There are clear ways to reduce costs if you just examine your time-wasting activities.

We’re all on the never-ending quest for improved productivity and profits. But finally, people are looking in the right direction: Profit is made by minimizing costs. Profit is the difference between what you sell it for (price) and what it took to make and sell it (cost). Price is something you have little control over. Your costs are in two categories—raw materials, which, again, you have little control over, and your added-value manufacturing costs (AVMC). By lowering your AVMC, you dramatically improve your profits.

In your QUest for Improved Profits (QUIP), you’ll find the age-old formula: time = money. Using some simple algebra, we see wasted time generates no money and therefore creates losses. Even worse, lost time cannot be recovered. Time used more efficiently generates more money because it increases its value creating profits.

To begin our QUIP, we first start with data. For purposes of this article, our data collection device will be the production logbook taken from the molding floor and a spreadsheet program on your computer that contains a graphing function.

Data has three essential characteristics. It must be repeatable, useful, and valid. All three must be in place at the same time to be considered data. For instance, given the appropriate circumstances, the data for boiling water at sea level with the correct atmospheric pressure will always have the same value. If we need to know the temperature to do something else and can relate the value our temperature-measuring device has given us, this is data. But suppose we want to control the temperature of the water but don’t have the means to do so? While repeatable and valid, this information is not useful and therefore cannot be considered data for our purposes.

Gathering evidence

When setting up your spreadsheet, look at your operation for production-floor time wasters and include those in one column. Let’s briefly look at 10 time wasters and their solutions.

1. Machine down/no schedule. The sales force’s purpose in life is to overload your shop. If a machine sits idle, you’re not making money. Injection molding is a 24/7 technology, yet many shops don’t run 24 hours a day and more still only believe in a five- or six-day workweek. If you are not fully utilized, your shop is losing some very lucrative potential profit.

2. Machine down/no operator. This is inexcusable for several reasons. First, you’ve made your operation people-dependent and, unfortunately, people are not particularly dependable. Second, injection molding maximizes its profit potential by running fully automated processes. Third (I’ve actually seen this in several plants), the workforce is so “lean” that some machines have to be shut down when folks go on breaks, go to lunch, at shift change, during vacation time, or the opening day of hunting/fishing season. You’ve got to be mule-stupid to have put yourself in this position.

3. Machine down/no mold. If you schedule properly, you should always have a backlog. If a scheduled mold hasn’t arrived at your plant or is being repaired, or you’re awaiting approval from a customer, put another mold in the press and mold parts. The worst that can happen is that you’ll have partially completed this new run and you’ll have to pull the mold and put the one in that was originally scheduled.

4. Machine down/machine maintenance. Scheduled maintenance is part of the cost of doing business and is not wasted profit. However, neglecting maintenance and going down because something broke is inexcusable.

5. Machine down/tool maintenance. Tooling should be maintained when the job is not scheduled to run. Water leaks, broken pins, scratched cavities, etc. are things that should be anticipated and interdicted before the mold is mounted in the press.

6. Machine down/setup. Setups are a necessary cause for downtime. However, setups that take more than half a shift are wasteful. You shouldn’t have to go hunting for equipment (bolts, clamps, waterlines). You shouldn’t have to stop your setup to troubleshoot another machine. You shouldn’t have to stop and wait until someone else is done using your only torque wrench, crane, forklift, or anything else.

7. Machine down/no material. Going down because you ran out of plastic to process, were waiting for the hopper to dry your material, or didn’t have boxes to put parts in or skids to stack boxes on should be grounds for termination for lack of planning.

8. Rejected lot. If everyone knows what a good part is, the mold is properly maintained, and the mold has made acceptable parts in the past, there is no excuse for making bad parts. Ever.

9. Slow cycle. If you’re making scrap and you slow down the cycle (physically slow it down, block off a cavity, and so on), you’re wasting time you’ll never get back.

10. Inspecting quality in. If fear of a reject requires you to put additional labor on a job to inspect every part, it’s probably cheaper to put a few $20 bills in with the parts and let your customer sort them. If you must sort quality in, there are devices that can do it faster and more accurately than people can.

Making your case

Each of these wasters could very well be broken down into several subcategories. It doesn’t matter. It’s way more important that you set up a list of the time wasters that best fits your operation and your machines. As a pilot program, you might pick only a few machines. Gather data (repeatable, useful, and valid) so you can account for 24 hours a day, seven days a week for each machine, regardless of how your plant operates. You’d be surprised, when you add up the hours of machine time, how often people “forget” to put in the true downtime because they feel it makes them look bad. This is a situation you’ll have to deal with. Gather data for two weeks minimum. Longer than two months (unless you’re using the ever-exploitable/abusable summer students) is a waste of time and money.

With this data in hand, calculate the total nonprofit-generating hours for each category by machine and draw a bar chart. Create another bar chart by category for all your machines. Redo your charts into a Pareto format. The importance of insisting on true data and using the Pareto approach is that you are pointed toward the issues with the highest profit potential.

Using the Pareto principle of “80% of the problems are generated by 20% of the causes” as you go through your charts by machine, you’ll notice some very specific time wasters unique to certain machines. This is a maintenance issue. However, there are always some surprising generic time wasters. Many people think 10-minute mold changes are a good goal to pursue. While it certainly is, comparing the lost time of running seven cavities on an eight-cavity mold puts running on full cavitation as a the top of the list and faster mold changes something to be worked on later.

You may now share your QUIP with management, along with a plan to correct the deficiencies. While they like charts (executive coloring books), some of the more enlightened also want data expressed as money, making your request for money easier to justify. Simply multiply your lost hours by whatever dollar figure you use in quoting parts.

This pilot program can be used as a crystal ball experiment—the data you’ve got from this small sample of machines is probably typical of your entire operation. Implement your QUIP on a small scale, measure the profits, and then leverage it plantwide. A Pareto chart is a snapshot in time. But circumstances tend to be dynamic. If your QUIP report generates enough profit to make this an ongoing program, you’ve now justified purchasing one of the several prewritten programs.

This article is virtual. You can read it, set up your own program, and look like a hero. You can also use it to scare management as they watch jobs going overseas. Or you can use it to say, “I told you so,” when you get downsized. Your choice.

Consultant Bill Tobin ([email protected]) is a regular contributor to IMM. You can sign up for his e-newsletter at www.wjtassociates.com.