CNC – BIG Machine downtime can result from SMALL reasons, and ruin your ROI
This is a real story from a shop floor that uses our LEANworks machine monitoring software to track their machines, mostly VMCs and HMCs. Among other reports, LEANworks gives a report of downtimes and their reasons. The shop Manager kept noticing that every machine reported periodic downtimes for ‘waiting for tool’ in every shift. The downtimes added up to something like an hour every day, on every machine.
He walked over to the shop floor, asked a couple of operators what this was. He found out that a group of machines had a single set of allen keys. If an operator need the allen keys, he had to search all other machines to find out who had them. If they were in use, he had to wait till they were free.
The manager simply gave each machine a set of allen keys, and the downtime stopped. It was costing the company Rs. 1000 per machine per day, Rs. 3 Lakhs per year, per machine. The one-time cost of the solution was Rs. 250, for the set of allen keys.
Any shop floor has a number of such downtimes caused by trivial reasons. The people on the shop think the downtime is part of the process (“Oh, this is how we have always done things here”), and top management does not know that it is happening. So everyone is happy, but money is leaking.
