What one knows and the other doesn’t.

Once there were two brothers, identical twins, Johnnie and James Jones. Each brother loved baseball, was married with two children and worked as a CMM operator for Wingnut Aerospace Manufacturing Corporation’s East Side and West Side plants respectively.

Their WAMcorp co-workers knew Johnnie and James to be thoughtful, intelligent and hard workers. This was very important because the workload wasn’t getting any lighter. Over the past few years, WAMcorp’s sales dollar volume had grown by a respectable 35% while the average dollars per order had decreased by a frightening 75%.

Since they were smart, Johnnie and James did the math. WAMcorp was taking in a lot more work but with shorter runs and narrower profit margins. Long production runs were a thing of the past. One-off and two-off jobs were getting to be an everyday occurrence. That meant there were more process qualifications, more process & tooling troubleshooting, more reverse engineering, more first piece inspections and more validation reports than ever, but each plant still had only one CMM and one operator to do the work. When the workload had nearly tripled, each CMM operator was given an assistant.

This is the point at which the career paths of Johnnie and James Jones began to diverge. James and his #2 guy at the West Side plant were certainly feeling the pressure, and at first, they put in a considerable amount of overtime.  After a while, thought became less frequent. James and his assistant were managing the workflow and staying a half step ahead of it most of the time.

Back at the East Side plant, Johnnie and his assistant were buckling under the strain of too much to do and too little time to do it in. Overtime was incessant, and it seemed like the harder they struggled the further behind they got. Every day, the queue of parts at the CMM got a little longer, and inspection was becoming a bottleneck causing some deliveries to be late.

 

This is when Big Ed McGravy, V.P. of Engineering summoned E. M. Sleuth to his office in the East Side Plant. “Sleuth,” he said with no trace of delight in his voice. “We’ve got the same kind of parts, identical CMMs, identical software and almost identical people. Yet one team is moving forward and the other is sinking in quicksand. You’ve got to get to the bottom of this.”The next day Sleuth spent observing the West Side CMM team at work. Early in the morning, James was on the CMM collecting data on some older broken parts. Manufacturing urgently needed the data so that they could reverse engineer the parts for an emergency order. This went faster than Sleuth would have thought possible because James selected large areas for scanning with the CMM with just a few touches of his probe and clicks of his mouse.

 

By mid-morning the crisis was over, and the assistant was back running parts on the CMM while James wrote inspection programs at an offline station. The assistant had only four months experience using the CMM but he was picking it up quickly. James had made it easier for him to get more work accomplished by setting up the system with a simplified interface that hid a myriad of functions that would be used only once in awhile to perform specialized measurement tasks. When the assistant got in over his head, which was infrequently, James would spend a few minutes showing him what he needed to do.

Sleuth thought James would lose it for sure in the middle of the afternoon when the sales manager walked in with a request for a special report for a big aerospace customer. The customer wanted WAMcorp to break out a lot of data in a proprietary format that only the customer used. At first James turned red like steam was about to come rushing out his ears. He was right in the middle of a complicated airfoil measurement program.

He closed the airfoil program window and sat back. To clear his own head, he took a deep breath and shook his head real fast like a dog flicking water off his ears. Then he looked the sales manager in the eyes and said, “Tell them they will have it by the end of the day.”

James had done a similar report for this relentlessly demanding company (bless them for all their business) only last week. Using tools provided in the newest release of the measurement software, James reformatted the report macro and flowed previously acquired measurement data into it. The whole process took less than ninety minutes.

At the end of the day, James and his assistant were worn down and a little frazzled, but still half --maybe even three-quarters-- of a step ahead of what everyone was throwing at them. It was a very different situation when Sleuth observed the other CMM team the next day.

Johnnie was at the CMM computer showing his assistant how to perform a moderately easy first piece inspection. This was going to take up most of the morning but the assistant had to learn. Johnnie thought he would be getting to his emergency reverse engineering job by mid-afternoon. Of course, all that changed when McGravy himself walked in demanding a custom report for the very same omnipresent, persnickety aerospace customer Sleuth had run into the day before.

This pretty much derailed the day for Johnnie and his assistant. Johnnie spent the rest of it cutting and pasting charts and other data into a special format he created himself from scratch. He was frequently interrupted by the assistant, who was swimming over his head in a confusing sea of icons, palettes and dropdown menus at the CMM. At the end of the day, the assistant went home to look through the help wanted ads, and Johnnie stayed to do the reverse engineering job, tediously instructing the CMM to collect data one point at a time.

“Soooo?” McGravy fumed at the Sleuth the following morning.

“It’s the software,” said the Sleuth confidently.

“How can it be that? They both have the same software.”

“Yes they both have it. But only James has installed the last two upgrades and he’s taken the time to learn how to use some of the best new productivity tools. In addition to a lot of other enhancements, the new releases of the software have better scanning functions, more flexible reporting capabilities and a more flexible user interface. That’s making a world of difference.”

“But we don’t have time to learn new software.”

“James has learned how to use them, and look a the differences in productivity between the operations.  Your software vendor has invested untold man-hours in enhancing the software.  It’s senseless not to figure out a way to give Johnnie the time to learn the new features.  Otherwise, you’d better buy him another CMM, because it would be a shame to lose such a good worker,” said Sleuth sarcastically.

Before Sleuth and McGravy could get further into the discussion, the phone rang. Sleuth would have to come back later. McGravy was going to be tied up in a conference call discussing some new reporting requirements with his aerospace customer.

 

EM Sleuth is sponsored by Wilcox Associates Inc, (www.pcdmis-ems.com), part of the Hexagon Metrology Group and makers of PC-DMIS measurement software. Contributors to this article include: Ken Woodbine, Vice President, Wilcox Associates, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ; Steve Logee, Director of Business Development, Wilcox Associates, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ; Rob Fabiano, Sleuth iIlustrator, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and Joel Cassola, Writer, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .