The Fabricator July 2004

Augur Metal Products, a sheet metal fabricator that manufactures components for OEMs, punches large stainless-steel sheets for commercial separators. Its punches required sharpening after punching 10 to 15 sheets until it changed to Mate punches made from DuraSteel™ tooling with Maxima® coating and dies made with Mate's Slug Free® design. The new tooling allows the company to exceed 40 sheets between sharpenings and increase press speed by 20 percent.

Productivity increases when manufacturing processes are executed as quickly as possible. Maximizing productivity also means minimizing the nonproductive segments of the manufacturing cycle. When all the time associated with manufacturing—the fabricating process itself, non-process in-cycle time, out of cycle waiting time, downtime, and secondary operations—is minimized that productivity is maximized.

World-class manufacturing is a common catch phrase, but it's usually used even though the company has done nothing to justify the highfalutin title. Many companies have been using manufacturing resource planning (MRP), lean manufacturing, kaizen, kanban, Six Sigma systems, statistical process...