Aug 12
StevenDeamAS9100, Aerospace Machining, Certification, Document Management, News
By Steven R Deam – CNC Industries, Inc. Fort Wayne, Indiana
CNC Industries Completes AS9100 Rev C Certification
Fort Wayne, IN 8/12/2010
For Immediate Release
Date: Thursday, August 12, 2010
Contact: Steven R Deam
CNC Industries
Fort Wayne, IN
260.490.5700
Email: stevendeam@cncind.com
Fort Wayne, IN—CNC Industries is pleased to announce that they have successfully completed their AS9100 registration effective on July 31, 2010. CNC Industries had previously been certified to the ISO9001:2008 standard – the AS9100 certification is recognized as including all aspects of the ISO 9001 certification as well. SGS served as the registrar and auditor for CNC Industries.
CNC Industries, established in 1995, specializes in precision machining, milling, turning, and assembly of custom parts for the aerospace and defense industries. The company uses the latest machinery as well as custom written ERP software to facilitate high levels of quality demanded by their customers. CNC Industries has a 35,000 square foot facility on the north side of Fort Wayne, IN.
AS9100 certification is an international standard for quality and management systems for the Aircraft, Space and Defense Industries. CNC Industries’ Vice President of operations, Dustin Kimbrell, has said “The implementation of AS9100 standards throughout the company has helped to make us a successful supplier to many aircraft and defense contractors. We are better able to serve our customers needs and expectations through our internal processes and systems at this point than we have ever been. We have become the premier supplier for many of our customers, and the AS9100 certification is another indication of our commitment to always uphold a superior level of quality throughout our production processes.”
By becoming AS9100 certified CNC Industries joins a small group of companies that demonstrate their superior quality management systems. In Fort Wayne, only 7 companies are AS9100 certified – of which only 3 of these companies are local businesses. CNC Industries is the only precision machine shop in Fort Wayne to become AS9100 certified. In all of Indiana only slightly over 100 companies have managed to become certified to the full AS9100 level.
CNC Industries attributes much of its success in obtaining the AS9100 certification to its’ internal ERP system called Job Manager. Steven Deam Jr, the IT Administrator at CNC comments, “The ability to adapt our software systems to the higher standards of AS9100 regulations has allowed us to adjust our processes to the increased demands placed upon us by increasingly complex parts and orders. Our customers expect high levels of quality and service. With Job Manager we are able to meet their stringent quality and service requirements while additionally offering them better overall pricing”.
For more information regarding CNC Industries Inc., please refer to the company web site: http://www.cncind.com or call 260.490.5700.
For additional information about SGS visit http://www.us.sgs.com.
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CNC Industries is a Fort Wayne, Indiana based Job-Shop specializing in precision CNC machining, fabrication and assembly of application-critical and custom machined parts for the Aerospace, Defense, Medical, Industrial and Transportation markets. The company presently employees approximately 55 people.
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Aug 06
StevenDeamAS9100, Aerospace Machining, Certification, News, Precision Machining
We will be issuing a press release about this early next week, but we are now fully certified to AS9100 B. The official certificate and press kit came in the mail today, and we were placed in the OASIS online database of certified suppliers earlier in the week. Overall the auditing to certification process was relatively painless, for a four day audit at least.
We have researched the AS9100 certification statistics a little bit:
In Fort Wayne there are only 8 AS9100 certified companies, including CNC Industries. CNC Industries is the only precision machine shop in Fort Wayne to receive an AS9100 certification. Likewise we are the only custom machine shop certified in Fort Wayne as well.
In Indiana there are now 112 companies certified to AS9100. The vast majority are service or assembly houses. We have not looked at all of the certifications, but our estimation is that we are one of only 10 or so machine shops to be certified to AS9100.
In the United States there are 5725 total companies certified. assuming the same approximate ratio of machine shops, I would assume that we are one of 575 machine shops in the country with the AS9100 certification. This puts us in a very elite class of machine shops, one that we are proud to be a member of.
The full press release will be issued early next week.
Jul 09
StevenDeamAerospace Machining, Lean Manufacturing, Precision Machining
The final of the seven wastes that we are looking at is waiting. Any time that a part is waiting is additional time that you are holding the costs of the part without receiving the income of the part. Waiting, as we have identified it internally comes from three main places: 1) having a part or batch finish with one machine and the next machine required for the part is not available and 2) any part that is in a batch but is not currently being machined, 3) inventory.
The first of these items is very self-explanatory. A batch of parts sitting by a machine waiting to be run through that machine is very obviously waiting. What is a bit less obvious is that even while the batch is being machined, the majority of the parts are still waiting. If there is a batch of 500 parts that each take 1 minute to complete an operation then at minimum each part will have 499 minutes of waiting while the rest are getting machined.
In any production facility where resources are shared between multiple batches / parts, it is extremely difficult to schedule all of the jobs so that no part is ever waiting at all. In fact this scenario is used to illustrate a difficult to impossible problem to solve with computers – known as the Job Shop Problem. This problem may be especially difficult in the aerospace machining industry. With long lead times and large numbers of operations requiring many different resources, scheduling jobs to move through the shop at the best possible rate is exceptionally difficult.
