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Issue link: https://mms.epubxp.com/i/155490
feature Looking back over the history of the company, plant operations manager Dan Hogge says the shop has made a dramatic change roughly once every seven years. The move from screw machines to CNC was one of the earlier shifts. Embracing lights-out machining is the latest. what might have been his most pressing question at the time: how to accommodate rapidly increasing demand without rapidly increasing staffing. Letting go of more than half of the company's employees had affected the company, and it had affected him. While business activity was high, neither that activity nor the economy itself seemed stable enough to justify expanding the staff. That increase might just be followed by letting a wave of people go all over again. Unattended production seemed to offer a promising alternative. In retrospect, though, that first attempt at unattended machining might have gone too well, he says. He didn't know what he was getting into. He committed the shop to realizing lights-out production on various other machines, and that is when the misery began. PREVIOUSLY INVISIBLE PROBLEMS customer was hit hard. The shop's staff of 70 was cut to 29, and those remaining 29 often saw work weeks as brief as 24 hours. When business began to return in 2009, capacity in the shop's sole remaining shift filled quickly. That was when a customer came to the shop with an urgent order involving a CNC Swiss-type part. The shop had just purchased its first CNC Swisstype machine, and while this machine was booked through the day, it went unused at night. "We thought, why not just let the part run when no one is here?" Mr. Hogge says. Given that the material was brass, there seemed little risk of harm or significant loss if anything went wrong. And nothing went wrong. The unattended process ran smoothly. The staff arrived the next morning to find 500 finished pieces at the machine. This was the customer's entire order. The accomplishment caught Mr. Hogge's attention. The success seemed to directly address 92 MMS September 2013 mmsonline.com He says the obstacle to implementing effective unattended machining is essentially this: Shops do not realize how much they rely on operators. He didn't realize this about his own shop. On any given machining process, a variety of infrequent and unpredictable glitches might stop production. Most of these problems are rare. Most are easy to address. In fact, if an operator is present, addressing the glitch might be so easy that hardly anyone even notices a problem arose. But if an operator is not present, then that little problem can cause hours of production to be lost—hours the shop was counting on to fulfill its promises to customers. Thus, the commitment to unattended production proved to be the start of a journey of eliminating glitches. That is, it was a journey of fixing previously tiny problems that became large, and previously invisible problems that became visible, once the machines started to run with no operators present. The way through this journey was of ten infuriating, Mr. Hogge says, because successfully resolving a problem that halted production one