LEAN is good, because it is designed around eliminating waste, and understanding profit. There are four principles of LEAN

1. Improve Quality
2. Eliminate the Seven Types of Waste
   1. Unnecessary movement of materials
   2. Excess inventory
   3. Inefficient Layout
   4. Waiting
   5. Over production
   6. Rework / reprocessing
   7. Defects
3. Reduce the time it takes to finish an Activity
4. Reduce total Costs

What’s interesting here is all four principles are based on the definition of an acceptable part. Here is where Common Sense must prevail:

Do you and your customer have a crystal clear definition of an acceptable part? How many times has a gate mark been both acceptable (because they needed the parts) or unacceptable (because you fell for the specification “no manufacturing / visible defects”)?

In molding there’s usually little need to ‘improve’ quality. However there’s a screaming need for a fixed, uncompromising, unchangeable definition for acceptable parts that is clearly defined and understood by you and your customer.

* *

SMED or fast changeovers come in two steps:

The first is purely mechanical. Is the new mold scheduled? Do you have all the accessory equipment and people available for the next run? Do you KNOW how to hook up the water and set the process conditions? Is the mold ready to run acceptable parts or is it out for maintenance and nobody told scheduling? Is the setup team/crane/forklift available when the job is ready for changeovers? This requires PLANNING by everyone. Not just an edict from a computer or a schedule.

The second in many instances conflicts with the ‘reduce total costs’ philosophy. The fastest way to begin running a new job is either to be able to use the same material as the previous run OR have a separate portable dryer that has pre-dried the material so you don’t have to wait. Do you have enough of these portable dryers available or do you need to buy more?

While there’s a lot to be said to comparing a mold changeover to the pit crews of NASCAR, if you don’t have useable material it doesn’t matter how quickly you changed the mold. The same is true if your setup team is troubleshooting another machine and ‘couldn’t get around to it’ because their first priority was to keep production running.

* *

Reducing the ‘time to do an activity’ and JIT are based on an interesting assumption: loading.

If your shop is under-loaded, idle equipment becomes an expense. There’s only so much you can do to fill up your capacity.

I’m embarrassed to say our capitalist system views people as an expense. We try to keep wages low when we should be looking at how much does each individual contribute to the profit (People Loading). Paying two people who can do the work of three or more at the same wage as a slacker explains why you lose your best people.

Training those who could contribute more is usually last on the list for available money, while ‘Lack of Operator’ is a shamefully common excuse for idle time. Cross train your people. Who says someone who is an operator can’t help hook up waterlines, or do the first few steps in troubleshooting? Spending a few thousand to train everyone in the principles of good molding, troubleshooting, mold changeovers, even driving a forklift; will pay back many times over even if only a two out of twenty apply it. New people create scrap. Retention of good people, periodic training of everyone (new and old), and rewards for the ‘players’ will keep your operation Lean and costs low.

JIT and SMED are based on a mystical assumption that if you reduce the changeover time to nothing (from the last good part to the production of goods parts for the next run) the unit cost of a ten part run is the same as the unit cost of making a million parts. PLEASE NOTE: I didn’t define SMED as only changing tools. This has to be a measure of the cost of idle time between two different saleable parts. When trying to cram this philosophy into a high volume industry like injection molding where a mold might be changed in fifteen minutes but a good part will be consistently produced after an hour of ‘dialing it in’, is false thinking. Once you understand how to change molds quickly; learn how to start them up equally fast.

The big ‘sales point’ to JIT is the lack of storage costs. Good thinking on the part of the customer; what about the molder? There are some easy to use Economic Order Quantity formulas available from any economics text book or the internet. What you quickly find is that while perhaps you shouldn’t make two runs per year for a customer when you ship weekly, you might make more profit is you made six or eight. What’s the cost of storage? If you have an international freight container in your parking lot and use it as a warehouse, what do you think the cost is per cubic foot?

* * * *

At the end of the day we’re all here to maximize profits with minimized expenses. While people with letters after their names expound on the individual components of LEAN, SMED, and JIT what you have to ultimately look at is a simply philosophy: “In the Big Picture, what gives the most profit?” Toyoda’s principles are neither academically technical nor complex. It isn’t about precision, it’s about consistency. It’s not about automation; it’s about properly using what is necessary whether it’s a robot or a person. More importantly, it’s about common sense.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bill is a trainer in molding, a consultant and a writer. You can contact him at bill4012@hotmail.com

]]> http://wjtassociates.com/site/?feed=rss2&p=385 http://wjtassociates.com/site/?p=375 http://wjtassociates.com/site/?p=375#comments Thu, 10 Nov 2011 20:45:52 +0000 WJT Associates http://wjtassociates.com/site/?p=375 I was in the owner’s office that overlooked the production floor where all the machines were making parts.  His comment was “Look at that, a money machine!”  Interesting.  When we got around to discussing why I was there; he was complaining about his minimal profits although his machines were busy.  And there’s the problem: are you making money or just running your machines? Here are four simple (inexpensive) steps to make money:

#1 The first step the easy one – Don’t make parts, Make schedule.  Although you might fill the order, if the customer gets it late or you paid overtime to get it on time; you’re going to lose business because you’re an unreliable supplier who can’t properly schedule or contain your costs.

#2 Don’t accept variances find out why – I love student interns:  They work cheap, will do a job that no one else has the time for; their work output will be their Senior Project so you also get free consulting advice from a professor.

Have your student intern go though all your jobs.  Write up a list of the most recent cycle times that you based your part prices on and the actual cycle times (the pieces shipped for the last order divided by the total hours to fill the order)  This will give you the REAL cycle time.  On this same spreadsheet have them calculate the difference in hours.  In the next column have them calculate the poundage of material budgeted compared to the amount of material actually used.  Using what you believe to be your standard press rate and the materials cost, in the final column lay out if the job made or lost money compared to your expectation.

