In the world of new manufacturing technologies, you have to know what you're getting into before you upgrade.
An alphabet soup of new manufacturing technologies can give small companies the automation edge. But know what you're getting into before you upgrade
Cook Specialty Co., a $10-million manufacturer of precision metal parts, used to take customers' blueprints and knock out a finished product. No more. Global competition in the early 1980s changed all that. Cook's customers, some of them Fortune 100 companies, began consolidating their supplier base into a handful of companies with the best prices, quality, and delivery record. Tom Panzarella, Cook's president, knew that if he wanted even a chance of maintaining a competitive edge he'd have to overhaul the company's entire manufacturing strategy.
So Panzarella transformed Cook from a job shop to a custom manufacturer. Now instead of just making products, Cook actually designs them with customers. What made the change possible was a technology turnaround that left the plant humming with equipment such as computer numerically controlled (CNC) vertical machining centers and robotics. Today, as Panzarella walks the floor of the 70,000-square-foot factory, the air lightly spiced with oil and welding smoke, he gestures at the machines and operators with pride. "We don't really have a product line," he says. "What we have is expertise in engineering and manufacturing."
It hasn't been easy for smaller companies to lay claim to manufacturing expertise. That's because large companies have traditionally had the automation edge. But now, thanks to the falling costs of hardware and software, their smaller counterparts can steal that edge away. The boost in technological know-how also increases the flexibility long associated with smaller businesses, allowing them to shift strategic gears and to recast production processes faster than ever before.
But going high tech in the world of manufacturing is not for the fainthearted. It's hard enough to sort out the alphabet soup of acronyms -- CIM, MRP, CAD, CAM, CNC, and PLC, to name just a few. Then there's the equipment expense, the training, and the massive labor and process restructurings. Businesses must do some tough soul-searching, too, before jumping into the upgrading fray, to be sure that their problem is really too few machines and not less-than-optimum management of people. (See "Keeping It Simple," [Article link], for a profile of a company that found less is more.)
When automating operations is the right course, however, the benefits can be manifold -- everything from improved quality to streamlined production planning.
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Flexible Factories Just ask Tom Panzarella. For Cook Specialty, in rural Green Lane, Penn., sophisticated manufacturing technology has opened the door to an entirely new competitive strategy: "agile" or "flexible" manufacturing -- the ability to produce high-quality customized products quickly for constantly evolving markets.
Over the 21 years Panzarella has been at Cook, he's shifted the company's manufacturing portfolio from basketball hoops and display racks to higher-margin custom-engineered medical instruments and precision metal parts for photocopiers, computers, and automobiles. Because technical innovations for those devices come so fast, almost a third of the products Cook makes each year are new.
The only way to achieve the flexibility required by that ever changing portfolio, says Panzarella, is by avoiding waste at every stage of the manufacturing process. Get the right materials and information to the right place at the right time -- that's Cook's philosophy. It's also the general idea behind computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM). In a nutshell, CIM means combining the various disciplines within a manufacturing operation through automation. For example, CIM enables Cook to swap parts drawings with customers using two computer-aided design (CAD) packages: AutoCAD (from Autodesk, 800-964-6432) and Pro/Engineer (from Parametric Technology, 617-398-5000). That's how Cook recently helped Welch Allyn, a medical-instrument and diagnostic-products manufacturer, develop an improved line of laryngoscopes. Once a design is finalized, it is fed into Cook's computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) package, SmartCAM (from CAMAX Manufacturing Technologies, 800-394-5300), which in turn generates the instructions the CNC machines follow to actually make the product. And though linking technology is important, says Panzarella, connecting people is just as crucial. "Around here," he says, "CIM might just as well stand for 'communication in manufacturing.' "
Having tools to facilitate communication is especially important in a shop like Cook's, where the 120 employees also own the company. At Cook the operators work with minimal supervision in "manufacturing cells," multidisciplinary teams of people and arrangements of equipment that can be quickly reconfigured. Much of the company's communication occurs over the network of more than 30 computer terminals throughout the plant. Operators rely on them to tap into Cook's shop-floor control-and-scheduling package, Symix (from Symix, 614-523-7000), a UNIX-based system that runs on the company's Hewlett-Packard HP9000 minicomputer. "The technology enables them to feel and act like owners of their piece of the production process," says Panzarella.
To track customer information on-line, Cook hired a software developer to write a special application that is integrated with Symix. The software enables operators to trade notes on the status of production jobs and to key in relevant information from their communications with customers. Many operators start their day by logging on to the system to look for "hot" jobs -- those that need immediate attention. "The idea," says Panzarella, "was to bring the voice of the customer right onto the floor, where the people running jobs could hear it directly."
What's saved Cook from the pitfalls that many larger companies encounter when they automate to the hilt is the company's insistence that its technology serve its people, not the other way around. That attitude is reflected in all the company's technology decisions, even buying a new welding robot. Cook bought the most user friendly machine it could find, and then taught its welders how to program and use it. "We'd rather retrain our people to use technology than hire a bunch of textbook-trained CNC experts and try to teach them welding," says Panzarella. "After all, our agility depends at least as much on our employees and processes as it does on our machines."
