Our Sites

Rethinking the production meeting

Keep it brief and on point—or maybe don’t have one

Just as there is no one way to fabricate a metal part, there is no one way to conduct a meeting to discuss how a metal part may be made.

The production meeting is as ubiquitous as the sheet metal delivered to the shop each morning. Every shop needs to know what is happening for that day if the right parts are to be delivered on time to the right customers, right?

Ten years ago the answer to that question may have been an unequivocal “yes,” but times have changed. Today lead times are incredibly tight, making almost every job a rush job. Employees are cross-trained, so they know what is going on not just in one particular department, but other areas of the shop. Enterprisewide software systems provide information to all the key players who have been granted access, leaving them with no excuse for not knowing what is happening on the shop floor.

The daily production meeting has morphed into something different for many shops. To illustrate that point, The FABRICATOR reached out to three shops to find out how they keep information flowing about production flow—outside of a traditional daily meeting.

Twice Weekly Works

With its 150 employees who work over three shifts, Accrotool Inc., New Kensington, Pa., is not tiny, but it still has the feel of a smaller company. Its longtime employees enjoy a work culture in which everyone is comfortable sharing details in casual conversations and informal meetings that take place in hallways rather than conference rooms. Employees know their jobs and what needs to be done to keep up with customer demands; they really don’t appreciate activities that take them away from getting parts out the door.

That is one of the reasons that the daily production meeting disappeared for a time during the last year. When the key players—floor supervisors, schedulers, sales, and engineers—got together to discuss hot jobs and production concerns, many of the meeting participants lost interest as the meeting went on. They felt their time was better spent actually tending to parts instead of just talking about them.

“What happened was that it got extremely mundane. We kind of went over the same things each meeting,” said Matt Guzzo, Accrotool’s engineering manager. “It could last an hour and a half to two hours. Guys would start to lose interest.”

Accrotool’s once-a-day production meeting schedule lasted for about two years until the decision was made to go to the opposite extreme, having no meeting at all. Guzzo said the company’s culture kept the communication channels open, but some of the front-office people were left out of the loop.

“We needed to have some way to bring together manufacturing and sales, even if it wasn’t occurring every day,” Guzzo added. “We decided to bring it back, and for a time, we tried to do it once per week. Then we went to two days per week.”

That seems to be the perfect balance between the need for front-office and shop floor information exchange and respect for people’s time. Now salespeople don’t feel like they are on the outside of the shop floor door, looking inside for someone that can answer their production questions.

Guzzo added that the company’s JobBOSS manufacturing resource planning system has the capability to deliver real-time updates on jobs on the floor. The hope is that company personnel will use this tool to answer questions that might normally be brought up during the production meeting. That way questions about parts are limited to inquiries about parts that are not where they need to be.

With the twice-a-week meeting, which occurs on Tuesday and Thursday, now in place for five months, Guzzo said he hopes the focus of the gatherings will become more forward-looking. For instance, the Tuesday meeting might be for catching up on what happened over the weekend and on Monday, but the discussion also has to set up what will happen the rest of the week. On Thursday, time can be spent discussing what needs to be shipped before the end of the week and set up work for the weekend.

Guzzo is confident that the transition will occur. He also likes the current setup because he knows the production meeting schedule is a better fit for the company culture than the everyday meeting.

“We have a good thing here,” he said. “Guys are not afraid to talk.

“It’s nice that we have guys coming into my office as much as possible, and I’m always going to see other guys around the shop,” he added. “I know certain companies will talk only during a scheduled meeting, and if it isn’t discussed from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. during that meeting, they aren’t going to talk the rest of the day. You aren’t sure if stuff got done or not until you meet again the next morning.”

The Occasional Meeting

Dynamic Fabrication Inc. (DFI) is a custom contract manufacturing company. The 25-man shop, located in Santa Ana, Calif., is AS9100-certified.

The company performs specialty short-run, quick-turnaround items and R&D projects. A skilled fabricator can be working on a five-piece stainless steel order one day and a one-time fabrication made of INCONEL® alloy the next.

Mike Kartsonis, who founded the business in 1981, is fortunate to have many long-term employees. He said he can count on both hands the number of people who have quit over that time period.

Because of this close-knit and experienced group, operations continue to run smoothly, even in the face of tight deadlines and very complex projects . The shop floor has a good handle on what is needed and when it needs to be delivered.

“A production meeting is held on an as-needed basis,” Kartsonis said. “The foreman who runs the shop says when parts need to be fabricated and when they need to be finished. He handles the schedule internally.”

Typically, Kartsonis, the general manager, and someone from the contract review department have a daily meeting that greatly influences the creation of those travelers that are so important for production. This meeting, however, is focused on contract reviews.