Now have your student intern create a Pareto Chart with the biggest losers ranked first down to the least losers and the back up to the big money makers.  If your Intern can do it, have him/her postulate the reasons behind the winners and losers.

What’s typically found in cycle times is that most people on the floor don’t think a second or two means anything.  Here’s where the law of Unintended Consequences will chew up your profits:

A. Longer cycles extend the run time and therefore lower your press rate – where you make all your profit.
B. Longer cycles steal future press time that could be sold to another job or customer.
Since materials consume the vast majority of the part’s cost, this component of the pricing should take special attention.
A. Does your scrap rate plus the contribution of the sprue and runner amount to less than the regrind allowance?  If it does, 1,000 pounds into the process should yield 1,000 pounds of product.
B. While $10/pound purging compound may seem expensive, how many pounds of material are you generating in cleaning the barrel and tossing out mixed material parts?  This is both machine time and material lost that you’ll never recover.
Yield rates affect both cycle times and material usage.
A. Speeding up a machine but making more scrap in the process has a negative effect.
B. Over inspecting - the operator every 20 minutes – the Inspector every hour – the final inspection before shipping tells you two things:
a. You are actually ‘inspecting quality in’ and therefore you’re more likely to reject parts.  You’re spending a lot of indirect labor on inspections with little return.
b. You probably don’t know what an acceptable (read: Shippable/salable) part is.

#3 Don’t make rejects.  I realize this is stating the obvious but when you ask an operator, an inspector and a customer to tell you what a good part is, you generally get multiple answers.

Face the facts – NOBODY makes parts to print.  There are too many dimensions on a part to comply with all of them; so we generally only look at the ‘critical’ ones.  But when the customer has a quality audit (just for the fun of it OR because he over-ordered) he’ll find some sniggly dimension or a visual surface that he’s never complained about before and reject the entire lot.

This comes from ignorance on the part of the customer and supplier.  All too often I’ve heard buyers whine ‘the part is OK, but you can do better’.  It’s interesting that this complaining doesn’t come with any financial incentives.  Look at your $1,000+ TV set or your new car with the eyes of an inspector not a purchaser – look for flow lines, dings, bad texturing, scratches, rippled paint jobs etc. – All the stuff your customer rejects your product for but something you couldn’t care less about because you bought the product.  Too many molders bid on jobs with the specification “Free of Manufacturing Defects”.  You’re kidding Right??  If you have these jobs, you’ve got an engraved invitation to a rejected lot anytime your customer feels like it.  Dummy.

MORAL – a good part does what it’s supposed to do (It functions per its intended use) and is acceptable to the customer who purchases the part at the retail level (cosmetic acceptance).  Get that definition clearly stated from your customer on what is acceptable (not perfect) – rejects will vanish.

Have your Intern give you a listing of rejects.  Have your engineers and quality people jump all over the customer for a solid definition of what they’re actually willing to pay for.

#4 DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT – With this wonderful data from your intern, focus in on the biggest losers and eliminate the causes, keeping in mind one solution that won’t kill you is to tell your customer to either change the requirements or take his molds and find someone else to bankrupt.

Don’t form a Kaizen or Lean committee who’ll study it to death.  I had a client once with a proprietary product (read: they defined all the specifications) who formed a Kaizen committee of 10 people who met for half a day twice a week for 6 weeks to see if they could reduce their scrap.  I found it funny because an engineer and an inspector could have come up with better recommendations in a couple hours of solid work.  However these two people probably wouldn’t have generated a 50 page report and an hour long management presentation (at what cost?).  I secretly hoped some brain-dead manager would have seen through all the fluff and feathers, but they didn’t.  The report was presented at a national convention and nothing ultimately was done.   Go figure. All the quality/manufacturing gurus tell us to solve the problem embedding the solution – nothing more.

I cannot emphasize this enough – DO SOMETHING, if whatever you’re doing now isn’t working, doing anything different has a better probability of success.  From your intern’s Pareto chart; work on the biggest losers first.  Redo the chart and again attack the losers until there aren’t any.

- Find the proper cycle time and material allocation for a job.  Hold your people accountable – money only comes from on-time shipments that get paid.  Late or poor quality shipments ultimately come out of everyone’s paycheck.  You can’t afford apologists or slackers.  It’s better to have people who are arrogantly proud of how well the place is run, then some PowerPoint-wonks giving lame excuses on why you’re bleeding to death financially.

- Look at your sales force.  These guys and gals are the classic Hunter/Gatherers.  Their definition of success is booking a job.  They’ll tell you it’s your job to make a profit on it (after their commissions are paid, thank you).  Unfortunately their commissions are based on percentages of sales and not percentage the best fit between the job and your expertise.  There’s no such thing as a general molder.  We all specialize.  A medical house couldn’t afford to quote automotive work.  If someone wants a precise gear, going to someone who make screwdriver handles and bicycle grips might not be a good choice.  Quote jobs based on what you do well.  Only quote jobs on things you’ve never done that have little impact if they are rejected but the upside of giving you the expertise to move into a different type of molding.

- Train your people.  Every molder will tell you hiring an inexperienced operator is always a high source of scrap.  However, asking them to spend money on training is almost blaspheming.  What do they expect? – standing near a machine will allow the operators to somehow absorb knowledge like cat litter soaking up a spill?! If you can pay for scrap and inefficiencies you can afford to eliminate these problems with training.

‘Nuf said.

