So much of metal fabricating activity today is focused on the
elimination of waste, and one of the bigger steps a company can take is
integrating its CAD/CAM software with its job shop management software.
It
wasn’t too long ago that the shop floor drove the metal fabricating company.
Workers started a job when it made sense to them—unless otherwise instructed—and
the completed job shipped, sometimes unknown to the front office. The shop also
followed a schedule that made sense from only its perspective, which typically
resulted in large amounts of work-in-process sitting around and excess material
being ordered for products being fabricated but not yet ordered.
Even
in the shops with the best communication between management and production,
waste was seemingly inevitable. That is no longer the case today.
Shop
management systems allow for strict materials resource planning, inventory
control, job costing, quoting, and scheduling. CAD/CAM and nesting software
systems deliver detailed information on production requirements for a job and
simulations to prove them out, resulting in more accurate job quotes, better
material utilization, and more precise inventory counting.
True
automation of information flow between the front office and the shop floor is
still elusive. The problem is that these modern software tools often are not
integrated. Information from a shop management system is not automatically
generating nests and schedules without some sort of manual intervention, and
the shop floor production results don’t necessarily flow back to the
enterprise-level software used to run the company. A chasm exists between the
two software systems.
More
metal fabricators are seeing the light, however, of what can be accomplished
when the shop management software is more closely integrated with CAD/CAM
packages. The results speak for themselves.
1. A more precise quote is delivered.
A
winning job quote can become a losing one if a shop is not making money on the
job. Luckily, fully integrated software tools can help deliver a good outcome.
Once
a job, such as a laser cutting operation, has been successfully completed, the
information from the fabricating activity can be fed back into the job tracking
and costing modules of the shop management software. An estimator processing a
repeat of that same job or something similar can find out real process times
instead of relying on averages that likely haven’t been updated in several
months.
This
is especially helpful in more intricate jobs, such as a laser-cut disk with
plenty of grooves. It’s difficult for even experienced estimators to deliver an
accurate job quote just with a guesstimate. The estimator has to take into
account piercing and speed adjustments as the laser cutting head moves around
the many curves. An archived reference would help to deliver a sound quote
while speeding up the quoting process.
Automated
information flow to formulate quotes also helps to process additional quotes.
In today’s marketplace where quotes sometimes are awarded on a
“first-in-to-win” basis, timely responses to request for quotes can be very
important.
2. Production jobs are organized more easily.
Plenty
of shops have a work flow that calls for a programmer to create nests manually
in the front office or that involves shop floor workers creating the nests at the
machine. This gives the shop ultimate control of the nest, but loses out on the
time efficiencies associated with automated nesting.
With
integration of nesting and shop management software, a programmer no longer
gets a folder with 50 different jobs on it and instructions to nest them and
get them out the door as quickly as possible. Instead, the shop management
software pushes jobs to the nesting software, and those nests are created
automatically according to a project due date. Realistically, a shop that
previously required a full day to nest parts for several hundred orders now can
accomplish the same task in less than an hour.
The
integration allows for more flexibility as well. For example, if a shop is
organized according to manufacturing cells or value streams in which only
certain types of products are fabricated, the shop management software can
organize nests according to material type. Now the front office can schedule
nests for a certain group of machines, rather than just schedule them according
to delivery date.
3. Inventory is tracked more accurately.
Inventory
is a tricky aspect of shop operations. A business doesn’t want too much raw
material inventory because it doesn’t want to pay for something that isn’t
going to be used right away and is just going to take up floor space. That cash
can be applied to something more productive. However, the same business doesn’t
want to be short of inventory that may be needed to cover a rush job.
Anyone
involved in manual inventory counts knows the inaccuracies that can occur and
the time needed to pull that together. Even getting a machine operator to log
inventory information, such as what material was used and if any remnant was
left, into the shop management software is rife with potential errors simply
because it’s a manual task.
With
integration, once a cutting job is done, the material information is fed back
automatically to the front office. Management knows exactly what material is
available and what has been used. It makes ordering more precise and keeps cash
from being tied up in excess inventory that may otherwise simply languish in a
rack for an extended period of time.
4. Real-time visibility into operations is achieved.
Perhaps
the greatest benefit for having CAD/CAM and shop management software more
closely aligned is the access to real-time production information. Management
simply can call up a report or add a key performance metric to a dashboard to
find out the status of any job in the shop, the performance of a certain
machine tool, or any other item of interest. The front office isn’t dependent
on getting that information directly from shop floor personnel or relying on
those same individuals to input information into the system.
Visibility
can be expanded depending on the relationship between CAD/CAM and shop
management software packages. For instance, if the shop management system is
allowed deep access to the cutting and nesting engine, anyone with a license to
the enterprise software can gain greater access to shop floor activities. That
license holder can see what a part looks like, where it resides on a nest,
where it is in the production schedule, and how long it took or will take to
process. This is all information that at one time was accessible only to the
machine tool operator or possibly the part programmer.
Imagine
a daily production meeting that now includes reports that not only show job
status updates and shipping details for the day, but also pictures attached to
the individual job orders listed on the report. This gives management a visual
clue to the work going on in the shop, and it’s a complete picture, both
literally and figuratively.
The
automation of information flow between the shop floor and the front office is
the next great step in eliminating waste and improving decision-making in metal
fabrication operations. The only way that this can occur, however, is with
efficient software integration. Without it, metal fabricators are not making
the most of their engineering and production capabilities.
Source:-http://www.thefabricator.com/article/cadcamsoftware/what-does-cad-cam-and-job-shop-management-software-integration-mean-