“Contract review is critical before it goes to production,” Kartsonis said. “It’s just good business.”

The upfront focus on incoming jobs minimizes surprises on the shop floor. Kartsonis said some of the items he and his general manager look for include:

  • Unrealistic delivery dates. Some of Dynamic Fabrication’s customers are so large that it may take two weeks before a purchase order is processed; therefore, by the time the order gets to the shop, the original due date may no longer be realistic for material delivery, much less actual fabrication of the part.
  • The correct job. Believe it or not, the shop actually needs to verify that jobs quoted are actually jobs given to them. Every shop knows that customers always change engineering drawings, and sometimes that happens between getting the initial RFQ and receiving the actual job files.
  • Welding certifications. If a certification such as AWS D17.1, a well-known cert for welding in aerospace applications, is noted, Dynamic Fabrication has to find out if welders are certified to perform that requested weld joint on that specified material and thickness of material.
  • Manufacturability. Some aerospace companies have entry-level engineers who may not fully understand metal manufacturing. It is not uncommon for an engineer to request a tolerance of 0.030 inch on a 10-in.-long aluminum tube that is bent three times.

“Just make sure you are comfortable doing what you are asked to do in a timely manner, and that you have all of the requirements in place,” Kartsonis said. “It’s dotting your i’s and crossing your t’s.”

The company’s E2 software from Shoptech provides him and his general manager with the knowledge of where a job is, added Kartsonis. With a manufacturing process that calls for multiple steps, including outsourcing for finishing and several inspection requirements, the software is important in maintaining the company’s 98.3 percent on-time delivery rate.

What do an experienced workforce, contract review, and a robust MRP system have to do with a production meeting? Combined, they assist in creating the perfect scenario for an occasional production meeting to work well. When the meetings occur, they are brief, specific, and to the point. It’s almost another tool in the quality tool chest.

None Works for Them

“We used to be like everyone else,” said Ted Zuercher, vice president, operations, Metal Dynamics Inc., a 12-man shop in Wooster, Ohio. “As we grew, we tried to do the production meeting once a day or once a week.”

They don’t have one anymore.

It simply didn’t jibe with the company’s approach to fabricating. The shop, with its TRUMPF TruLaser 5030 5-kW fiber laser cutting machine with automated material loading and unloading and its TruBend Cell 7000 robotic press brake, operates with low overhead in mind. Because of this, employees share front-office and shop floor responsibilities.

“Everything is directed to getting product out the door,” Zuercher said.

Metal Dynamics pulls a lot of work off blanket schedules from customers. In other cases, it can access customers’ web-based portals to see what parts are needed and create a production schedule for that.

Typical purchase orders are processed, and travelers created for the shop floor. They are placed in bins next to the machine tool.

A whiteboard gives the shop floor employees an idea of just what is taking place in production, but most workers are consumed with what is stacked in the nearby bin. The shop is small enough that when a hot job comes through, one person can keep tabs on it until it is completed.

“Actually, we have found that having a meeting at 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. was a real inconvenience. We are already running then,” said Scott Plance, Metal Dynamics’ president. “Having a meeting would really interrupt everyone’s day.

“It’s just as easy to talk to someone,” he added.

Zuercher said that the closest thing that the company has is a face-to-face meeting that he and the plant manager might have with the smaller group that works the second shift. Even then, it’s a quick discussion, maybe five minutes, about what needs to be accomplished during the shift and how to set up for the third, unmanned shift.

Plance said the desire to be flexible enough to get a job out the same day if necessary is helped with fabricating technology that can accommodate dramatic shifts in production. For example, the fiber laser cuts so fast that it creates extra capacity; interrupting production to fit in a new job is not a big deal. Also, the robotic press brake changes tooling automatically, which helps moving from one job to a new one much easier than relying on manual setup of a brake.

People, however, really make Metal Dynamics responsive to customer demands, according to Plance. He has worked hard to build a company with like-minded individuals who don’t require meetings to lay out directions.

“I never wanted to hire anyone that I had to think for. I would rather have 10 guys that were self-starters. They all motivate each other.

“Everyone is working late. The office is part of the shop,” Plance said. “This is not us versus them. It’s a real team.”

That’s probably the ultimate goal for any metal fabricator—having a team of entrepreneurs on the floor who are always looking to make the right decision for the business. Production meetings can be a tool in creating that culture, but some metal fabricators are lucky enough not to need very many of them.

About the Author
The Fabricator

Dan Davis

Editor-in-Chief

2135 Point Blvd.

Elgin, IL 60123

815-227-8281

Dan Davis is editor-in-chief of The Fabricator, the industry's most widely circulated metal fabricating magazine, and its sister publications, The Tube & Pipe Journal and The Welder. He has been with the publications since April 2002.