* - * - * - * - * - * - *

You can read this article take it to heart and do something.  Who knows?  You might become more profitable.  Or, if your fiefdom depends on generating reports laced with Japanese words and esoteric presentation slides, you can bury it and hope no one else got a copy.  OR you can read it, smirk, and use the paper you printed it on to line the cat litter box of your corporate pest control beast.

You’re choice, in hard times like these; it’s only your future at stake.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR – Bill Tobin is a consultant and trainer who can help molders make more profit.  He is the owner of WJT Associates and can be contacted at bill4012@hotmail.com

Unfortunately the Gurus of Statistics were brilliant mathematicians but boring writers.  Very few of their disciples completely read their books to understand the lessons.  Soon the quality folks fell in love with the concept of CpKs, PPM defect rates, DOE’s etc. but failed to comprehend the consequences of the answers.  Most were satisfied with the Cliff Notes versions.  While the Gurus extolled the virtues of statistics they also heavily emphasized it was only a tool.  With the proper application it would vastly improve profits but with improper use, it would only increase overhead costs and degrade profits.

AN EXAMPLE
The concept of CpK is simple.  You look at a tolerance, and then compare the variation of the process.  This variation is then statistically analyzed to give you ‘all possible outcomes’ from the process.

Let’s look at a simple example:  Rolling a pair of dice.  The ‘tolerance’ of a pair of dice is fixed.  The lowest number you can roll is 2 and the highest is 12.  The most frequent number and the average of all the combinations is 7.  In this example, our specified Mean dimension is 7 with a tolerance of +/- 5. (On careful consideration you’ll notice this tolerance is quite tight.)  Now someone decides they require at least a CpK of 1.0 meaning all possible combinations will fit within the tolerance and be centered on the mean.  This is kind of fun to do on a spreadsheet AND it seems reasonable.  You’ll find the standard deviation of all of the combinations is 2.44949.  BUT when you do the three sigma calculations you find statistically the lower 3-sigma limit is -0.3447 and the upper 3-sigma statistical limit is 14.3447.  Oops!

If you rolled a conventional pair of dice in a casino and came up with a negative number or a number higher than twelve, large gentlemen would probably have an intense discussion with you before you were tossed into the parking lot. This is the fault of believing only statistical analysis and ignoring Common Sense.  Statistics don’t lie, but amateur statisticians frequently misunderstand and draw bad conclusions.

All too often I work with clients where someone in the Temple Of Documentation required a statistical proof of robustness in their mold qualification procedures.  The molders and manufacturers made multiple runs of thousands of parts and endless mold modifications only to come up with statistics similar to rolling dice.  After having spent considerable time and money on this silliness, the Designers, Quality Geeks, or Engineers actually approve this ‘non-robust’ process as ‘not statistically qualified but acceptable’. Isn’t this blaspheming against the Sacred ‘Qualification Procedure’?

Before agreeing to CpK’s and other requirements; let these procedures see the ‘light of day’:

If the designs are already to the SPI tolerancing standards two things should be apparent. (1) The part should function successfully at both ends of the tolerance and all combinations in between.  (2) If the designer wants a tighter tolerance than the SPI standards provide for, you will have to ‘Inspect Quality In’ using a 100% sorting process. What the designer is really telling you with a CpK tighter than 1.0 is he’s afraid of his own specified tolerance scheme and believes his product will fail unless you manage to be almost exactly on the Mean dimension. (3) What value, if any, is it to the customer to send a statistical analysis with every shipment?

If the SPI Fine tolerance says +/- .002 and the customer wants a CpK of 1.33 he’s asking you to hold a tolerance of +/-.001.  Meaning you’ll have ugly yield numbers.  “But”, my clients say “This is what the customer wants, and the customer is always right!”  My response is: ‘If the customer is always right he will gladly pay for it.  BUT if the customer’s purchasing agent demands lower pricing, you’re gonna have nasty problems to deal with.’

It’s kinda fun to listen to the Data Dogs expound on the virtues of precision, see the designers blindly follow this philosophy and then listen to the buyer pull his trump card to  this talk with his ‘Fast, Cheap and High Quality’ speech.  The buyer’s only goal is to fill his pipeline with useable parts of acceptable quality, in the volumes necessary, at a reasonable price.  Everything else is wastefully expensive fluff and feathers.

Do your homework and present your case to the customer’s buyer. Buyers/managers only speak one language – money.  Designers and quality people tend to be ignorant or at least not fluent in this language. At the end of the day it is money that plays and everything else gets ejected from the game.

There’s a lesson here:  Before you quote a job, look at what it will take to ‘qualify’ the parts you’ll be molding.  Get a firm, committed, written answer to these questions from the company’s buyer.

(1) Who is paying for all these qualification runs and the production reports?

(2) Although the customer asked for it, are the demands of the statistical calculations even practical? Or will it be an expensive exercise in multiple tooling corrections where you not only have to ‘hit the bull’s eye’ but have to consistently put the next million shots from your gun exactly into the bullet hole from the first shot?

Talk to the buyer before you talk to the Techno-Geeks. Send him the SPI standards and the costs to meet his requirements. Let him make the choice. If you have the data (even from another customer’s part of the same material) to back it up, you’d be amazed what the buyer can do to streamline your qualification process and improve your profits. Ultimately the customer always pays for the qualification - either up front, or many times over buried in the part price

Use statistics wisely, they are merely a tool to use to improve your own profits.  They never were Holy Writ.  .

It’s your choice.

Times have changed.  Many companies have finally figured out ‘Kost is Cing” isn’t.  Off shore sourcing degraded quality standards, upset delivery schedules and too many parts were being air freighted in.  Now molds are being brought back into the country and sourced (as they should be) locally.  But the relocation program can easily turn into a mess!
I keep hearing the horror stories:  “We tried to bring the mold back into the country but the guy wants $XXX,XXX in Engineering Services Fees before he’ll release the tooling!”  Welcome to the real world!  Here’s what’s happening.

