It’s great to know equipment is running, but it’s also important to know whether it is generating value
It’s great to know whether equipment is running, or why it isn’t. Most modern machines provide telemetry to indicate what they are doing at every moment. If you pair telemetry with software dashboards, cloud-connected equipment provides a wealth of insight into what happens on the shop floor. But even then, there is often one missing piece to the puzzle: It’s great to know that equipment is running, but it’s just as important to know whether it is generating value.
For example, here’s a nesting quandary for you. The nest shown in Figure 1 has just enough room to add two more parts, but the work order doesn’t require that many. There are no other open orders requiring the material, no available filler parts, and no finished-goods inventory to produce. The customer may be willing to increase the quantity to top off the sheet, but with hundreds of other orders in the queue, there isn’t a lot of time to spare. Would you add two more parts to fill out the sheet?
The part only takes 15 seconds to cut, and all that area is just going to be scrapped anyway. Why not avoid the waste? If one part fails, there is no need to queue up a replacement. If not, the customer gets an extra part or two.
At our shop, that was the rationale for a while. It seemed such a shame to waste space on a sheet, so we’d top off one sheet, fill gaps in another with small parts, and even proactively cut extra on challenging jobs where we expected attrition. It felt good to use the full sheet, and customers were often delighted to receive extra parts. Meanwhile, we wasted less material and slightly reduced the need to requeue failed parts.
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