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April • May 2005 • Vol. XXIII No. 4 • An Arnold Publication |
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Managing an |
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Story and photos by C. H. Bush, editor |
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There was an old woman, who lived in a shoe; she had so many children, she didn't know what to do. She gave them some broth, without any bread; she whipped them all soundly, and sent them to bed. That, of course is an old nursery rhyme, but at one point in his business life, Gregg Thompson, owner-president of Gardena, CA’s Alard Machine Products, might easily have identified with the old woman’s plight, except in his case he had so many machines he didn’t know what to do. “When I first bought Alard Machine Products back in 1983, I had one employee, five screw machines, a lathe, a mill and a grinder,” he recalls. “Then one day I woke up and found I had 100 employees operating fifty-five cam-driven screw machines, twenty CNC lathes and twenty CNC mills, all occupying four buildings and 45,000 square feet. The truth is about seven years ago I woke up and realized I had a real headache in managing all that equipment.” What kind of headache? “To be honest with you, when I first started adding equipment, I really didn’t know you had to do anything to it except run it,” he recalls. “I bought a little Bridgeport and then another one and a little Miyano, and then a couple more little Miyano's. And we did run them, all right. We actually wore out a couple of Miyano's because we didn't perform any maintenance. We didn't take care of them. We didn't know what to do. We just ran them into the ground, got rid of them and got some new ones.” Alard is a highly successful, one-stop machining job shop, serving major aerospace and automotive customers as 2nd and 3rd tier subcontractors. He runs 2 10-hour shifts four days a week. “The reason we’ve grown and done so well,” Thompson says, “is that our customers can get just about anything done they want right here under one roof. They can get Swiss work, Brown & Sharpe work, multispindle work, CNC turning from low-to-high volume and milling. They can get prototype milling, production milling, centerless, through and cylindrical grinding. Basically, when it comes to machining we do everything except plating and heat treating here. Our management philosophy is ‘say what you do, then do what you say.’ That’s worked very well for us.” Alard’s production volumes run from 500 pieces a year up to half a million a year. “If our customers ask for it, we give it to them,” says Thompson. ISO and QS 9000 Certification The aspirin that cured Thompson’s maintenance head-ache was the ISO and QS 9000 certification process. “Two things were happening back then,” he says. “First, our customers in the aerospace and automotive industries were demanding that we get their jobs done and off the machines very quickly. We couldn't afford to have machines down. At about the same time we got involved in going for ISO and QS 9000 certification, which requires you have a written maintenance schedule. That turned a light on in my mind and forced us to set up a formal maintenance process on paper and to carry it out on a true schedule, instead of waiting for something to break. We wrote out our maintenance processes and made our operators responsible for carrying them out and that took care of the problem.” Alard’s maintenance schedules include all necessary calibrations, plus preventative maintenance done by outside vendors. “We also used to have coolant problems,” he says, “so we put in a big coolant recycling system, which processes the coolant, cleans it up. We didn’t install a lot of plumbing, though. Instead, we use a Yellow Bellied Sump sucker which we move around from machine to machine as needed. Much easier than interfering with production to put in a coolant plumbing system. The bottom line on a maintenance program is that we have seen a vast improvement in our machine up time, and our equipment lasts a lot longer, too. That goes straight to the bottom line.” CNC Headaches When Thompson began adding CNC equipment he found he also had other problems. “Luckily we had good people here to help solve them, though,” he says. “A lot of the responsibility for handling them fell on the shoulders of our CNC supervisor, Brian Zour, who has been with us since the days when we only had three CNC lathes and three CNC mills."
“Things were a lot easier back
then,” says Zour. “The operation was small enough that we could haul the cables
from the computer out to the machines and then we had to manually send out the
programs and data back to the computer. But that simple setup didn’t last very
long, really, because we kept adding machines.” About the time the company had grown to running 7 or 8 CNC lathes and 6 CNC mills, Zour says they went to switch boxes to handle their communication problems with their machines. “The problem with that was that you had to walk to the computer, get it set up, then switch the box to the machine you wanted to download to,” he says. “Then you had to go to the machine and tell it to receive the program. It was a lot of walking and wasted time. In my view it was a poor solution to managing communication with a lot of machines.” Switch to DNC Software About two years ago, with the CNC family growing significantly by the year, Zour recommended to Thompson that they put in a DNC system to handle the machine communication. “We had another problem besides just machine communication,” Zour says. “We do a lot of probing on our machines in order to cut the cost of post machining inspection. We use Renishaw probe software and at that time, if we wanted to do probing and collect the data, we had to put up one computer for each machine. That was a real pain. So, rather than trying to get a computer for each CNC that was doing the probing we needed a DNC system that would drip feed all our machines and simultaneously separate the probe data and send it on to customer files on our main server. So, we went to Westec 2003, I believe, and searched for a system that would handle communications with a lot of machines and also handle all the probing software traffic, too. At Westec we discovered the Refresh Your Memory DNC systems and it offered all the features we needed.” Refresh Your Memory Zour says the reason he chose Refresh Your Memory to manage his CNC machines was that they offered everything he needed at a very reasonable price. “Another thing was that they said they wouldn’t have to disrupt production to get their system installed,” he says. “In fact, it took them only a little more than a day to get all the machines set up. They used our existing computer and our existing wiring, so it was really a painless operation.” All the CNC machines connected to the Refresh Your Memory system are in one building, Zour says. “Those machines require a lot of interface with our programmers and our SPC system,” he says. “In the other building, the machines can easily be handled with floppies, because they don’t change too much. The really great thing about this system is that it works flawlessly. No more walking back and forth. No more computers at each machine to collect the probing data. Just nuisance-free efficiency.” More Machines? When Gregg Thompson started, he had a unique business goal. “Believe it or not, before I moved to my current building, back in 1990, my goal was to own 400 machines. The reason was that I had seen a picture of a shop in Germany that had three or four hundred multispindles under one roof, and I said I'm going to do that one day. Well, the flood of all the high-volume business to China changed that, though I think we could be well on our way, if the China thing hadn't happened.” So, what is Thompson’s goal now? “Well, now I’m going to spend my efforts to modernize what I have now. We’re going to automate and become even more competitive than we are now. We’re eliminating secondary operations. We’ve just got in our new Mori Seiki NH 5000 horizontal and the new little Star swiss machines. That’s probably a lot more practical right now.”
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