You’re pulling the job and the offshore molder is going to be losing profit he’d make if he kept it.  He’s across several time zones, international borders, and legal systems.  Here in the USA you only have to pay up all outstanding invoices and whatever charges you agreed to in your policy manual having to do with raw materials and such.  Once you’ve settled your account if you don’t get your mold, you go to court and things get nasty very quickly for your supplier.  If you try the same stunt with a Chinese molder, they’ll just laugh at you.  While you have recourse to go through the Chinese Court system, the game’s rigged for the home team.  You’re not the home team. Get it?

Scenario #1. Let’s say you do get the mold and you ship it to your best bud that you’ve not been allowing to quote because you sent everything across the pond.  Here’s your challenge:

Whose quality standards are we using?  If you expect the guy in the Windy City to produce the crown jewels from a mold that was lucky to make parts that even looked like what you’d specified; you’re in for a disappointment.

Expect any competent molder to take the mold as he would any other mold that just showed up on his dock.  In his view it’s nothing more than a pile of metal plates (maybe not even tool steel) until proven otherwise.

Expect to pay for an evaluation run.  This will show everyone what the mold is capable of producing, warts and all.

Expect a lengthy laundry list of repairs, replacements and refurbishments that will have to be done and paid for before this mold is put into production.  Keep in mind your buyer giggled with delight when the mold’s original cost was 1/3 the stateside cost.  The reason for this low cost was cheap labor and inexpensive (read different quality) materials.  In low labor markets they have no expectation of a mold lasting 1,000,000 cycles with its original components.  Because labor is so cheap, it’s more economical to continually rebuild components.  I’ve seen a few jobs that by the time the insourced mold was producing quality parts, the mold base was the only thing salvageable: all the inserts, mechanisms and pins were replaced.  Ouch! Spendy.

You might also brace yourself for the dreaded “There’s nothing salvageable in this tool” speech.  What you’re being told is that if the molder could pay his people $2/day it would be economical to hire an army of convicts to deflash every part and he’d be able to run the volumes you need.  But in the USA, it’s probably cheaper overall to simply build a new mold and get on with life.  Remember the buyer saying “I can by three molds in China for the price of one mold in the USA!”?  Now’s the time to cash in that boast.

SCENARIO #2
Regardless of whether you can directly produce acceptable parts from your ‘insourced’ mold, refurbish the mold, or replace it entirely; you’re faced with two problems.  How do I (1) track the repairs/refurbishment?  And (2) how do I requalify the parts/molds?

This is a big engineering commitment that neither the customer nor the molder can staff because the problem is an intense short term one.  Who are you going to find who’ll do this besides their normal responsibilities?  If you think the molder has tooling engineers loafing around, he doesn’t. He downsized his staff when you downsized on him.  If you think you can talk your people into working double duty (read 60-80 hour weeks) under the clause ‘any other duties management shall assign’ in your employment agreement; they’ll probably quit, or be divorced after the first month of this kind of panic.

What do you do?  Actually it’s simple.  This is what I do.  I’m experienced, don’t mind long hours, and short term (you don’t have to fire me, I just go home when the job is done). You hire me, or another consultant.  Tooling is rebuilt and reported to you on a weekly basis, qualifications are run and certified and you’re back in business as quickly as feasibly possible.  I’m not in love with traveling.  I extensively use the Internet for progress reporting (electronic spreadsheets complete with graphs), digital photographs to show the physical progress, and free video conferencing which is cheap. A one hour teleconference, is hundreds (sometimes thousands) of times cheaper than the time and billable hours for a road trip. Even a middle manager can figure that out!

Yup, it will cost you about what you pay your people IF you paid them for all the hours they’d work doing this themselves.  Or, you can do what you did with the Chinese mold-builder/molder: make one phone call, send off a check, go to sleep, and begin yelling for finished parts when the guy said he’d be done.  Oh Wait! You can’t do that! You’re already in production.  Now what?

+ + + + + + + +

You can read this and think it’s nothing less than Shameless Marketing on my part. You’re probably be right.  Or, you can read this and at least not get bushwhacked when a few dozen tools have to be relocated; not knowing the kind of commitment it will take to find new homes for all of them and fill the supply chain back up.  Or you can naively think your people will gladly jump to the task and ‘be happy in their work’ – you only have a few weeks of that silliness before burnout sets in and your people show up to work either grumpy, hungover or both.  OR you can just go back to sleep and wait for the dreaded ‘relocation memo’ to whack you on the nose.

I could use the work and you need to keep your people and your job.

Your choice.

Try these tips

- Start and finish the meeting on time. If there’s more to consider, plan the appropriate follow-up actions or schedule another meeting.  HINT ON PROMPTNESS Shut the door at the start of the meeting.  Lock the door and don’t answer the knocking if you want some fun.  Or if anyone (managers included) come in late, everyone stands up and applauds them for taking time out of their busy day to come to the meeting.

- At the close of the meeting, ask if participants are comfortable with the outcomes.  HINT ON OUTCOMES – business isn’t a democracy, but it also isn’t a dictatorship.  Make sure the assigned work is evenly distributed so that no one is overloaded and no slackers can point to someone else.

- Make sure all meeting participants know that you expect them to be on time and prepared to discuss their agenda items.  HINT ON DISCUSSIONS:  While a little brutal make a ground rule that anyone who comments off topic, isn’t prepared, or disrupts the meeting will be told to leave and must make up his/her assignment without further participation.

- Encourage everyone to speak up. Quieter people may have valuable contributions, but they may need some encouragement to share them.  HINTS ON PARTICIPATION: Everyone has something to contribute.  Make the ground rules clear that if someone sees a flaw in the plan should speak up, not criticizing but offering an alternative.  Ten people will have ten different points of view.  All of them are usually valid.

- Provide a detailed agenda for each meeting. It should include topics for and the purpose of discussion, as well as a discussion leader and time allotment for each topic. Distribute the agenda a couple of days before the meeting so that meeting participants have time to prepare.  HINTS ON MEETING AGENDAS – meetings are for problem solving, information exchange and consensus building.  Focus on the agenda.  If someone wants to preach point them to the local church.

- Assign someone to take notes in each meeting. That way, decisions and follow-up action items are documented and can be circulated to the meeting’s participants.  NOTES – there are computer programs that can record meetings and transcribe them into notes.  You don’t need a verbatim transcript.  Meetings are not a trial or deposition.  Highlight the bullet points, who is responsible for the actions and when they will deliver.  Three columns on a sheet of paper #1 Action Item, #2 Who’s going to handle it #3 the expected outcome (both action and completion dates).

- Determine which meetings are really necessary. If the objective of a meeting is to simply update others about ongoing projects, it might make more sense to send a memo or group e-mail, or to post the information on your company’s computer network. However, for in-depth discussions, meetings generally work best.  IMPORTANCE OF MEETINGS – While many people believe in weekly meetings and the importance of ‘Face Time’; meetings are expensive.  If you divide company profits by headcount you’ll quickly see each person at a meeting costs (or should be generating) $100+/hour.  A one hour meeting costs someone between $500 and $1000 worth of profit.  Think about the ROI and balance that against an e-mail before you schedule the meeting.

PRESENTATIONS
More and more, PowerPoint presentations are common in meetings.  Here are some hints:

-Graphics – Slides should be highlighting talking points.  Hard copy handouts are better to looking at data.  Use your slides to advance your meeting’s agenda. Don’t read the slide out loud.  This isn’t story time at nursery school.  The slide should either prompt your speech or be self explanatory.  Nothing else.

-Readability  - the rule of thumb for slides is that if the whole slide can’t be read in less than 5 seconds, you should use more slides.

-Data Overload – the slide should be in 24 point Font or larger.  Turning a spreadsheet into a slide will only allow the people next to the screen to read it.  If this kind of data is necessary, use a handout.  Small front is unreadable and irritating.

-Handouts.  Using slides as handouts only shows the presenter isn’t prepared. Handouts should be text, tables, photos and such as something to discuss.  Keep in mind, if you give someone a handout, they’ll read it and not pay attention to your slides.

-FORMAT – Your first slide to be a graphic ‘table of contents’ for the rest of your slides telling the audience what they are going to see later in the presentation.  Each presentation should have four parts: 1. Tell them what you are going to tell them.  2. Tell them.  3. Tell them what you told them.  4. Allow them to ask questions about what you told them.

-THEATER – a PowerPoint presentation is a kind of theatrical performance.
1. Rehearse what you are going to say in front of somebody.  Do it until they understand what you’re saying.  If they don’t understand, redo the slides.  Simple is better than confusing.  You should control the presentation not it controlling you.  Know what you are saying so well that you don’t even have to use the slides to prompt you.

2. People cannot take notes in the dark.  The only way you can see a slide with a dark background is in a completely blackened room and bright colored text.  If you ABSOLUTELY need a background color use a light one where black colored letters are easily readable.  If not, use a clear background and dim the room, don’t turn off all the lights.

3.  Use larger font for important headings and smaller fonts for subheadings.  Keep the font simple – Ariel, Times New Roman or Veranda.  Fancy fonts might look good on billboards or award diplomas but are impossible to read during a presentation.

4. Questions – questions during your presentation can quickly sidetrack the topic.  Hold off questions until the end of the presentation.  Allow 25% of your scheduled time for questions.

5. Grammar and spelling – PowerPoint has a spell checker, Use it.  Many managers will ask for a copy of your presentation (for their use in later meetings).  Each memo, report, and presentation is really a job performance review.  If your grammar looks like it was learned at the Prison Work Release program, that’s how you’ll be judged.

6. LAST SLIDE – nothing makes you look more like a rookie than at the end of the presentation everyone is staring at a black screen with ‘end of presentation’ in white letter staring at them.  You last slide should either solicit questions and comments.

Meetings / Presentations are taking on more and more of a theatrical flavor.  None of the rules are complex or hard to master but it does take a skill you probably didn’t learn in school.  Unfortunately more meetings/projects succeed on their theatrical content than they do on their substance.  Such is the Computer Age.

More bad ideas have been accepted and good ideas ignored because of the quality of the presentation.  Looking ill prepared or like an amateur trying to put on a presentation will cause your contribution to be ignored only a little slower than not presenting it at all.  Like everything else it is all about preparation and rehearsal.

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If you’d like to see how to make a mess out of your presentations check out this YouTube presentation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDRTFvQFJNo&feature=channel

This article is Virtual.  You can read this, take a little time to minimally master the skills and your meetings will go smoother and presentations be accepted with a higher percentage than before.  Or you can think by sheer force of personality you can get your ideas across and you’ll have your head handed to you by a rookie who can present better than you.  OR you can read this, think you know it all, use it to scare the vultures flying around the plant, and wonder why nobody listens to you.

The choice is yours, grasshopper.

Ideally customers want perfect parts at unreasonably low prices with the supplier maintaining a high level of finished goods inventory that the customer is not held liable to purchase.  But in the real world quality is only ‘sufficient’.  Unless there is a specific clause in the purchase order the molder keeps a minimum of authorized inventory because this is only a bet (not a guarantee) that the customer will purchase it.

