Assessing Your Cutting Needs

No one wants to make the mistake of spending tens of thousands of dollars on a critical piece of equipment that isn’t up to the job, or becomes outdated soon after purchase. Ideally, your cutting system will be able to keep up with a growing and changing business – an investment that meets your present needs, and also allows you to confidently prepare for the future.

Here are some questions to ask when assessing your cutting needs:

• What are your cut quality and part tolerance requirements?
• What type and thickness do you need to cut?
• What is your productivity requirement? How many parts per day, feet per shift etc do you need to complete?
• What is your target operation cost?
• What are your safety requirements?
• How much manufacturing flexibility will you require?
• Do you expect to bring outsourced work back in house?

Next look at common opportunities for improvement:

Updating or improving your cutting operation can help increase profits by reducing costs, increasing output, or both. Depending on your objectives, you might be able to improve your operation through simple steps such as more operator training or modest software and hardware upgrades. Other enhancements may require a more significant investment in a new cutting technology or cutting machine.

You can often identify potential improvement areas by looking for bottlenecks or other hidden costs occurring both upstream and downstream from the cutting operation.

Bottlenecks

Where are the bottlenecks in your fabrication or manufacturing operation?

• If your hand cutting stations are a bottleneck, you might be able to improve throughput by investing in machines offering faster cut speeds, or by adding automated cutting capability to your operation.
• If you’ve already automated and your cutting table is the bottleneck, you might be able to increase productivity through software or hardware upgrades, or by moving from a slower process like oxyfuel cutting to a faster process such as HyDefinition® plasma.
  
• If you are experiencing bottlenecks (or simply spending too much time and money) on secondary operations, improving cut quality may reduce the need for grinding, secondary beveling, or other downstream steps. There are many ways to improve cut quality – ranging from modest investments in operator training and software, height control, or torch and consumable upgrades, all the way to investing in a new machine with superior motion control.

Identify hidden costs

Inefficiency and waste in the cutting value stream also offer opportunities for improvement. Common sources of waste – and cost – include operator turnover and associated training costs, low utilization of material, poor quality parts that need to be scrapped, excessive material handling, machine downtime, overly complex software, energy inefficiency, sub-optimal consumable utilization, and even outsourcing work that could more cost-effectively be handled in-house.

Look beyond the cutting machine

You might find significant opportunities for improvement both upstream and downstream from your actual cutting machine. For example, by investing in advanced CAD/CAM software used for offline part programming, an upstream activity, you may be able to increase cutting machine utilization by eliminating the downtime that results from waiting for programming on the CNC. That same investment may also increase material utilization, leading to less waste – a huge cost in most cutting operations.

Looking downstream, you could be spending unnecessary time and money on mechanical tools and labor to prepare parts for welding or painting. Investing in cut quality improvements may reduce the need for secondary operations such as grinding or beveling, allowing you to increase your throughput of finished parts, not just the number of parts coming off your cutting table.

Build a case for investing in your cutting operation

If, after assessing your needs and improvement opportunities, you determine that an investment in new software or hardware may be needed, you still have to determine whether the expense is worthwhile. The return on your investment will be driven by how much additional profit you can produce as a result of cost savings as well as increased capability.

Increased capability may translate into:

• Greater throughput (more parts per shift)
• Ability to insource work that was previously outsourced
• Ability to take on jobs that were previously not possible

Remember that your customers are paying for finished parts, so be sure to look beyond the cutting table. Your business case may be built on improvements upstream, or downstream from the actual cutting operation.

When making the internal business case to invest in your cutting operations, you will want to understand and address the potential costs, benefits and options for updating each stage of your current production environment as many members of the buying group are likely motivated by different benefits.

• A plant manager may be focused on productivity
• A financial officer may be focused on overall profit improvement
• A safety engineer on reducing injuries
• An operator on producing more and better parts
• A HR manager on reducing training costs and increasing employee retention

Investments in cutting software and hardware can produce benefits that satisfy many members of the decision-making team!