At CNC Industries we address the problem of time wasted while a part is waiting in several different ways. One of the main approaches is our design of a universal fixturing system. We have designed a system of attaching fixtures to our milling machines that will allow a fixture to be machine independent in it’s use. We may design a fixture assuming that the part will be run in one of our Haas VF-2 Superspeed machines, but find that our Toyoda Horizontal is a better choice. With our universal fixturing system we can easily move the part to the most appropriate machine at the correct time and with minimal disruption.
Additionally we focus on redundant machines. Our capacity for production needs to be unaffected by any downtime that a given machine may have. We keep all of our machines well-maintained to prevent any problems, but there is on way to completely prevent down-time. With redundant machines we have the security of knowing that we are not going to be in trouble meeting our deadlines if a machine has any unexpected down-times.
Finally we have worked very hard to get our batch sizes as small as is reasonably possible while also reducing the setup time of each batch. This allows us to eliminate a sizable portion of each part waiting while the rest of the parts in the batch are being machined. The smaller batch sizes also help us to reduce our inventory and prevent the third source of waiting that we have identified.
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CNC Industries is a Fort Wayne, Indiana based machine shop specializing in precision CNC machining, fabrication and assembly of application-critical and custom machined parts for the Aerospace, Defense, Medical, Industrial and Transportation markets. The company presently employs approximately 55 people.
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Jun 18
StevenDeamAerospace Machining, Certification, Document Management, Lean Manufacturing, Precision Machining Aerospace Machining, Custom Machined Parts, ERP, Job Manager, Lean Manufacturing, wastes
The fifth of the seven wastes is the most readily obvious waste – defects. A part or product that is not made correctly and needs to be either re-worked or discarded, is obviously a waste. The time spent on the original part is wasted, the material and other costs are wasted, the time that it takes to re-work or re-make the part is wasted. Overall defects cause considerable disruptions and waste.
Once again high volume work has an easier time of removing defects from the process. the length of the run of a part will justify creating more complex and expensive fixturing to enable quality at the course – so that the part has little or no chance of being produced improperly. Custom inspection procedures will allow quick discovery of any non-conforming parts as well.
In a low volume high mix facility – as a large portion of CNC Industries is, making custom machined parts and precision aerospace machined parts, we cannot spend an extensive amount of time on fixturing – our lead time for the entire first batch of product is sometimes shorter than production companies will spend on a single fixture for a production part. The inspection requirements and quality standards will also vary – sometimes greatly – between parts running through our shop at the same time. We have to ensure that each fixture is made quickly and still performs as it needs to.
Of course defects are caused by a myriad of issues beyond just the fixturing the part correctly. We have many more methods of preventing mistakes and defects before they occur, but I think a more telling evaluation of a companies dedication to eliminating defects is the processes taken when a defect does occur. At CNC Industries, we place great emphasis on root cause analysis and corrective / preventative actions. As we are nearing our AS9100 certification, we are more aware of this need than ever before.
Our Corrective Action System is based on the Apollo Root Cause Analysis and allows and indefinite depth of root cause analysis. We regard and defect as a serious issue and are quick to come to an understanding of the root cause that allowed the defect to occur. With our ERP system, we are able to quickly resolve any ongoing systemic issue and immediately take the necessary corrective action to prevent future occurrences of the issue. Preventative and corrective actions and their resolutions are transmitted throughout the company immediately upon completion and necessary procedural and process changes are automatically updated. All relevant documentation is kept entirely in sync with our digital paperless document system.
The ability to adjust our entire process to address a deficiency in the processes that we utilize allows us to have an extremely low defect rate – and when the very occasional defect does occur we can quickly adapt and prevent the problem in the future.
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CNC Industries is a Fort Wayne, Indiana based machine shop specializing in precision CNC machining, fabrication and assembly of application-critical and custom machined parts for the Aerospace, Defense, Medical, Industrial and Transportation markets. The company presently employs approximately 55 people.
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Jun 14
StevenDeamAerospace Machining, Document Management, Lean Manufacturing, Precision Machining, Technology Aerospace Machining, Custom Machined Parts, Document Management, Lean Manufacturing, motion, the seven wastes
The 4th waste identified in lean manufacturing is Motion. Motion concerns the ergonomics of the workers in a process and any unnecessary steps or movement that they have in the process.
To again look at the difference of a high mix / low volume precision aerospace machining facility and a high volume production we will see a difference in the ability to reduce motion. In a high volume production environment you can count on a particular workstation being focused on a single task – even if that task is performed over a variety of individual parts, the motions and the ergonomics will be similar. In a low volume precision machine shop, the task on one day may be entirely different than the task of the prior day. While they will be related still – depending on the functionality of the machine at the workstation – the individual parts may require a significant difference in motion or handling.
To compensate for this changing process, CNC industries has designed it’s facility to accommodate a high mix of precision parts easily. While the information and documentation may vary from one part to another, we have standardized the method of getting that information into electronic information stations which are uniformly located near the workstations. Each worker in our facility may count on being able to get all necessary work instructions in the same way.
We have also standardized our machine setups with the tooling being handle off of the machine to eliminate unnecessary motion in the setup process. The advantages of removing extra motion include more productivity, less stress on the people involved in the process, as well as lowered chances of errors and mistakes being made. So even with a facility dedicated to fully custom machined parts and prototypes, we can easily remove unnecessary wastes.
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CNC Industries is a Fort Wayne, Indiana based machine shop specializing in precision CNC machining, fabrication and assembly of application-critical and custom machined parts for the Aerospace, Defense, Medical, Industrial and Transportation markets. The company presently employs approximately 55 people.
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