The problem here is the conflict between a reasonable request, profit, and how to ‘service’ a customer.

Let’s look at some examples:  The molder has quoted parts at $/1000 pieces based on a pre-negotiated retained in-house finished goods inventory that is built up to some maximum level and shipments are made until it reaches some minimum that triggers a rebuild.

Scenario #1 – The BIG order: a huge order arrives at the customer.  He calls his supplier’s customer service and orders (for immediate shipment) more parts than are in the retained furnished goods inventory. He wants the parts ASAP and not a split shipment emptying the warehouse immediately and the balance shipped when the job can be scheduled into production.
The expectation:  The customer expects a Heaven and Earth move from the molder to juggle schedules, expedite production, and meet his requirements (all this at no increased in cost).
What happens: Unfortunately Customer Service usually complies.  The net result being a thoroughly scrambled production schedule, parts produced on an overtime basis with no profit to show for it.
What should happen: The entire retained inventory will be shipped at the negotiated pricing.  However the balance will be produced (if possible) and shipped at an expedited cost if it is truly needed ASAP or shipped at the original pricing when it comes out as a scheduled production run.  It’s the customer’s choice.

Scenario #2 The KanBan revision: The negotiated price was in $/1000 in boxes of 500 units/box.  The customer wants to implement a better KanBan program and wants 250 parts shipped twice a day.
The expectation: Since this all works out to a $/1000 deal anyway, there should be no increase in pricing.
What happens Usually there is no increase in the costing.
What should happen Each shipment requires paperwork.  It doesn’t matter if it is one part or a million; the administrative costs are the same to generate the shipper, the invoice as well as the record keeping for each shipment.  Also, the deal was $/1000 pieces not fractional $/1000 pieces.  The pricing was quoted at some volume with a packaging cost of 2 boxes per thousand.  He now wants (an should pay for) the packaging cost of 4 boxes per thousand as well as the one time ‘tear down’ repackaging costs for the warehoused inventory.  A request like this scrambles the lot shipping system for the molder.  In this light the cost should be renegotiated to accommodate both the split shipment mentality and the increased administrative costs.

Scenario #3  The ‘Obsolete’ part trick: An engineering change is processed, invalidating all the parts in the JIT warehouse inventory.
The expectation: Since the parts were never truly ordered, the customer isn’t liable to pay for them.  They should be scrapped and replaced.
What happens: Usually the request is honored with a little screaming and whining. If whining doesn’t work it is a common trick for the customer to pull a ‘quality audit’ and scrap everything on the grounds of poor quality.
What should happen: Somebody didn’t do their homework.  In the initial agreement this should have been anticipated so that if the standing unpurchased inventory is declared invalid because of a customer caused engineering change, the molder will be compensated for his loss.

Scenario #4  Busting your chops:
4.1 Customer service is called into the customer for a meeting to ‘review all the pricing’ in anticipation of renewing the next year’s master purchase orders.
4.2 Customer service is called into for a face-to-face meeting to explain the cost increases due to resin prices
4.3 Customer service is called into for a face-to-face meeting for an ‘annual performance review’ or to receive (have inflicted on them) a ‘cost reduction’ program.
The expectation: The customer expects Customer Service to drop everything, pack up a toothbrush etc. and hop on an airplane at a moment’s notice to attend a meeting and ‘explain their actions.
What happens: In most cases the expectation is not only met, but the customer service folks take the buyer and anyone else within hearing distance out to dinner!
What should happen.
4.1  There is NO REVIEW of pricing.  You were the low bidder those are your current (non-negotiable) prices. If you are going to be cross-quoted it will happen whether you show up or not.
4.2  Resin price increases are pass-through costs.  The pricing on materials is public data found in trade magazines or on the Internet.  Since the customer specified the material, if anybody is going to negotiate a new price it should be them, not you.
4.3  Performance reviews can be mailed.  If it’s poor you can’t explain their data any differently regardless of the truth.  Having a TASK or COST REDUCTION program shoved down your throat without the customer funding the productivity improvements is arrogant; showing poor manners and a bad upbringing on their part.

All of these actions are merely a rookie-sandbox-power-game to see if you’ll spend your money and time to ‘dance to his tune’.  Do you do these things to your local grocer, the owner of your favorite restaurant; the phone/utility company or the credit card companies?  If you did, you’d be less than politely asked to no longer to do business with them, and laughed out of their offices.

Customer service is a profession like anything else.  Its purpose on the supplier’s side of the equation is to be the interface between the customer and the suppliers, to ‘play’ according to a set of pre-agreed rules and make sure things go smoothly.  Anytime the customer changes the rules, he cannot selectively change one side of this equation without the consequence of having the other side change to balance it.

Customer Service is not in the business of Freebies.  Both the customer and supplier have to set a system in place that is flexible enough to adapt to the inevitable changes that are market driven.  If they don’t, it must be understood that everything has to be renegotiated on a case by case basis.

===========================

This article is virtual. You can read it and stop doing some very expensive money-losing favors asked by your customer.  Or you can read it and ‘soldier on’ continuing to be your customer’s lap dog.  OR you can send it up the food chain to management with a few notes penciled in the margins on how much each of these stunts is costing you and hope the Ivory Tower Troops will have a quiet chat with the customer’s director of purchasing.  If the quite chat doesn’t work, they might instruct Customer Service to say “NO!” like a parent would do to a petulant child and back them up when the customer complains.  OR you can read it, figure you can’t do anything about it, shred it and use the shavings to line the cages of the Office Gerbils (middle management).

Your choice.

