By Chad Waldo
The story is almost a cliché these days; the customer needs parts yesterday and you have a week’s worth of production left.
It was a typical Monday morning when we got the call from the Norfolk Naval shipyard. There was a container ship leaving 10 days from Monday, and our parts needed to be on that ship. Production was still in process and would be finished Thursday afternoon. With that in mind, we told the procurement officer that there shouldn’t be a problem and hung up the phone. But upon checking the parts list for that order, we quickly discovered that there were two parts which required heat treating.
It wasn’t until we called our outside heat treating service company that we realized we had a big problem. Their current backlog was one week. There was no way to make the boat unless the parts were completed and out by Tuesday. We were at least two days short of time.
One constant truth about manufacturing I have found is that you always have options. Ours were to either ship the parts late and lose the contract, speed up the manufacturing process or heat treat the parts in house. With a limited window of only a few hours to make this decision, we dissected the choices, one at a time. Option one was out of the question; we simply could not afford to lose the contract. We quickly discovered that speeding up manufacturing wasn’t possible without shutting down several other jobs that were just as hot. In the end, the only option that made sense was heat treating the components in-house quickly.
We already had some of the equipment in place to make heat treating feasible, but we had no idea if it would work right. For our socket production line, we had installed a furnace next one of our punch presses. This setup was used to heat blanks up to 1800 degrees Fahrenheit. There was a large hood over the furnace to pull out heat and gas. We had access to several air lines, and one gas line could be tapped into if needed. With that layout in mind, we had the rest of the afternoon to figure out the best method to finish the parts in-house.
I really enjoyed the article and thank you for posting it but who wouldn’t agree that heat treating is a trade all it’s own and should be left to professionals. I’m always offended when people think they can ‘steal a trade’ like this and produce consistent, acceptable results in a short time.
While I applaud their willingness to try and how the article tells that they stayed right with it through their failures, it still doesn’t make it the right thing to do for their customer. It doesn’t even sound like anyone there that was involved had much of a clue how the whole process is done.
Their attempt to get into in house heat treating should have been started way ahead of time on samples that were not customers parts. Much study and guidance before the first part entered the furnace, let alone the quench tank or draw oven.
Heat treatment is science combined with years of hard earned empirical knowledge of the trade and the equipment you are using. You can’t steal that and become a heat treater in a week.
Gald they met their deadline… wouldn’t want their parts!