consultingwoodworker.com Blog

My wishes to all who read this for a happy and prosperous New Year!

All sorts of management experts and gurus have written extensively about people versus process. They will tell you that it is imperative to develop processes to control every aspect of your business. And Lean Manufacturing certainly leans VERY heavily on process over people, so you might have guessed that I support that view too.
But most small businesses were built by a person, or small group of people, who had better ideas on how their business might be done. Where would we be today if Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or Dean Kamen had been stuck with process?
My opinion actually falls midway between these extremes. Processes need to be in place to smooth transitions between employees as they move up of out of your company. But it is incumbent on your people to improve the processes that they control while in a particular job or position.
Too many of my clients have key employees who are the only ones in the company that know all the foibles of the molder, which vendors to go to for the best terms, or where all the job files are on the server. Even should these employees be happy and loyal, what happens to your company if they were to be hit by a bus on the way home this week? The “Bus Principle”, as I call it, means that you need to rethink the people versus process debate.
It is vital, for the ongoing health of your company, to be able to transition people in and out of positions in your business with the least interruption and delay. Highly skilled and valuable employees often get stuck in a particular position when they want to advance, because you feel they cannot be spared from what they do because they know too much to be spared or trained elsewhere. This employee is likely to eventually leave. Having good in-house processes makes it less risky for you to allow your people to transition.
But process tends to be stagnant and limiting. “We’ve always done it this way” is the death of innovation and growth. So the processes you establish to smooth your transitions MUST remain flexible and fluid while an employee occupies a position. You need to encourage your employees to be constantly improving and innovating the processes that guide their job. They need to take over a new position under the guidance of the exisisting process, improve and innovate, make it their own, then record the improved process regularly to guide the next person who will do their job.
This balance between people and process, if nurtured and encouraged, will help keep your business efficient and competitive, while insuring that loos or transition of employees will not set you back more than absolutely necessary.
As always, I invite you to comment here or by e-mail on this or any of my posts. rbagnall@consultingwoodworker.com
I can be reached through Linkedin as well: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ralphbagnall

Back when I used to sell woodworking equipment, I worked with customers to cost justify the machinery they were considering. The baseline was to ask how much it currently cost them to make a unit, or a particular part. What stunned me was how very few business owners could even guess at the cost, let alone give an actual figure. But cost justification of new equipment is only one reason to track your costs.
If you don’t very accurately know how much your products cost you to manufacture, you don’t really know if you are even making money on the job. If your costing assumptions are off, your bid on the next job might cost you plenty rather than making you money. You’ll have no idea which areas of your shop to look to improving, since you don’t know which operations are profit centers and which are money pits.
Tracking your time and cost gives you control over your business. If you know how much a cabinet costs to assemble, you’ll know which of your team are productive and which might need extra motivation. When an employee comes to you with a “money saving” idea, you’ll be able to properly evaluate it and make a decision to implement or not. Information is power, and this is the most basic information your company has. The good news is that the Lean techniques we have been implementing can help you gain control of this information.
To begin with, you have cleaned, organized and standardized your work stations. You have organized your hardware and fasteners and such, and may or may not have begun working in a unit flow. In either case, you can now begin to accurately figure out the time it should take to gather materials, fetch fasteners, drawer slides and such, as well as what all those items are costing you per job.
As you can see, breaking the entire process down allows for more accurate cost studies. Keeping track of these items from job to job leaves a paper trail that can be applied to future estimating, giving you an edge over your competition. You’ll know how to trim your estimate to the edge of your profit margin. You will also know which jobs to walk away from if the profit is not there.
The next part of this tracking is to begin recording the time spent in the initial milling of the parts, in edging and end boring, in assembly and in finishing. Each cellular step of the process should be tracked and quantified. This again makes bidding more accurate, and allows for more efficient application of resources. If you find that assembly takes twice as long as milling, then you obviously need to insure that there are two assemblers for each mill person. You will now know with more certainty how the shop time breaks down by procedure, which will give you much better insight into where to most effectively apply your capital budget. So, as you gain cost control over your materials and hardware, begin to create a time study history and use that information to best guide your business.
Next post, I’m going to discuss the debate between people and process, and why I am convinced that both is the proper answer.
As always, I invite you to comment here or by e-mail on this or any of my posts. I can be reached through Linkedin as well: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ralphbagnall

