StreetSpeed
Hot Rolled
- Joined
- Oct 15, 2008
- Location
- NY
Dudes,
*A bit longwinded. If you wanna get to the point skip to the last 2 paragraphs.*
One of our customers is an after market racing transmission supplier. It's one of a only a couple customers which I would consider that we do 'production' for. Bout' 3000, S7 mechanical diodes a year, made up of 2 parts, of which we make about 140 of each a month.
They want to have a meeting with us to talk about ramping up production. It would probably not be vastly different numbers, but slightly more, and I HOPE to be on a set delivery schedule throughout the year. Right now we have POs open for the next few months, but the time between them always varies, so we can't really schedule any machines since we never know when we REALLY need to do them. My father and I are on two different ends of the spectrum about how to handle the situation. My view is to consider upgrading our equipment to get the operations done faster than we do. These parts are rarely on time, and it's usually because of bottlenecks in the flow, and operations that take juuuuust long enough so that someone can walk away to do something else, then the machine sits idle for a minute or more. If we had faster indexers in the mill, (for 2 ops) ,some kind of manual pallet changer (for an op that we run 15 pieces at a time), tool probes and touch off probes in our 10,000 rpm spindle, etc, we would drastically cut cycle times and setup times and get parts through the machines faster.
He wants to simply hire another guy on second shift, and man the machines through the night. Essentially I want to upgrade to finish everything on one shift, he wants to hire someone to do it all in 2.
Here's the crux of my question, and it may be black and white: If you need to spend $60,000 to upgrade equipment, or $60,000 to hire an employee (benefits, salary, etc) then what makes more sense in the long run? To me it's the equipment. You're in and you're out, you have the stuff, you can use it everywhere, and it won't take sick days, show up late, and need to be paid hourly for the rest of it's tenure. We have plenty of cash lieing around for such purchases.
At first my idea was to find a nice used 2 spindle, 2 turret lathe to turn the parts in one setup, and throw a Robodrill somewhere with an indexer to rip through the milling ops, but that's a much larger outlay of cash for a (smaller) customer in the quirky automotive industry. Even though we'd use both all the time, it would be a hard sell to my dad. I think some upgrades to the mills and running the lathe with a little more gusto could net the same affect (for this customer) for much less money. What say you Captains of Industry?
Edit: You can see some of the parts on our not-quite-finished Website by following the url: http://amt-machine.com/auto.html
*A bit longwinded. If you wanna get to the point skip to the last 2 paragraphs.*
One of our customers is an after market racing transmission supplier. It's one of a only a couple customers which I would consider that we do 'production' for. Bout' 3000, S7 mechanical diodes a year, made up of 2 parts, of which we make about 140 of each a month.
They want to have a meeting with us to talk about ramping up production. It would probably not be vastly different numbers, but slightly more, and I HOPE to be on a set delivery schedule throughout the year. Right now we have POs open for the next few months, but the time between them always varies, so we can't really schedule any machines since we never know when we REALLY need to do them. My father and I are on two different ends of the spectrum about how to handle the situation. My view is to consider upgrading our equipment to get the operations done faster than we do. These parts are rarely on time, and it's usually because of bottlenecks in the flow, and operations that take juuuuust long enough so that someone can walk away to do something else, then the machine sits idle for a minute or more. If we had faster indexers in the mill, (for 2 ops) ,some kind of manual pallet changer (for an op that we run 15 pieces at a time), tool probes and touch off probes in our 10,000 rpm spindle, etc, we would drastically cut cycle times and setup times and get parts through the machines faster.
He wants to simply hire another guy on second shift, and man the machines through the night. Essentially I want to upgrade to finish everything on one shift, he wants to hire someone to do it all in 2.
Here's the crux of my question, and it may be black and white: If you need to spend $60,000 to upgrade equipment, or $60,000 to hire an employee (benefits, salary, etc) then what makes more sense in the long run? To me it's the equipment. You're in and you're out, you have the stuff, you can use it everywhere, and it won't take sick days, show up late, and need to be paid hourly for the rest of it's tenure. We have plenty of cash lieing around for such purchases.
At first my idea was to find a nice used 2 spindle, 2 turret lathe to turn the parts in one setup, and throw a Robodrill somewhere with an indexer to rip through the milling ops, but that's a much larger outlay of cash for a (smaller) customer in the quirky automotive industry. Even though we'd use both all the time, it would be a hard sell to my dad. I think some upgrades to the mills and running the lathe with a little more gusto could net the same affect (for this customer) for much less money. What say you Captains of Industry?
Edit: You can see some of the parts on our not-quite-finished Website by following the url: http://amt-machine.com/auto.html