Small Manufacturers Aren't Little Versions Of Major Manufacturers

Truer words were never spoken ... and it is those who realize it that just may survive these challenging manufacturing times.

I ran across this interesting article ... http://www.manufacturing.net/articles/2012/10/small-manufacturers-arent-little-versions-of-major-manufacturers ... it really encompasses the thoughts and designs of the software products we create here at Kentech Inc..

I spent a lot of years "in the trenches" ... I saw a lot of things along the way. The best shops I visited and worked in were the shops that new their place ... understood their market ... and made decisions based on that knowledge. They didn't necessarily go with the "trends" ... they understood what they needed and made purchases for items on the shop floor that filled those needs. Not always the items with biggest price tags ... nor the ones that made the prettiest pictures.

Allow me to give you one example of a poor shop that sums it up.

This shop was basically a job shop ... taking in any kind of manufacturing that came in the door. Had a wide array of equipment from VMC's to HMC's and turning equipment ... your average job shop.

They  utilized Solidworks for their design and engineering needs ... which was great. They were doing a lot of work on creating some type of product that they could manufacture and sell ... maybe a golf putter ... and some various other products. They were so impressed with Solidworks that everything revolved around it ... even their CNC programming. They made a purchase of a CAM package that worked inside Solidworks and decided that that would be the programming package for the shop floor.

So everything that came in the door ... from simple squaring up blocks to simple drilling patterns to simple turning ... needed to be programmed through this software ... or programmed by hand. The problem ... not one of the machinists on the shop floor ... the guys doing the set-ups and writing the programs ... had any knowledge of either Solidworks nor the CAM program. And the "programmer" who knew how to operate both was always busy doing the engineering work and was never available to help out.

The result ... almost everything was programmed by hand ... was fraught with errors ... took time to prove out ... and resulted in lots of scrap and wasted time. But Solidworks made the prettiest pictures and was definitively the top of the line engineering app ... so it must be the best for everything.

This was one case that I personally experienced ... but I'm sure is repeated throughout the manufacturing community. Management forcing the latest technology whether it's a good fit or not ... if it's the latest and greatest it must be a good fit for us.

I am seeing this more and more with the complex, multi function CNC machinery being produced. Hey ... no problems with turning centers with live tooling and Y axis ... ya, needed. But these turning centers with 5 axis milling capabilities ... REALLY ??? This may be the GE and BOEING of tomorrow ... but I'm not convinced that this is the future for the thousands of shops operating in the real world of job shop manufacturing. And my fear is that if they buy into the hype ... they may not survive.

Do you think that innovation like this is driven by these machine tool builders need to make something new to make more money? ... or by the desire to create real world solutions for perceived manufacturing issues?

At Kentech Inc. ... our slogan has always been "real world software." And we pride ourselves on developing applications that fit in the real world ... that provide real world solutions to real world problems. And over the past 25+ years ... we are proud to say that Kipware® products are used every day by thousands of manufacturers around the world.