This fab shop really cooks!

Modern Machine Shop, Nov, 1993 by Chris Koepper

Most of us have noticed during our daily commute, and along other frequently traveled routes, how some businesses appear to spring up from the ground overnight. Such rapid proliferation seems especially true of the many chain restaurants that dot the cityscape--you know their names.

This story is about a fabrication shop that works behind the scenes to help make such apparitions occur. They tackle the task of coordinating the manufacture or procurement of every item needed to furnish a chain restaurant. An important contributor to this shop's success, and our focus for this story, is a software package that helps them maximize production flow through the shop so the seeming miracle of instant institution can be realized.

But software, or any technology alone, is not sufficient to assure success. This shop carefully blends technology, such as integrated production software and CNC laser cutters, with their most valuable asset--people. It's a winning combination.

Start With A Sheet Of Stainless Steel

One look at the receiving department of Stainless Incorporated (Deerfield Beach, Florida)--shelves lined ceiling to floor with bundles of 14- to 22-gauge stainless steel sheet--tells even the most casual observer this company got a real deal on some steel or they use a bunch of sheet metal in their manufacturing operation. Both assumptions are accurate.

Contrary to the prevailing trends of lower raw material inventory, part of the Stainless Incorporated business strategy is to keep a lot of sheet stock on hand. The company buys its stainless steel direct from a mill in Washington state. "Buying direct and in quantity gets us a good price break," says Vince Povio, supervisor of manufacturing engineering. "In fact," he continues, "the savings we realize from buying direct and in quantity offsets our inventory carrying costs. In our case, because the mill is so far away, and because we have such short leadtime for orders, stocking a large inventory of raw material works out economically to be in our best interest."

Getting The Order

In many job shop operations, an order is received for a quantity of one part, or it may be for a family of three or four different sizes of basically the same part. And, in some cases, a customer needs the shop to produce several different parts on an order.

Such typical orders are not the case for Stainless Incorporated. A typical order for them consists of from 400 to 600 distinct finished products. Products needed to fulfill a typical order in this shop range from tables to the kitchen sink as well as refrigeration units--literally anything fabricated from stainless steel that is used by a chain restaurant.

To illustrate how the complexity of an order in this shop escalates, let's take for an example of one of those 400 to 600 products, a self-serve beverage counter, used in many chain restaurants. Each beverage counter may have 100 distinct parts that must come together correctly to make the finished product. A quick calculation tells that a potential of 40,000 to 60,000 parts may be involved in an order. By comparison, a typical automobile has around 10,000 parts. Further complicating the order is a quoted turnaround time of four weeks, which is sometimes ("More often than we like," says Mr. Povio) even less than that. They ship 10 to 15 of these large orders a week! It takes a lot of steel.

From Front Door To Shop Floor

The road from order entry to shopfloor production is a fairly direct one at Stainless. And it's in this beginning stage of the manufacturing process that Stainless gets its jump on throughput. An automated software system from Optimation (Independence, Missouri) is an important tool for getting this fabrication shop from design to production in a hurry. In fact, Stainless Incorporated credits much of its ability to run orders smoothly, and more important, correctly, to the Optimation software package, installed a little over two years ago. The software has become an integral bridge between Stainless' CAD system for generating new or modifying existing parts, the IGES file system for existing parts, and the shop floor.

While Optimation software is first visible on the shop floor as a material usage controller (nesting program), much has already happened to get ready to make that first cut on a sheet of stainless steel.

When an order is placed with Stainless Incorporated, the production wheels move quickly into motion. Fast delivery is in the nature of this business. Order content is based on a contract written between a distributor for Stainless and either a chain restaurant franchisee or the chain itself. Some contracts may only call for a few replacement items for an existing store such as fry baskets or other sundries that Stainless keeps in stock. Another contract may be to re-equip a store that is remodeling. A third example of a contract is for an entire store. Everything needed to open and run a chain restaurant is readied and shipped from Stainless Inc.

When the contract is received, it is divided between the shop and an MRP inventory system. The products that need to be manufactured are assigned workorder numbers and entered into a batch file. The rest of the order, cataloged in the MRP system, is pulled from inventory and stock. The two systems, manufactured products and bought-out products, run parallel. We'll now continue to follow the manufactured product through the shop and we'll catch up with the MRP system a little later in the story.