We’ve all learned material types – Semi Crystalline and Amorphous (perhaps Liquid Crystal Polymers). What we missed is why we learned them: The crystalline family has a sharp melting point and processes well with a high compression screw. Amorphous materials have a wide melt point range and therefore do better with a low compression screw whose compression zone is much longer than the high compression screw. There is no such thing as a general purpose plastic. Yet, most machines use a general purpose screw which is usually a compromise between high and low compression designs – moderately acceptable for every material, ideal for none.

When buying a machine you need to look at what kind of materials you run. I had one client where 98% of his material inventory was polypropylene. Another had a silo out back with black ABS, and a third who could dedicate 5 of his 20+ machines to optically clear acrylic. Here is a perfect opportunity to use custom built screws for those particular machines because of the following advantages:

1. There is a more uniform melt injected into the cavity. Even with all the pressure sensors and black boxes regulating the fill speeds, there is an inherent level of scrap generated if the shot isn’t evenly molten (and most of the time is isn’t with GP Screws). Using a custom built screw significantly reduces scrap from this cause.
2. With an even melt, you can process the plastic at a lower temperature. Since plastic is a ‘heat-in-heat-out’ technology; the cooler the initial melt the less heat you need to pull out. This results in faster cycle times.

But even with all this; materials are tricky and need to be handled as though we were cooking a fine soufflé. With your soufflé too high a temperature and it is burned on the outside and raw in the inside. Too long a time in the oven and we are treated like Greek Gods by our efforts being rewarded with a burnt offering. Too little time in the oven leaves under cooked material. Too low a temperature and we get a result as dry as an Egyptian Mummy. The same holds true with Thermoplastics.

EXAMPLE: Many molders will not run medical grade non-thermally stabilized PVC. Yet others readily welcome jobs that use this material. What’s the difference?

The first group of molders are the General Purpose kind – They use general purpose machines, melt PVC with general purpose screws, and routinely burn the material releasing all kinds of nasty fumes as well as acidic vapor that eats their molds and machines. Hence PVC is avoided like the plague.

The vast majority of the second group use custom built screws specifically designed for PVC and pay a lot of attention to the size of the injection unit to the point of making odd (to the outside observer) combinations of injection units and clamps.

Clamp Size and Injection Capacity of molding machines were initially arrived at by market forces. The customers seemed to need these combinations and the machinery industry provided it. Over time, some machine companies became a little smarter. Besides the usual options of one clamp size and a few different sized injection units, they made the removal and installation of the entire injection unit easy enough so that when a molder was done running black 30%GF Nylon and his next material was water-clear SAN, he could change out the entire injection unit for a new one faster (and cheaper) than he could spending all day purging.

Filling the mold comes with a several caveats: The first is size. While the Common Knowledge Practice is the ideal shot should be between 20-80% of the injection capacity you must also attend to the concept of ‘shot inventory’. Shot Inventory is the entire volumetric capacity of the screw and barrel divided by the weight of the shot. If you have a 20 gram shot and the screw and barrel holds 200 grams of material you have a shot inventory of 10 (200/20=10). The implications here are if there is a very small shot inventory severely strains the repeatability of the machine to control the shot accurately. Conversely a high shot inventory the material is going through the compression and metering zones of the material so fast that the injected shot will have a relatively high percentage of un-semi melted pellets in it.

Shot inventory is only one concern. The more important concern is Residence Time. Here we take the shot inventory and divide it by the cycle time. If we have a shot inventory of 10 (as above) and a cycle time of 15 seconds; the residence time is 2:30. (10 shots @ 15 second each = 150 seconds divided by 60 seconds/minute = 2.5 minutes). For heat sensitive materials (vinyls, TPUs and some TPRs) you may see a high degree of degradation. This generates a definable percentage of scrap. But is you use a smaller screw/barrel combination where you have cut the inventory to 5; now the residence time is 1:07. With exposure to heat, the shot is molten but not degraded. Therefore your ‘degradation scrap’ percentage goes away. You have a higher yield, and without this degradation you can now regrind your runner system. This saves you time and material that quickly pay for the new injection unit.

What’s right? A little surfing through the internet and careful reading of the material spec sheets and data bases are capable of telling you the maximum allowable time under heat before your material degrades. It may take a little hands-on experimenting to generate your own data when it comes to heat induced color shifts because the organometallic dyes are extremely heat sensitive.

If you’re a General Purpose kind of guy, you look at thermally induced scrap (either the general scrap of color shift and bad melt quality or the slower cycle time cost for having to overheat to compensate for poor melt quality) as “part of the cost of doing business” because General Purpose designs cover all your applications. It’s like playing golf with only one club: While you can get through the course; your score will suffer.

“BUT WAIT!!” you may well say to my nay saying. “Those things cost a lot of money. Where’s the return?” Fortunately the folks who are the major manufacturer of custom built screws have heard your “but wait!!” argument shouted at them like a cranky baby. If you do a little surfing on the internet two of the major companies will give you an on-line calculator to use to see if this might help you. Of course that requires you to do a little work also.

+ + + + + + + + +

This article is virtual. While we all dream of the infamous ‘competitive edge’; usually we have to be hit over the head with it before we see it. Properly sized and designed screws will give you this kind of advantage over your competition. If you try it on one problem job you’ll be the Wunderkind of your company. Or, you can listen to some bean counter complain about the $10-15,000 you need to buy the new screw but won’t hear a peep when you put twice that amount into the scrap bin. Or you can put it in your “I told you so” file and watch your employer go bankrupt and show the article to the next guy you interview with. (P.S. – if you show your ‘I told you so’ at the interview, be prepared to tell them why you didn’t implement it)

Your Choice.

