On the first day of the 2024 Manufacturers Association Annual Meeting in Clearwater Beach, Florida, Forbes speaker and columnist Gene Marks presented an eye-opening article that tracks the cost of computer processing speed over the past several years. He pointed out a graph. Decades.
During the FMA annual meeting, a Navy SEAL turned leadership consultant brought up an idea that might be a bit surprising to someone who has never served in the military: distributed command. “Distributed command not only allows you to grow within your role, but also allows you as a leader to step back and look at the big picture. You can't have that perspective if you're constantly making decisions for your team. .”
That person was Carlos Mendez, a veteran consultant with Texas-based Echelon Front. His insight went against the prevailing view of the military, shaped by a scene in a movie where his sergeant yells at his men. In reality, soldiers can be cut off from central command, and without the training and authority to think and act independently, can find themselves in difficult situations.
Lives may not be at risk in manufacturing plants, but livelihoods certainly are. Most metal fabrication takes place in a mixed product environment. When equipment and software juggle hundreds of tasks, it's inevitable that unexpected variables will disrupt your operations. Although Fabricator strives to minimize exceptions, exceptions always occur.everytime–There are exceptions.
On the first day of a conference in Clearwater Beach, Florida, in late February, Forbes speaker and columnist Gene Marks presented an eye-popping graph tracking the cost of computer processing speed over the past several decades. pointed out. “Today's processing speed costs about 100 million times less than it did in the 1970s. In 1993, the fastest computers could perform less than 1,000 operations per millisecond. That's more than 1 billion Operation reached every millisecond.
The extraordinary power of modern computing has given rise to all kinds of AI tools, but they are not “all-inclusive” solutions. You can compose emails, design presentations, and automate certain email tasks. They are very helpful in a thousand different ways, but only achieve 80% to 90%. Humans still need to bring work across the finish line.
This scenario may someday mirror life on the manufacturing floor, but we still have a ways to go. The challenge, as several custom fabricator attendees discussed in breakout sessions at the conference, is data.Conventional wisdom holds that manufacturers are swimming in it, but how? good Is it data? Machines and software capture an incredible amount. However, in most fab shops, not all machines are automated and a lot of work needs to be done before and after each manufacturing step. Although the operator now uses laptops, tablets, and even mobile phones instead of paper work, she is probably still manually entering job information into her ERP system. What exactly happens between the first clock in and the last clock out at a particular work center is often not known.
This can be a big surprise when manufacturers integrate industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) platforms. These reveal how short the machine's “real” uptime is, i.e., whether the machine is actually cutting, bending, welding, and actually producing good parts. Usually it's only a fraction of the time people expected. IIoT reveals low-hanging fruition improvements (such as standardizing material preparation, procedures and work practices between shifts), but it also shows that no matter how dialed in operations are, exceptions will occur. . will exist. Discussions at the FMA Annual General Meeting focused more than in past years on how best to manage them.
Lean principles were discussed during the conference session, such as optimizing machine utilization but not sacrificing overall plant throughput. Inefficiencies, which are not often talked about, were also brought up for discussion. In one breakout session, OSH Cut co-founder (and fellow The Fabricator columnist) Caleb Chamberlain walked attendees through the customer experiences he and his team have designed. It cannot be printed using OSH Cut. In fact, there was no print at all, which raised some eyebrows in the audience. Customers upload design files directly to his OSH Cut website and perform design for manufacturability (DFM) analysis. If there is a problem, the customer can make changes and upload the design again. From there, nesting, machine programming, and countless other order preparation tasks are all done automatically.
OSH Cut isn't the only manufacturer to do this. There are several shops offering similar services in the US, and a collection of “web shops” in Europe, with his 247TailorSteel in the Netherlands being the best known. This model won't work everywhere, but it's important to understand what activities in the metal manufacturing supply chain truly add value, and where those activities (particularly his DFM) should take place. Which brings up bigger questions.
Brian Steel, CEO of Cadrex Manufacturing Solutions and conference panel participant, represented the other end of the spectrum in metal manufacturing. After acquiring numerous factories, Cadrex is now one of the largest metal contract manufacturers in the country. The company also employs software that simulates the entire factory, weighs different production options, and recommends what's best.
Attendees at the Fabricators and Manufacturers Association Annual Meeting took a deep dive into what defines operational excellence, skills, and future success: great systems, great data, and most importantly, great employees .
All of this highlights the growing importance of software innovation. The best of them aim to weigh the effects of thousands of variables in high-product mix manufacturing, ultimately helping skilled people make better decisions. Software doesn't solve everything, highlighting the importance of problem solving and distributed command. The last thing attendees at the FMA Annual Meeting want is to lead an automated shop where software makes all the decisions and people just sit back and do what they're told.
Operators should not avoid using new technology or change machine programs or tools just because they like it. But you also shouldn't run machine programs or jobs that don't really work. They need to be able to identify what is truly an “exception” and have enough knowledge and authority (supported by good systems and procedures) to act and get the job done. No matter what the future holds for software, machine learning, and AI, employee skills and curiosity will remain a key competitive advantage for manufacturers.
