- News/topics 2017/07/06 UP
-
Key formula to increasing productivity
Sharing of machining know-how of skilled technicians in company 1【Sorting out issues】
- Tag
-
- Digitalization
- CELOS
- Personnel training
- Setup time reduction
1.Accumulated “trials and errors” are assets to increase productivity.
Productivity improvement is an ever-lasting issue to any companies. One of the various approaches is reduction in setup time. Setup time can be drastically reduced by “re-use of accumulated setup know-how in the past.” It has been possible to refer to past NC programs, but they are simply the records of final results.
Know-how is actually stored in trial and error processes from drawing to programming, and we cannot learn any from completed NC programs in the past because they are mere forms of final results.
Some operators manually write down setup know-how in drawings, but in reality it is difficult to share and use the information among other operators sustainably.
2.Two reasons why the use of trials and errors will be increasingly important
（1）Growing needs of high-mix low-volume production
The standardization of setup work can lead to increasing productivity because we see more shifts from mass-production to flexible high-mix low-volume production.
More frequently we change workpieces, more setup work we need. When the number of production items increases, it directly increases the number of setups. That’s why reduction in setup time, namely machine idling (non-cutting) time, is increasingly significant.
（2）Retirement of veteran technicians and difficulty in securing human resources
As a working population decreases, securing human resources becomes more and more difficult. Reliable veteran technicians may have a limited workload and working hours, or a higher risk of health problems. Their retirement also makes the situation serious.
With limited human resources, operation of one machine, which has been conventionally done by a particular operator with particular skills, will have to be done by any others. So the veterans’ own know-how needs to be shared and smoothly passed onto others.
The increasingly important “standardization of setup work (Not dependent on individual expertise)” also brings beneficial effects such as reduction in training time of newly hired employees and easy deployment of new technologies and tools.