Cellular manufacturing is the primary model for Lean Manufacturing. The idea is to build an entire unit in a single process rather than making piles of parts and then assembling them into finished units. For a custom cabinet shop, this means building each individual cabinet as a complete unit from start to finish rather than cutting all the parts, then edgebanding all the parts, then drilling all the parts, etc. I touched on this before in earlier blog posts. Now that we have cleaned and organized the shop, and have gotten control back of our parts and materials, it is time to work out the details of One Unit Flow.
Recently, in working with a client building a fairly small job, I took the time to record how the parts were handled. The job was a small kitchen, and three small vanity bath units, a total of 50 cabinets. Interiors were prefinished maple, with beech exposed edges, and one of the vanities was paintgrade.
The parts were all precut on the CNC as a batch, and stacked on racks and carts as they came off the machine. In order to edgeband, they needed to be sorted out. Adjustable shelves get maple edgeband, cabinets get beech edgband, and the paint grade cabinets get unfinished maple. Then all the parts need to get resorted into individual cabinets for assembly. By my count, from CNC to assembly, this pile of parts was stacked, sorted and restacked four times.
Now let’s look at working this job in a cellular operation: The CNC nest is outputted to cut parts for individual cabinets as a group. Each set of parts is moved to the edgebander, where appropriate banding is applied. (the adjustable shelves could be milled and processed as a group since they are, in this shop, stacked and shipped to the jobsite separately) The stack of parts equaling one complete cabinet is taken from the edgebander directly to an assembly bench where it is assembled.
At this point, we can begin applying another Lean Manufacturing technique, that of Cycle Timing. The time needed to machine the part set, and edgeband them, and or dowel them, should be recorded and tracked. The time needed for assembly can be recorded as well. These times are compared to determine the distribution of human resources. If it takes a total of 10 minutes to process the parts for assembly, and takes 20 minutes to add slides, hinges and assemble, then we know that you’ll need two assembly tables working to match the flow from the CNC and edgebander.
Working this way, you can begin getting very accurate times for processing your cabinets. This means that you can now determine how much it actually costs you. You got control of your materials, so you know what is going in there, and now you know exactly how much each cabinet is using in manpower and shop time.
There are several other advantages to One Unit Flow. Since the parts get handled fewer times, there is far less chance of scratching and other surface damage. Floorspace is maximized since there are not parts stacked all over as they are sorted and processed. If your machining is not correct for some reason, you will know it right away, rather than finding out after all the parts have been cut. You will be able, once you are familiar with the process, to establish ahead of time very accurate estimates of shop time, allowing for much more accurate proposals, and reducing the opportunity of costly estimating mistakes.
The time issues bring me to the subject of my next blog posting, understanding what your jobs actually cost you to make.
Please feel free to post a comment to these blogs, or contact me if you want more information, and feel free to click on the RSS button in the bottom right corner of this page to keep up with my future postings.
rbagnall@consultingwoodworker.com

Assuming that you have worked your way through the shop cleaning and organizing the workstations, you can begin looking to the next stage, which is stock and outsourced parts.
How often do you find your jobs being held up because you don’t have the drawer slides you need? How much money have you spent on overnight or express shipping because you don’t have the proper hinges on hand when you need them? And are your outsourced doors and drawer fronts arriving too late, or so early that you are tripping over them while you build boxes? Do you order more screws only to find an unopened or half full box the day after they arrive? It is time to seriously begin to get your ordering and stocking under control.
A big part of the entire Lean mentality is Just In Time production. Now as a cabinet shop, you don’t always have that much control over your vendors and suppliers, but you probably have a lot more than you currently exercise, and there is a lot of money that can be saved by taking that control.
The very first step is to get your on site hardware situation in hand. Are your hinges, hinge plates, drawer slides and the like organized, easy to find and accounted for? Do you know offhand how many 110 degree Eurohinges you have? If your assembler needs to get two special hinges for the corner cabinet he is building, can he go put his hands on them in a few seconds, or is a big hunt going to ensue?
A well organized and marked hardware station can dramatically reduce the time needed to assemble cabinets and get them to the loading dock. If your assembler wastes even 30 seconds per cabinet finding hardware, that’s 15 minutes per assembler for a simple 30 cabinet kitchen. And that’s assuming that everything he needs is on hand. If not, how much time will he waste looking before he decides that there are none, then goes to ask someone else? You’ve all seen this over and over.
With your hardware organized and accessible, it becomes much easier to track what is on hand and what needs to be ordered at the beginning of a job. And this idea brings us to the next stage of getting Lean, ordering hardware and outsourced parts in a timely manner.
Often, when working up a proposal, cabinet makers will work by lineal footage of countertops, or some other “packaged” method of costing. The drawback to this method is that you must not forget to go back and count the slides needed and order them ahead of time. You also need to delve into the cabinets and account for slides for any pullouts and such.
I typically recommend my clients keep an inventory of commonly used hardware, and order each job as a deposit is received. This helps keep the inventory under some control and makes job costing more accurate. You should be doing this with screws, dowels and other common fasteners too. You know how many cabinets are being built in a job, and roughly how many screws each cabinet uses. A simple spreadsheet can alert you to when you need to order more and again, let you track actual costs.
As you can see, we are working our way through your entire operation and tightening up your command and control of each aspect. Next installment, we will begin looking at the advantages to building cabinets in a single unit process, and how it helps in job costing.