Give Status Quo the Old Heave Ho

There was a time when we would have lost the job, lost money on it or beat ourselves up until we squeaked by with marginal success.   

We’d been making a part with a blind hole in 12L14 material with .250” diameter, .001” tolerance and 20 micro finish using a screw machine, honing and burnishing to finish the ID, plus doing two milling operations.  Recurring quality problems made consistent deliveries difficult and we felt frequent customer pressure to cut our cost.

As any skinned cat will tell you, there’s more than one way to do a job.  Rather than dig for one little improvement after another, we took out a fresh sheet of paper and opted to completely reengineer our approach to the part.

We never want to do it like we always did it before.

We called together a team of our own engineers and operators along with outside tooling vendors and application engineers who specialize in some of our newest CNC equipment to explore options.  Thanks to the flexibility of the equipment, some clever tooling ideas and the work processing approaches that resulted from the team’s combined experience, we were producing a steady flow of quality products at a consistently lower cost within just a few weeks.

The key lessons here:  With a willingness to abandon the status quo, the help of people with the right expertise, and an expectation to achieve ‘breakthrough’ results, tremendous things can be accomplished in short order.  But you’ve got to be willing to abandon the business as usual approach.

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