If you’ve experienced delays due to a slow or disorganized machine shop, you know just how frustrating and costly their inefficiencies can be for your project.
At Ketchie, saving you time and money matters to us.
We’re always looking for ways to improve productivity and make and deliver parts more efficiently. Regularly improving organization, investing in new technology, and streamlining communication in our shop are just some of the ways we’re prepared to meet the demands of our customers.
Want to learn more about how our productivity improvements can benefit you?
5 Ways Ketchie Consistently Improves Productivity
Our commitment to continuous improvement allows us to guarantee faster lead times—so you’re never waiting around on delivery of your parts. Here’s how we set and maintain such high standards:
We’re proactive on the shop floor.
As an ISO certified machine shop, we always meet intensive requirements for standardization and quality assurance. But we’re always on the lookout for ways we can do better. As soon as we identify an inefficiency, we modify our process and keep things rolling.
For example, after determining that we could expedite machining by reorganizing our chuck jaws, we immediately set aside time for our team to collaborate on a solution. Not many shops would grant machinists the time to work on this kind of organizational project, but we knew that this one tweak would significantly increase our productivity.
The end result was developing a process that tracks and classifies our chuck jaws to ensure more efficient machining. Our machinists can find what they need right away and our customers get their parts that much faster—everybody wins!
We empower our machinists.
Machinists are essential team members who work on parts every day: they’re experts at their trade! They can pinpoint exactly what’s slowing them down on the shop floor. So it’s vital that our leadership team maintains regular communication with our team about how we could make their jobs easier.
During these conversations, we’re always open to feedback. By keeping an open dialogue with our machinists, we empower them to suggest ways to improve best practices and shorten lead times.
We hold productivity initiative meetings.
To get everyone collaborating about new solutions for improving productivity, we regularly hold specialized meetings just for this purpose.
We gather team members from every department (shop supervisors, sales, production, and engineers) and allocate time to talk about projects, generate new ideas, and give feedback.
Together, we set goals to increase productivity and drive revenue. When we make time to collaborate, we evolve—and our customers benefit from our improvements.
We’re more efficient with fewer people.
As the metalwork machining skills gap makes it increasingly more difficult to find qualified machinists, we adapt by automating our systems and machining technology to improve efficiency.
Our high-speed HCN-6000 PALLETECH helps us achieve increased productivity through unattended machining. With this advanced technology, we’ve been able to add a second shift without needing an operator to be tied to the machine.
We’ve also streamlined our front office, using analytics to prioritize our production schedule for better efficiency. Our technology determines work order and helps us make smart decisions about how to best organize our people and our machines.
We invest in tooling and fixturing.
We invest in highly efficient solutions for tooling and fixturing that significantly reduce setup time and streamline machining processes. Those benefits are ultimately passed on to our customers.
Some of our key investments include magnetic workholdings and customized milling fixtures, both of which speed up setup time, simplify programming, and enhance part quality. Customized fixturing also means that when customers have recurring orders, we’re ready to machine their parts over and over again!
Your machine shop should care about your project and work efficiently to get you what you need when you need it—at a reasonable price. Trust Ketchie to save you time and deliver high-quality parts.
Request a quote today to work with a team you can count on.
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