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To Find New Employees, Look to the Current Ones
For a leading lean manufacturer in the Northeast, offering incentives to current employees has proven to be the most effective route to finding quality new hires.
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Milling with Air
... not to mention grinding with air. Thanks to high speed spindles powered by shop air, this job shop expands the work its VMCs can do.
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LinkedIn for Metalworking
I like LinkedIn—the social networking site aimed at business people.
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Just-in-Time: Just a Little Too Far?
For many machining facilities, business has picked up suddenly and dramatically—and that’s OK!
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Has Lean Become Too Extreme?
Surges in demand reveal a weakness of just-in-time supply chains.
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Outsource Regionally Instead of Nationally
The logic of “offshoring” often makes more sense when there is no shore involved. Considerable savings can result from sending work to different regions of the USA.
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Telling the Mainstream about Manufacturing
How do we reach the next generation of manufacturing employees? One machine tool company succeeds with local efforts. Meanwhile, “C.H.A.M.P.I.O.N.–Now!” seeks to go national.
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Going to Extremes
I wrote this column in early 2008 listing machining “megatrends.” It still holds up, but because it was written before the crash, a couple of the points (on employment and currency) have acquired a prescience I never intended.Recently, I got a note from a shop I visited that included an example of another of the trends in that column: the push away from mid-sized workpieces toward more extreme workpiece sizes.
Read MoreCan Social Media Promote a Machine Shop?
Yes. But if you are busy making parts, then stick to what is simple.
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How 3+2 Saves Tools
A machining center capable of reorienting the part enables the shop to machine compound-angle features more efficiently.
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