MachineMetrics helped Carolina Precision saved over $1.5M on machine monitoring

Gary Bruner, the president of Carolina Precision Manufacturing, a contract manufacturer that specializes in small-diameter, close-tolerance CNC Swiss turned parts, had a problem. Over breakfast that morning, Gary had logged onto the MachineMetrics monitoring system on his laptop at home to check the status of his machines assigned to a lights-out operation, but saw immediately that two of his machines were not in production. “What’s wrong with machines 35 and 36?” he thought to himself. Upon arrival to the shop, Gary learned from his operator on duty that this type of hold up was nothing out of the ordinary, and was in fact a product of inefficient startup procedures that had simply never been analyzed or augmented previously. In an industry with razor thin margins, Gary understood that the keys to growth and success were in efficiency and quality. He understood the importance of keeping tabs on production stats, job status, uptime, and setup. However, there was no way to know how well machines were doing in real time. What was causing this additional downtime? Furthermore, CPM’s current methods of measurement and data collection were not only time consuming, but had quickly becoming outdated. Historically, CPM had an employee dedicated to the collection of utilization data. This employee would walk around to each of the machines, collect scrap tickets post-production, talk to operators, and record yesterday’s data into their current ERP system; not to mention that this manual data collection was prone to errors, and would take upwards of 2 hours per day. Without the ability to visualize their results, the recorded data was not very actionable.

CPM installed a new machine monitoring software MachineMetrics on all 36 of his Marubeni Citizen-Cincom CNC lathes. While Gary and the team were still acclimating to the monitoring system and how to best use the data it collected, analyzed, and reported, the benefits of MachineMetrics became apparent immediately. MachineMetrics Dashboards were installed on TV’s across the shop floor with tablets mounted at each machine for operator feedback. If a job fell behind production goals, the color of the tile changed, and text notifications were sent to managers, so that action could be taken immediately instead of waiting for the next day or next week.

• [Efficiency Improvement - Operation]
  MachineMetrics holds operators accountable for keeping up with their goals for the current shift - so our team can spend more time working on the harder problems that historical data allows us to identify and measure
• [Data Management - Real Time Data]
  Information we get changes the way we work. Troubleshooting using data can discover the root cause of the issue, and make real time changes while relieving communication issues between teams.

• An average of 688 additional operating hours per machine. A 20% increase in Machine Utilization.

• At $60/hour, that averages out to an additional $41,280 of billings per machine. CPM’s initial investment in MachineMetrics was returned within only 11 days of using the software.

• 2 hours per day of administrative savings. Increase capacity by $1.5 million in 2016 with no additional machines!