With the introduction of CNC automation, we can produce components faster than ever before. However what tends to happen is the stages that follow have inconsistent flow, meaning the assembly stage is often waiting for the job to be cut and edged in its entirety for the next trolley or bin to arrive to allow the assembly stage to begin.
To counter this, we may change the way we nest to focus on a "nesting per cabinet strategy" or "per assembly optimization". This can sometimes lead to higher material wastage at the expense of trying to achieve increased flow. With the ever increasing rising labour & material costs that is no longer a logical or viable option.
Some 15-20 years ago, I worked in a business that would produce around 20 completed Jobs per Week. The CNC would typically focus on being one job ahead the edgebander. We would edge a job in its entirety, leaning all the parts around the walls near the edgebander sorted by Cabinet. Once the last piece had been edged we would then flat stack on a trolley and wheel that up to the Assembly Team, to unload and begin Assembly. We would endeavor to be one stage ahead of the next, ideally with a Job in a holding pattern ahead of the stage that followed, ensuring that we had a redundancy if a stage caught up. Despite our best efforts, there were many times, where the strategy would come unstuck, and the flow of work would come to a standstill.
Assembly was the bottleneck of our business; we would schedule jobs around the qty of Cabinets per week to ensure we did not exceed the capacity at this stage. Our capability to assemble 200 boxes per week was our max throughput number. If we took steps to increase the efficiency at this stage, the stages before and after generally had capacity to do more.
Fast forward to today, something that we could have explored was working with a fixed rack strategy. As technology has improved, we can now scan a barcode and allocate a part to a specific location in the fixed rack and once all components have been received and scanned, a screen can notify the assembly team member that a particular cabinet assembly is next inline, to start that assembly rather than waiting for the whole job to be cut meaning we sort now, verses paying later in lost productivity.
A fixed rack strategy will allow you to utilize a smart nesting strategy saving both material and labour but will also mean that we can increase the flow of parts, leading to a next inline, ready to assemble opportunity increasing productivity, increasing profitability. Exploring small batch nesting strategies, sorted by assemblies may continue to help, with an increased focus on reducing double handling to ensure that consistent flow is achieved through the middle stages of Production. This would mean that we would increase the flow of completed components to the assembly team faster, with less handling, rather than waiting for a full job to be completed at each stage, before beginning.
Would introducing a Fixed Rack Strategy improve the flow of parts for your business?
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