine. I hope you enjoy it.
Six Sigma helps to achieve an increase in quality by eliminating defects and variation while increasing yield. Automation is not only a good way to increase production, but it helps meet the criteria of Six Sigma. One of Six Sigma’s goals is to get rid of defects, and defects are anything that could lead to customer dissatisfaction. With lean automation, productivity will increase along with customer satisfaction.
Customer satisfaction is a major goal in Six Sigma. Therefore the product that comes off the line must be free of defects. There are many ways to identify and remove product with defects. One way is to have a final inspection of the product. This method is usually done by people with instruments or other devices to help them spot the defect. This is not the best method. Even with instruments, humans make mistakes. An automated process could have inspection stations set throughout the process. This method allows the inspection to be simplified since the machine is only looking for one defect at a time. Since the inspections are placed throughout the process we can tell the machine to stop doing work on a defected part. This not only keeps the machine form doing unneeded work on a defected part, but also helps identify where in the process the defect took place.
Automation not only allows you to inspect the product throughout the process, but it allows you to get rid of some inspections. For instance, consider a cylindrical part that needs to have a feature accurately placed in the center. An inspection could be set up to measure the concentricity of the outside of the cylindrical part and the feature, or there could be a guide for the punch tooling built in such a way that it is impossible to place the feature out of the tolerance range. This is only one of many ways to eliminate an inspection.
As stated earlier, eliminating people from doing the inspection is a good way to eliminate defects from making their way to the customer. The same principal goes to the actual process of making the product. One of the steps in Six Sigma is to eliminate variation. An automated process will do just that. The machine will make the product the same every time. For instance, say that a step in a process is to place and fasten a screw in to place. A person would place the screw in and torque it down differently every time. If the screw was not torque properly the product could have a failure. With an automated process the screw would not only be torque to the right value, but verified that is was torque correctly. This is just one simple case, but it shows how an automated process would eliminate variation.
Automation and Six Sigma are a good fit. Automation helps fix the root cause of a problem, and eliminates defects and variation by simplifying the process and taking out the human errors.
If you have a process for assembling or inspecting your parts, how do you know if automating the process makes sense? Setpoint has been discussing this question with companies since 1992. In our YouTube clip, Does Automation Make Sense, Clark walks through the issues a company needs to look at before automating a process. In order to solve your problems, you need to know what they are. Watch the video below as Setpoint discusses the steps of getting all the issues and opportunities out, setting a budget, determining your ROI (Return on Investment), and more so you can decide if automating is right for you.
Who has heard of the acronym TRIZ? Until a few months ago, it would have meant nothing to me except as four nicely arranged capital letters. Honestly I still don’t know what the terminology of the acronym is because it is derived from a Russian phrase meaning “Theory of Solving Inventor’s Problems.” I do, however, have a basic understanding of the principles of TRIZ and how to apply them. TRIZ is a bunch of principles that can be used to solve any problem that you may encounter. This applies to work, home, play, or anywhere else. TRIZ was developed by G.S. Altshuller, a Russian, as a means to solve problems. There are 40 TRIZ principles that can help you out. You can Google TRIZ to find out more about TRIZ and its uses. For now, I am going to relate a recent example where we have used the principles of TRIZ.
We are currently in the design phase on a fairly large machine. Space and cost are issues with this project. The machine will be building parts that have a very defined manufacturing process with many steps. For us, we have mimicked the original process as best as we could. Our machine started out with 3 dial tables, with each one costing a sizeable chunk of cash. After laying out the machine and realizing that we had many open stations, we decided to change the order of operations, cleared this with our customer, and placed a particular operation up closer to the front of the process. This allowed us to remove a dial table from the machine saving us some much-needed real estate, and a bunch of money.
These principles have become a part of our culture here at Setpoint. I am quite certain that when this decision was made we were not intentionally applying a TRIZ principle, even though we did. The principle we applied was Merging. We took a similar process and placed them side-by-side.
There are many more examples of where we solved a problem by applying a TRIZ principle on this project. What we have learned is if you get to a place where you are stuck, pull up the TRIZ principles on the net and go through them one by one and see if one of them will help solve your problem.
Managing a project consists of many tasks that need to be scheduled, delegated to the members of the team, completed, and followed up on by the project manager in order for the project to be successful.
One of the main tasks of the project manager is to track the overall progress and profitability of the project by the total hours and cost of goods charged to the project compared to what the bid has allotted. At Setpoint we have an open book policy for all projects. Anyone can go to the team board and see exactly what the progress is of any project at any time. This board shows the project revenue, the bid cost of good sold (COGS), actual COGS, project gross profit (GP), earned GP, percent complete, the week’s hours, the week’s GP, the week’s GP per hour, and the GP per hour to date for each project.
Reporting these numbers can sometimes be a tightrope walk for the project manager who reports the progress of each of his projects to management and the team of assemblers and programmers working on them. The management team wants answers to why the progress of the project is behind the forecast numbers he gave them at the beginning of the month. The assembly and programming team members working on the project are wondering why the hourly rate is so low or they are expecting the percent complete to be much higher. There are usually good answers for both teams.
As a project manager, I take the conservative approach. Sometimes a projects progress is well ahead of the hours that were in the bid, and sometimes the cost of goods is less than what is in the bid. This doesn’t often happen, but when it does I don’t like to take all the “good news” on the progress report until I am sure that all the parts have been accounted for in accounts payable and the majority of the debugging has been done on the machine. Some people might call this “sandbagging,” I call it proper project management. Can you be too conservative? Sure you can. But I ask you this; would you rather take all the “good news” at the point of discovery and find out later that one of the key, and very costly, components was not accounted for or was overlooked in the procurement state? Maybe you find out the scope of the project was not communicated to the programmer correctly and you now have two more weeks of programming to do. This is usually not the norm, but it happens. You now have costs or time you need to “give back” on the next progress report, or several reports, making it look like you have made no progress when the team is still working hard on the project.
