Miller Welding and Machine Manages Growth with Less Manpower

The year was 1963. The Dodgers, behind the arm of Sandy Koufax, beat the defending champion Yankees for the World Series, while the first Super Bowl wouldn’t be played for another four years. The astronaut, Gordon Cooper, became the first human to spend more than a day in space, and the last American to fly there alone. And, there wasn’t a single Toyota to be found anywhere in the United States. A new America was in transition, maturing in the age of postwar prosperity. It was also the year David Miller opened the doors to the Miller Welding and Machine Company (MWM).

Today, over four decades later, David still opens the doors to the shop, usually showing up before his wife, his five children and five grandchildren who also work there alongside him. With three generations of Millers involved in the day-to-day functions of the company, the family maintains a solid foundation of American working tradition, while also …Read the rest of this entry »

Wilshire Precision Proves the Long Term Advantage of Using Global Shop Solutions ERP Software

Read Part 1 here.

Fast and Flexible Customer Resource

To compete in an ever-widening global economy, manufacturers today must be proactive. Shortened lead times and reduced margins mean that, more and more, customers are looking for shops that respond to their changing needs—and quickly. Global Shop has helped Wilshire become a fast and flexible resource for their customers. With Global Shop’s real-time data displays, Wilshire can make changes to orders on the fly and without delay, relaying those changes throughout the shop with the touch of a button.

Tom points out that this is one of the main reasons for Wilshire’s competitive edge in the marketplace. “One thing we really like about Global Shop is that when we are quoting a job, we’re able to take the estimate and the work that’s created on the order entry and merge the two together as a work order—it happens within milliseconds. And, if there’s any modifications in the work order while the job is running, we can go back into the original estimate and be able to make changes there—dimensional changes, add-on inspection points, and so forth—it’s all there for the next time we run the job.”

The flexibility that Global Shop brings to Wilshire is a plus for their IT staff. Having the capability to not only process orders, but to provide on-going controls for both the database and the department functions means that IT has much more time for proactive technology innovations that lead to efficiencies. Dana Ullerich, who handles IT at Wilshire, praises the synergy provided throughout the plant by the Global Shop system. “Global Shop is great because it interconnects the whole shop as the central communication point for all of us here. Everything’s related, everything’s connected. While some shops are using completely different systems for …Read the rest of this entry »

Wilshire Precision Proves the Long Term Advantage of Using Global Shop Solutions ERP Software

When Wilshire Precision opened their doors for business in 1954, they could not have imagined the manufacturing software tools that they use today. For Wilshire President Tom Lewis, this is the bottom line: “The two main things that our customers care most about are the quality of the part and the fact that it’s there on time. Since implementing Global Shop Solutions, Wilshire’s grown 1,200% with 99.4% on-time delivery and a quality rating that is close to near-perfect.”

Through decades of machine shop demands in times of war and peace, as improvements in shop floor management occurred, Wilshire was quick to adapt to the changes necessary to always keep a step ahead of their competition. Today, Wilshire is a prime government and private industry contractor for high quality aviation and automotive parts, as well as critical research and development projects. They have proven their mettle as a machine shop that continually exceeds customer expectations.

Of course, in manufacturing “exceeding customer expectations” is much easier said than done—especially when your operation has grown as extensively as Wilshire’s. From what was once a small general machine shop in the 1950’s and 1960’s, the company is now a …Read the rest of this entry »

When a manufacturer does that occasional bit of bottom-line soul searching, the most fundamental determination to consider is which parts, products, customers, projects, and/or jobs are profitable. To this end, Activity-Based Costing (ABC) is used to identify, assign costs to, and report on manufacturing operations.

 To a large degree, ABC is a more accurate cost management system than standard cost accounting in that it is able to identify places where the manufacturing process can be made more effective, essentially by determining the “true cost” of producing a product.

Shop floor work centers are particularly suitable for ABC because they produce identifiable and measurable units of output. With ABC, management can define processes, identify the cost drivers of those processes, and determine the unit costs of products for performance based budgets that …Read the rest of this entry »

It should be the case that, in manufacturing, having an abundance of work is a good thing. Labor and machinery are running at full capacity, finished goods are moving through the plant as fast as new work orders are being generated, and production efficiencies are enhancing the bottom line.

