When you are trying to source a big job, everybody is interested. But when you have technically-challenging components or sub-assemblies in low to mid-volumes, interest narrows dramatically. This is because many machine shops find it very difficult to make money on high mix, low volume work…so they just “no quote” them.
At Rable, we believe that part of being a strategic partner with our customers is being there to meet their needs on small jobs as well as bigger ones.
Through lean manufacturing, advanced technology and continuous improvement we’ve perfected our manufacturing processes to the point we know how to make money on low volume, difficult-to-manufacture components.
More specifically our lean manufacturing process can be summed up in three words… “Focused Common Sense”.
Its taken 10 people 3 years to get everything in place and optimized:
- We started by categorizing 1700 parts…now we have nearly 4000 parts
- Then reorganized the shop floor into cells
- Established a “Process Family Code Visual System” to determine parts we could run together to reduce set up times
- Trained our people to be real experts on their cell’s programming, tooling & change-overs
- We replaced less productive equipment with multitasking machines that drop finished parts off complete
The Results:
- We boosted sales per employee by 61% in less than 10 Years
- Increased profitability dramatically.
- Our Kanban systems dramatically reduced inventory and opened up machine capacity.
- Our visual scheduling system reduces set up costs by more than 65% and we constantly look for ways to further lean out our operations.
- We also find that because we are a 100% employee-owned the best cost saving ideas consistently come from our machine operators/owners.
- Our employee-owners don’t fear change…they embrace it.
