In 2005, Troy Leroux left his job at Anderson Pattern (Muskegon, MI) to pursue a new career opportunity. Anderson was a highly regarded conventional custom casting process tooling manufacturer that was struggling in the face of foreign competition and inflexible business processes.
In 2010, he was rehired by his old company to schedule production in the roughing department. The company had changed its name to Anderson Global. That was not the only thing that had changed. Leroux was astonished by how much more productive the company had become. He roughly estimates that output through the company's CNC manufacturing equipment had increased by 40-50%. It was almost like he had stepped out briefly in one era and back again in another.
The biggest change was that machines are no longer standing idle machinists while write their own CNC programs. Anderson Global now has three off-line Mastercam programmers that supply programs to ten machines five to seven days a week for three shifts. Spindle downtime is now limited to changeover setups. The department also standardized the tool library for all of its machines. This created scheduling flexibility, made programming faster and allowed machine operators to be more efficient because they don't have to be locating tools for their machines every time they run a new program.
Lead programmer, Keven Knollinger believes that most machinists at Anderson Global buy into the new paperless way of doing things, but obtaining buy-in wasn't easy at first. "Programming at the machine had been a big part of their jobs and we were asking them to give that up. Everybody has their own way of doing things, so it's not easy to give up on your own preferences, particularly when you have been doing things a certain way for years. However, I think that most of my coworkers are finally saying that this is really working. It's not perfect but I think that if we hadn't done this, we would not be alive today. That's how important it is." |