Lab Shows Low-Cost Way to Enter Automation Era : Uncle Sam Gives Hand to Machine-Tool Shops
Nearly everything that people touch, all manufactured products, involve the use of metal-cutting machine tools.
In countries such as Japan and Sweden and West Germany, the machine-shop owners are automating their lathes and drills, saving time and gradually taking over the market that once belonged undeniably to the United States.
And yet in the United States, less than 11% of the machine tools in many metal-fabricating industries are computerized; fewer than half the plants have installed automated machines, and, even among plants that have invested in computerized automation in the last five years, only about one in six machines is computerized.
But U.S. machine shops are beginning to automate, and one government research lab will be showing small companies how to do so without going into the red.
Next month, the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, which is about 30 miles south of Baltimore, will open an automation-technology project that it calls the Shop of the ‘90s.
The project is designed to help small metal-working shops gain on foreign competitors by automating their operations with inexpensive, off-the-shelf computers and software available now at any computer store.
At the national institute, Adrian Moll created the demonstration project by modernizing his own 56-employee machine shop, called the Fabrication Technology division. There, workers design and build the special instruments and equipment used by institute researchers.
Many Research Projects
Until last year, the institute was the Bureau of Standards, where scientists built measuring instruments and systems that gave science and industry a basis for accurate measurement. In 1988, the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act changed the federal research lab’s name and its focus.
Now, its 3,000 scientists also build better integrated circuits, develop tougher industrial ceramics, create improved enzymes and transfer these discoveries to U.S. companies.
At any given time, about 200 companies or organizations are sponsoring cooperative research at the institute on such projects as new measurement and quality control technology. Its products include thousands of instrument calibrations that often are essential for safety and quality control in industrial operations, and its standard reference materials are used nationwide to ensure the accuracy of clinical lab tests.
During the last year, Moll and his division staff installed and taught each other to use a personal computer network that allows them to automate routine machine-shop activities such as estimating costs, planning manufacturing processes, managing the tool room, tracking jobs and costs, and designing and manufacturing products.
Automating his own shop, Moll says he “ran the project the same way a small machine shop would. We didn’t buy anything until we needed it. All the equipment was bought piecemeal, then installed when we had time.” Still, he kept the shop up and running, and profitable, during the entire process.
Mostly Small Shops
A shop owner’s average cost to put a similar system to work, Moll says, would range from $5,000 to $20,000, depending on how much of the software a company decided to buy. “Shopping around helps,” he adds. The yearlong project cost $300,000, including the cost of visiting manufacturing technology centers around the United States to talk about the project.
Beginning in October, the institute will invite about 400 people a year from among small metal-fabrication shops for hands-on demonstrations of the down-to-earth modernization project. Visitors will be able to take a product through the system from beginning to end, Moll says.
The institute will make the principles and procedures developed in the program readily available, at no charge, to interested shop owners and engineers.
These small metal-fabrication shops, with fewer than 50 employees, make up about 85% of U.S. metal fabrication facilities and account for about 75% of all U.S. metal fabrication.
Roughly 375,000 workers are employed in the nation’s 12,000 small metal-working shops, cranking out an astonishing array of products.
They make cutlery, hand tools and hardware; heating equipment, plumbing fixtures and farm machines; jewelry and silverware; engines and turbines; guns, ammunition and screw-machine products; metal stampings and electrical industrial apparatus; motor vehicles, aircraft and guided missiles, space vehicles and scientific instruments.
They make these products for diverse client base of companies that make automobiles, aerospace products, appliances, business machines, electronics, agricultural implements, medical and construction equipment, nuclear and environmental products, and for the Defense Department.
Last year, to kick off the project, Moll gathered his entire staff in a room.
“ ‘The accountant was in last night,’ I told them. ‘If we don’t turn this shop around in a year, we’ll be broke.’ ” The simulated financial emergency set the parameters for the project, he says. “At that point, we hadn’t done a damn thing yet.”
They only had a year, and they got started immediately. First, they evaluated their resources and machine tools of varying vintages to decide whether to repair or replace them, and to allow more accurate estimates of the shop’s return on investment.
Next, they installed a personal computer network to support computer-aided cost estimation and process planning, computerized tool-room management and job and cost tracking, and PC-based computer-aided design and manufacturing systems to speed parts design and programming.
Different Approaches
Eventually, they taught everyone how to use the new systems and equipment.
The demonstration system, generically referred to as computer-integrated manufacturing, will include computerized cost estimating and process planning, tool-room management, computer-aided design and manufacturing, a project manager and a timekeeper.
Though it recommends no particular products, the institute took on industrial partners to provide the project’s software and equipment. Some of the shop’s manual machines were retrofitted to operate as computer-controlled machines; some were replaced.
Already, the division staff estimates, the project has demonstrated a three-fold reduction in programming time for some of the computer-controlled machines and, because of improved productivity, a six-month pay-back time for new equipment.
But Moll, who calls himself “a tool-and-die maker by trade” and who has worked in computer-integrated manufacturing at the shop level since 1978, may have some convincing to do about the practicality of automation when shop owners and engineers start visiting the project in October. Inside the thousands of U.S. metal-working shops, the transition from the industrial age to the automation age is painfully slow.
“Automation is fine in a research facility test bed, but when you have to go into the real world and make a profit . . . that is where the paradox of automation lies with this entire industry,” says Bill Ruxton, technical department manager at the 3,100-member National Tooling & Machining Assn. in Ft. Washington, Md.
In small job shops, he continues, the product quantities required are usually small. “A thousand parts is a limited run compared to hundreds of thousands, or millions. The situation in state-of-the-art technology is that a manually equipped shop bidding on a single die or batch of machine parts can be competitive for the same work from a larger, automated shop.”
Partially Automated
“From the point of view of dollars,” says association spokesman Mark Jeschke, the $5,000 to $20,000 that Moll says the off-the-shelf automation system will cost “is not an exorbitant amount of money--it’s not as expensive as buying a new piece of equipment. The question is whether the application is a one-time kind of thing.” Ruxton reports observing an increasing amount of computerization among shops he visits, “although most companies using automation may not be using it throughout the entire plant. . . . If a company has 10 machines, one or two might be computerized numerically controlled machines (CNC) and the rest might be manual.”
Just because the small shops aren’t filled with flashy, high-tech, automated systems, Ruxton adds, doesn’t necessarily mean they’re lagging behind competitively.
“I visited one shop in Philadelphia,” he recalls. “I pulled up outside the old, brick building and thought it would be another 1940s factory. Inside there was old equipment and dirt on the floor,” he says. “But the equipment was well-maintained, they were using some sophisticated statistical-process-control techniques, and they had a couple of CNC machines. They could have competed with a similar company anywhere.”
