By Joe Egbert,
VP / General Manager,
Libra Industries — Dayton, Ohio
Why capacity in this business moves slower than anyone wants it to
When people ask whether we can take on more work, they usually mean do we have machines. The machines are the easy part.
We run 45 CNC machines in Dayton. If we needed another 5-axis machining center, that is a large check and a long lead time, and both of those can be planned around. I could tell you the date it would be cutting chips.
The true differentiator is having somebody who can run it well, and that is the part of this business nobody outside it has much reason to know about.
What the job actually asks
Take a 5-axis setup that has to hold a tenth — a ten-thousandth of an inch — on an Inconel part. Getting there once, on a good day, with the engineer standing at the machine, is not the hard part. The hard part is the fortieth part, on second shift, coming off the same as the first.
That means knowing how the fixture is going to load the part and where it will let go. Knowing that the finish that came out wrong on Tuesday afternoon is the tool and not the program, or the material lot and not the tool, and knowing it in 20 minutes rather than after scrapping four more. Knowing which surface to hold on first, because holding the other one distorts a wall by half a thousandth that nobody will find until the CMM.
None of that is in a manual. Some of it is in a manual and does not work in practice, which is worse. It comes from having made the mistake, or from standing next to someone who did.
How long it takes
Someone with no background can run a machine that is already set up within a few months. That is real work and we need people doing it, and it is not the constraint.
Setting up a job on a three-axis machine, from a print, without help, is more like two years. Five-axis work, tight tolerance, difficult materials, and knowing when to stop and ask rather than push through — call it five years, and some people never get there, which is not a criticism of them. It is a specific aptitude.
The people who can look at a part they have never seen and tell you within a minute which two features are going to be the problem are 10- and 15-year people. We have a number of them; and part of their job is bringing others along.
What we do about it
We hire for aptitude and attitude rather than for a resume, because the resume mostly tells you where someone has been rather than whether they will get good. We take apprentices, and we pair them with people who are patient enough to explain the same thing twice. We accept that this costs us throughput in the short run, because the alternative is being in exactly the same position in three years.
We are also honest that we get some of it wrong. We have promoted people into setup work before they were ready because we needed the capacity, and it cost us scrap and a couple of late deliveries. We have lost people we should have kept.
Why this shows up on your side
If you buy machined parts, this is behind a set of things that look unrelated.
It is why quotes get slower and drift up without material moving. It is why lead times go from six weeks to 10 in steps that each have a good specific explanation. It is why a shop that used to bid everything starts picking, which is easy to miss because a no-quote looks the same as silence. And it is why expediting becomes routine, which is a capacity signal even though nobody logs it as one.
It is also why machining capacity does not scale the way assembly capacity does. A building can be built, and assembly technicians can be brought to competence, in months. When a company commits to doubling output, the assembly side of that has a schedule and generally gets delivered. Machining is working against a five-year clock underneath a one-year plan, and the shops supplying you are under the same constraint you are.
What that means if you are growing
I am not going to tell you how to run your supply base. What I would say is that if a machined part is on your critical path, the thing you cannot arrange quickly is a shop that already knows how to make it. Everything else about a supplier relationship can be compressed. That part cannot.
The practical consequence is that the same conversation is much cheaper now than in the quarter when a program is already late — not because our prices change, but because attention is easier to get from everyone involved when nothing is on fire.
And it is why I would rather talk to a company a year before they need us than the week they do. We are in a better position to be useful, and you are in a better position to find out whether we are any good.
Send an email to sales@libraind.com.