We’ve all learned material types – Semi Crystalline and Amorphous (perhaps Liquid Crystal Polymers). What we missed is why we learned them: The crystalline family has a sharp melting point and processes well with a high compression screw. Amorphous materials have a wide melt point range and therefore do better with a low compression screw whose compression zone is much longer than the high compression screw. There is no such thing as a general purpose plastic. Yet, most machines use a general purpose screw which is usually a compromise between high and low compression designs – moderately acceptable for every material, ideal for none.

When buying a machine you need to look at what kind of materials you run. I had one client where 98% of his material inventory was polypropylene. Another had a silo out back with black ABS, and a third who could dedicate 5 of his 20+ machines to optically clear acrylic. Here is a perfect opportunity to use custom built screws for those particular machines because of the following advantages:

1. There is a more uniform melt injected into the cavity. Even with all the pressure sensors and black boxes regulating the fill speeds, there is an inherent level of scrap generated if the shot isn’t evenly molten (and most of the time is isn’t with GP Screws). Using a custom built screw significantly reduces scrap from this cause.
2. With an even melt, you can process the plastic at a lower temperature. Since plastic is a ‘heat-in-heat-out’ technology; the cooler the initial melt the less heat you need to pull out. This results in faster cycle times.

But even with all this; materials are tricky and need to be handled as though we were cooking a fine soufflé. With your soufflé too high a temperature and it is burned on the outside and raw in the inside. Too long a time in the oven and we are treated like Greek Gods by our efforts being rewarded with a burnt offering. Too little time in the oven leaves under cooked material. Too low a temperature and we get a result as dry as an Egyptian Mummy. The same holds true with Thermoplastics.

EXAMPLE: Many molders will not run medical grade non-thermally stabilized PVC. Yet others readily welcome jobs that use this material. What’s the difference?

The first group of molders are the General Purpose kind – They use general purpose machines, melt PVC with general purpose screws, and routinely burn the material releasing all kinds of nasty fumes as well as acidic vapor that eats their molds and machines. Hence PVC is avoided like the plague.

The vast majority of the second group use custom built screws specifically designed for PVC and pay a lot of attention to the size of the injection unit to the point of making odd (to the outside observer) combinations of injection units and clamps.

Clamp Size and Injection Capacity of molding machines were initially arrived at by market forces. The customers seemed to need these combinations and the machinery industry provided it. Over time, some machine companies became a little smarter. Besides the usual options of one clamp size and a few different sized injection units, they made the removal and installation of the entire injection unit easy enough so that when a molder was done running black 30%GF Nylon and his next material was water-clear SAN, he could change out the entire injection unit for a new one faster (and cheaper) than he could spending all day purging.

Filling the mold comes with a several caveats: The first is size. While the Common Knowledge Practice is the ideal shot should be between 20-80% of the injection capacity you must also attend to the concept of ‘shot inventory’. Shot Inventory is the entire volumetric capacity of the screw and barrel divided by the weight of the shot. If you have a 20 gram shot and the screw and barrel holds 200 grams of material you have a shot inventory of 10 (200/20=10). The implications here are if there is a very small shot inventory severely strains the repeatability of the machine to control the shot accurately. Conversely a high shot inventory the material is going through the compression and metering zones of the material so fast that the injected shot will have a relatively high percentage of un-semi melted pellets in it.

Shot inventory is only one concern. The more important concern is Residence Time. Here we take the shot inventory and divide it by the cycle time. If we have a shot inventory of 10 (as above) and a cycle time of 15 seconds; the residence time is 2:30. (10 shots @ 15 second each = 150 seconds divided by 60 seconds/minute = 2.5 minutes). For heat sensitive materials (vinyls, TPUs and some TPRs) you may see a high degree of degradation. This generates a definable percentage of scrap. But is you use a smaller screw/barrel combination where you have cut the inventory to 5; now the residence time is 1:07. With exposure to heat, the shot is molten but not degraded. Therefore your ‘degradation scrap’ percentage goes away. You have a higher yield, and without this degradation you can now regrind your runner system. This saves you time and material that quickly pay for the new injection unit.

What’s right? A little surfing through the internet and careful reading of the material spec sheets and data bases are capable of telling you the maximum allowable time under heat before your material degrades. It may take a little hands-on experimenting to generate your own data when it comes to heat induced color shifts because the organometallic dyes are extremely heat sensitive.

If you’re a General Purpose kind of guy, you look at thermally induced scrap (either the general scrap of color shift and bad melt quality or the slower cycle time cost for having to overheat to compensate for poor melt quality) as “part of the cost of doing business” because General Purpose designs cover all your applications. It’s like playing golf with only one club: While you can get through the course; your score will suffer.

“BUT WAIT!!” you may well say to my nay saying. “Those things cost a lot of money. Where’s the return?” Fortunately the folks who are the major manufacturer of custom built screws have heard your “but wait!!” argument shouted at them like a cranky baby. If you do a little surfing on the internet two of the major companies will give you an on-line calculator to use to see if this might help you. Of course that requires you to do a little work also.

+ + + + + + + + +

This article is virtual. While we all dream of the infamous ‘competitive edge’; usually we have to be hit over the head with it before we see it. Properly sized and designed screws will give you this kind of advantage over your competition. If you try it on one problem job you’ll be the Wunderkind of your company. Or, you can listen to some bean counter complain about the $10-15,000 you need to buy the new screw but won’t hear a peep when you put twice that amount into the scrap bin. Or you can put it in your “I told you so” file and watch your employer go bankrupt and show the article to the next guy you interview with. (P.S. – if you show your ‘I told you so’ at the interview, be prepared to tell them why you didn’t implement it)

Your Choice.