However, when abundance turns to overloading, labor and machinery often have a hard time keeping up. Sure, fresh work orders are coming in fast, but the ability to produce product is exceeded by the time available to actually manufacture the goods and adhere to quality standards.

There is only so much time available in the day, and if machines are running full capacity all the time, then there will inevitably be …Read the rest of this entry »

Procurement in manufacturing involves many processes. From the generation of a sales order, a whole host of processes kick in to begin the production movement through the plant in, hopefully, the most efficient way possible.

Along with vast improvements in shop floor machinery efficiency and automation over the past decades, highly efficient enterprise resource planning (ERP) software systems have been introduced to help automatically control system flow—particularly requisitions. This is the new reality in manufacturing, despite the reluctance of some to change and profit from the movement found from being online and on time through ERP.

Streamlining requisitions through automated ERP applications satisfies the most necessary of manufacturing operational goals—the need to be convenient. In the more robust ERP software systems, the complete supply chain is at the fingertips of the purchasing manager. Critical real-time and historical information for raw materials and parts needed for …Read the rest of this entry »

Why take ten steps to do something, when you can do the same thing in two? It seems such simple logic, yet in manufacturing today there are still some companies that insist on maintaining the old, anachronistic, handwritten ways of purchasing material for the shop.

However, to overcome deficiencies found in the old paper-based ways of purchasing, manufacturers are now utilizing enterprise resource planning (ERP) software systems that employ autopurchasing modules that meet the needs for speed (and savings) in the manufacturing operation.

Such autopurchasing modules read the inventory system, scanning the inventory master for every part and looks for opportunities to both refresh inventory and take advantage of quantity discounts.

Many manufacturers have taken to heart the notion of demand driven purchasing whereby raw material/parts acquisition is a result of orders pulled from the client. That is to say, in lean enterprises requisitions are made not from forecasting models, but immediately as a result of …Read the rest of this entry »

When it comes to the direct- versus in-direct costs associated with manufacturing labor, the question must always be asked, “Who’s in the plant, and what’re they doing?”. That is to say, when it comes to questions concerning the valuable, yet limited, resource of time, the tracking of personnel and their activities through any part of the day is absolutely necessary to eliminate waste, enhance productivity, and increase the bottom-line.

In the past, the accounting of personnel time was simply a matter of marking time-in and time-out as indicated on a manually punched timecard. The “in-between” time of an employee was lost to managers and only measured by the amount of finished goods delivered at the end of the day. That it took a shop floor machine operator a half an hour to search for a tool before returning to the pending job on his machine was shrugged off as unreportable data.

With trending in manufacturing toward totally integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP), software technology advancements have now evolved to the point where …Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve ever owned a car, you know the importance that maintenance has in keeping things rolling. With any machinery such as a car, it is a sort of “pay me now or pay me later” mentality where the idea of regular upkeep, ahead of any breakdowns, means that costly and time consuming downtime for repairs is hopefully prevented from occurring.

In other words, preventive maintenance is designed to: 1) predict the onset of machine or component failures; 2) detect failures before they have any significant impact on manufacturing operations; and 3) repair (or replace) the machine(s) or component(s) before the failure occurs.

Indeed, by scheduling the preventive maintenance of machinery on our terms and in our schedule, we can plan in advance for a short term downtime during the most convenient time available to us; that is, for a day or time when, perhaps, the asset is …Read the rest of this entry »

Where do we in manufacturing find the “edges” that make or break our profit margins? Where do we make the changes in process, the tweaking, that maximize returns on investments (ROI)?

More often than not the edges that reach both output and quality goals are found in the efficiencies we make in the manufacturing technique. Today, in many job shops, make-to-order, or mixed mode manufacturers, those efficiencies in production are found in the elimination of waste—a technique commonly referred to as lean.

In a lean system the manufacturer seeks maximized ROI by attempting to eliminate the waste of resources commonly found in physical production processes. In effect, the greatest and most fixed resource available to any manufacturer is that of …Read the rest of this entry »