Use slowdown time to organize your job shop

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We are currently in the middle of a huge slowdown at the shop, and I am finding out we aren’t the only ones. No one looks forward to slowdowns, but I’ve been in the business long enough to know they come in waves, and they don’t have to be entirely a bad thing. You can take advantage of the slow times by stepping back and identifying areas where your business can be improved.

The Anatomy of a Slowdown

Our production has come to a halt in many ways. None of our consistent, larger customers are quoting projects, and that trickles down to the small shops like us. On the other side of our business, we have Mountains2Metal. Selling our aftermarket auto parts usually picks up around the holidays, but we’ve noticed that people are not wanting to spend their money like they used to. With three kids myself, I can understand why. It costs an arm and a leg to buy groceries nowadays, and tricking out your car or truck is a want, not a need—although some people could argue that statement.

Another reason for the slowdown is a lack of buyers at the festivals and markets where my dad sells wall hangings. We normally sell quite a few, and members of our family help run the booth. This year at the Mullet Festival in downtown Swansboro, N.C., we did roughly 20% of our average sales for that festival. There were plenty of people in attendance, but everyone seemed to be empty-handed. In years past, we watched visitor after visitor walk out with all sorts of art and other festival purchases. Not this year. We even added several new items that we’ve never sold before and had very little interest. People strolled on by with no intentions of buying anything.

Making Good Use of Downtime

So, what are we doing while business is slow? There isn’t much we can do about the economy or other people's spending habits, but we can take measures to improve our business.

Our focus has been to improve productivity by getting more organized. We’ve purchased a cabinet and a few carts with hardware storage bins, and we’ve reorganized a lot of rack space. While these efforts aren’t going to make us a ton of money, they will be beneficial in the long run.

We bought the cabinet to house all our PEM nuts and fasteners. We previously had a dedicated storage box on wheels for these items, but it was getting out of hand. We had to sift through it to find what we needed, and parts would fall out of bags and eventually get lost in the mix. We replaced that storage box with a cabinet with labeled bins to make it easy to find the fasteners we need. It’s easily accessible for restocking, and parts always go into the same bin for the next use so they’re easy to find.

The carts we bought have similar bins to hold the hardware we use to install some of our Mountains2Metal products. Moving away from tubs and boxes for this hardware has been a game changer. Inventory levels can be checked at a glance, and part numbers are easy to see on the labeled bins. It might not sound like much, but it really is a big help to everyone in the shop involved with boxing or assembly.

Reorganization of our storage racks mainly involved removing random items that have been collected over the years. Some stuff has been sitting there since we moved into this new facility more than four years ago! We tossed a lot in the trash and freed up an amazing amount of space by consolidating like items.

One of our lead fabricators took it upon himself to empty an entire toolbox and reorganize everything. There were plenty of random treasures in there, and we ended up with several boxes of unused hardware. I remember he asked what one of the tools was that he found. It was an old scribe tool that was used quite often at the old shop before we had CNC press brakes. I actually knew what it was and showed him how to use it, and he understood it right away.

If your shop is like ours—somewhat old school—there is always a broom to push when times are slow. Why not take that a step further and find a project like some of these that can be easily implemented? Reorganization doesn’t take a lot of skill, but it’s necessary.

For now, I’m going to clean off the stack of random magazines on the corner of my desk that show up faster than I can read them.

This new cabinet at Barnes MetalCrafters stores fasteners, which once were kept in an old storage box on wheels. The cabinet still has plenty of room left for additional bins.