Yes, in reality the end result should be the same; but let’s say your team can earn bonuses for completing projects ahead of schedule and below cost. I for one do not want to get the team excited about their efficiency and the prospect of getting a bonus for their efforts one week just to have it taken back the next. It doesn’t help the morale of the team. There is a “happy medium” for claiming the ‘good news” that differs from project to project. This is one of the hardest tasks to conquer for a project manager.
First of all, be safe. There may be a lot of different people working on the same project, so you might finish wiring the panels and pneumatics on the machine that someone else started. After the machine is complete and before you power up the whole machine, start your check out by pulling all the fuses, circuit breakers and such one at a time. This way you can check different parts of the machine at different times, which can save you from running into bigger problems. If you just power up the machine without doing this step and there’s something wired wrong, you could create a problem throughout the entire machine.
When you power up the machine, check the voltage one step at a time by plugging in the fuses and circuit breakers for the area you are checking one by one. Check each component for their power, check the D/C (direct current) power the same as the A/C (alternating current). If it doesn’t smoke you did a Good Job!
If it does smoke, look for what smoked. Look for blown fuses or circuit breakers and such. Look for incorrect wiring or voltage. If the problem is found, fix the problem. If no problem is found it could be a defective part.
Troubleshooting is just that, looking for the problem and going step by step to find out what is causing the problem. Each machine is unique and different, sizes and ranges of voltage can differ as well as components.
In today’s economy lean automation provides a better solution to manufacturing than its non lean counterparts. In our newest YouTube Setpoint talks about SMED (Single Minute Exchange of Dies) and has a great video clip from a recent machine of the tooling change out. We also talk about Poka-Yokes and making sure that the pieces you add to the machine can only be fitted in one way. Making a machine portable with easy access for maintenance is also another important lean feature. One of the biggest differences lean can make is the size of the footprint. We have a picture of a functioning machine produced in Europe and an overlay of the lean system Setpoint designed and built that does the same thing.
Though tools are expensive, it’s important to use the proper tools for the job you are doing. If you don’t have the right tools you can run into many problems. Rounded off or stripped out bolts, wrong sized holes, and broken taps are a few of the problems you may face.
Using the wrong tool for the job makes disassembling parts, or changing out parts difficult. Also, the cost of replacing parts that may be ruined by using the wrong tools is avoided by using the proper tools.
Using power tools and air tools when possible is more efficient and can lower your costs in hours. Who wants to stand around and build something using a hammer and nails when you can use a nail gun instead?
Having the right tools for the job helps everybody deliver a quality professional product for their clients and reflects well on your company.
At Setpoint we have been building lean automated equipment for over 16 years. One of the lessons we have learned is the importance for engineers and assembly technicians to work together to get the job done efficiently and give the customer the best possible quality, price, and on-time delivery. Many times if the two don’t work together things tend to have to be redone, redesigned, or ideas scrapped all together. I’ve seen this time and time again, which in turn affects the quality and price and doesn’t make anybody happy.
For many years I have maintained and assembled machines and have seen many designs and working environments that most design engineers aren’t even aware of. Because of this experience that myself and other assembly technicians have we can often give insight to these facts.
Working together also makes installation easier and better. Engineers don’t tend to think of having an easy connector to two parts of a machine so that they can be easily separated for shipping or how the air hoses or electrical components are connected so when the machine is prepared for shipping you don’t have to rewire part of it at install. When examples such as these are not kept in mind during the design phase, the onsite installation can take much longer to get the machine up and running on the customers’ floor than need be, which costs us more and doesn’t look good to the customer.
At Setpoint we follow the 5 S’s system, as the shop manager here is my take on how we are able to implement this in our assembly shop.
Sort - This is the hardest part for me. I have a hard time throwing things away that could be very expensive or hard to get. But, if I haven’t needed it in a long time, it ends up costing me more to store it than to buy it new when we need it. By doing this you will free up more space, make your shop look more organized and less cluttered, make it faster to find what you are looking for, and end up costing your company less in the long run.
Straighten - For this you need to find a place to put everything you have decided to keep. Look around for the best place to put the item, once you find that place mark it with tape or outline it so everyone knows where to put it away. This needs to be done with everything, make it so at a glance you can tell if there is something left out or not put back where it belongs. Think of it this way, if you have a new employee you would like them to be productive as quickly as possible so they can start working without looking for the tools they need.
Shine - Just like it sounds, keep it clean. This could mean sweeping, putting tools away, or taking out the trash. The more organized you are the less time it takes you to clean up. It should look the same when you leave work as it did when you got there.
Standardize - This could mean using all the same brand of drills or tools so they are interchangeable and you can replace them as they wear out; using the same vendors so they are familiar with your shops lay-out and how you like things, and where to put the items they are delivering. Also, by using the same assembly and staging methods each time, this will help everyone get accustomed to the rules and guidelines your company has set up. These guidelines can be followed without thinking about it or asking someone where to put a tool away.
Sustain - This is another hard one because when you have a lot of work to get done you tend to skip over some things that may not seem that important at the time. When you let this happen it can get out of hand very fast, making a habit of cleaning and putting things away makes it easier to maintain them. This is critical to the five S’s system; if you let it slip you end up doing the first three over and over. Don’t be afraid to change something that just doesn’t feel right, find what works for you and your company.
