consultingwoodworker.com Blog

I was going to write some more on using Social Media to connect with clients, but have decided to put it off a bit in order to share with you a unique experience I am having this week:

I write this from Kingston, Jamaica. I am down here working with Jamaica Fibreglass Products, my first and still favorite clients. This time, I am staying at a beautiful new facility in New Kingston. What makes this all notable is that I helped JFP create this room 18 months ago.

Back then, I was down here helping JFP figure out how to improve their CNC output and streamline much of their assembly. We began working toward a single unit production schedule, looking at new tooling and processes, and implementing the Lean Manufacturing techniques that I have been discussing in this blog of late.

The owners at JFP were also preparing for a meeting with clients about providing furniture for an upcoming hotel opening. While JFP is highly experienced at restaurant style seating, this was a pretty big departure from their normal business. Also, the client really wanted solid wood, and JFP is not really set up for large scale production in solids.

That is when the owners of JFP really started to impress me. They knew that getting the hotel project was a long shot. They could not offer the solid wood, and had no prior hotel work to show. They took a bold step and began prototyping the hotel room in full scale. When I arrived, they already had several pieces pretty well done, and were walling off a section of their lobby to replicate the room dimensions. I was able to contribute to the project by showing them how to use their CNC to miterfold the furniture parts, and adapting some of the designs to maximize the benefits of miter folding.

The clients, where ushered into the hotel room they had envisioned, sat on the bed, tried out the chairs, and really got the feel of the room. JFP did not have to convince the buyers that miterfolded furniture would look like solid wood, the clients could not ignore the parts they were touching.

Eighteen months later, I sit in the hotel and type this blog. I hope that you take the proper lessons from this unique company:

They decided to get the sale first, then figure out how to build the job. They could take this risk because they have structured their entire business to remain flexible. They know they can find a way, either in house or outside. That’s the second lesson:

JFP certainly does not suffer from “Not Invented Here” syndrome. They are willing to pay for outside expertise, and quick to respond to the fresh ideas presented to them.

And the last lesson is that they were ready to run with their plan. Completely on spec, they designed the furniture and began prototyping it. Since I was already there, they enlisted my help in detailing the construction to best utilize their capabilities. The client was presented with the exact design JFP was prepared to build. By the time the clients had finished moving the pieces around in the “room”, the deal was pretty well set, and here I sit.

This incident was not a fluke. JFP has gotten several large jobs since I have been working with them in the same manner. Does your company have the corporate mindset and will to go for the brass ring this way?

Isn’t it time?

JFP: www.jfpmfg.com
See the room here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/furnituremaker/sets/72157615520823654/

Ralph Bagnall
www.consultingwoodworker.com
On Linkedin
Follow me on Twitter as Consultingwood

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been involved in a couple of discussions about foreign imports and getting customers to “Buy American”. Some folks believe that it is time to raise trade barriers or otherwise limit imports, but look where that idea has gotten GM. Decades of protection and insulation enabled the Big Three to defer innovation and avoid maximizing efficiency to the point that they have struggled for several years to regain market leadership, and are being pummeled by the current economy.

What the woodworking industry needs to do is begin educating their customers. What YOU want to do is to teach your customers to look beyond just the price tag and recognize the value of your products. They want to buy American. They want to buy locally. You need to show them why it is a better value to buy from you.

Your first informational contact with your customers is likely to be your website. They may look at site after site with beautiful photos of other people’s kitchens. Some will gain inspiration and ideas from that, but you need to offer more. A quick Yahoo search for “Kitchen Cabinets” resulted in nearly Ninety one MILLION hits. Even if a couple visits a few dozen pages of sites, can your site will make them remember it and return? This is not a tutorial of improving your search placement, many folks are better qualified than I to teach you that. No, what I’m getting at is giving your customer something for visiting your site.

They are searching the web to find ideas, figure out options, decide on hardware and features. There is some really innovative and cool stuff out there. You know about it. They don’t have a clue. So educate them. Do you offer undermount self closing slides? A fifteen second video clip on your website can show your customers how they work. You can add a similar clip showing a blind corner trolley unit being pulled out. With an inexpensive digital video camera and editing software you can quickly add informative clips to your site.

You website should feature links to materials providers, hardware companies, design websites, along with books and videos on kitchen design. These will provide your customers with much useful information. Set up affiliate links with Amazon and some of the other websites, and you might even make enough to pay for your site. Remember that lots of free information on your site will drive repeat traffic, create buzz and get you some attention.

Your site needs to be more than just nice photographs. You need to explain why the materials you use are superior, how your construction lasts longer, why your design skills are more innovative, whatever makes you the better VALUE than other options.
Next post, I’ll discuss some intriguing (and cheap) ideas for getting attention for your business.

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

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.

Time, in this posting, to begin closing the loop I began with the “What is Lean” posting. Over the next several postings, I intend to help you sort through Lean Manufacturing Techniques, and how they can apply to your business.
Lean Manufacturing seems on the surface like another business fad that gets lots of press and bluster, but realistically does nothing useful. (Can you say, “ISO 9000”?) But if you can cut through the jargon and dig out the good ideas, getting Lean can help you substantially.
I will NOT be trying to teach you terms like Kanban, and Six Sigma. The last thing you need is to try and learn a new language. I WILL try and help you find the gems contained within the jargon and use them to improve your business.
One last point before I begin: I’m very sure that there will be some folks who will condem the idea that you can take only what you want from Lean Manufacturing. Those deeply involved in the process are used to working with larger manufacturers making lots of very similar items. As a custom cabinet shop, each cabinet is an individual unit, and no two cabinets, let alone two kitchens are quite the same. You simply cannot impose a rigid control system on top of such a flexible manufacturing model. So we will go on, and decide what we want to take, and what we want to leave behind.
The first task in Lean Manufacturing is to realistically clean up each work area, sort through the tools and equipment used at that station, and organize the area and storage. Think for a few minutes how much time is lost each day trying to find tools, hardware, and parts. Work stations need to be clean and organized, and basic, regularly used tools must be close at hand to keep production moving along.
You need to extend this organization to the machines too. Each machine area is a workstation too. Any tools, lubricants or whatever needed to adjust, maintain or otherwise use the equipment must be close at hand. Take a look at your edgebander. Are the tools needed to tune and adjust it nearby? Do you have rolls of tape stacked and unraveling all over getting dirty and damaged? Are there convenient racks to hold the solid wood strips and the different glues? We have already discussed how much proper maintenance and tuning can improve your business. The tools necessary to quickly and efficiently keep the machine tuned and maintained must be close at hand and organized or operators will tend to skip or shortchange the schedule.
All this cleaning and organizing can be a VERY daunting challenge when you look out over the entire shop floor, but it really must be done. Start with one station at a time, and work your way through the shop place by place. Work with an incentive plan to keep the plan going. Each week, you can reward the crew from the cleanest station, or most improved or whatever. A public presentation of $10.00 per person, or a gift card or whatever, can reinforce the lessons. And as workers find how nice it is to work in a clean environment, with well tuned equipment, they should keep up the stations voluntarily, as well as pressure the slobs (like me!) to do their part.
In closing, I will ask a favor of you, my readers. I know how many folks are reading this on any given day, but I do not know if my readers are totally random, or if some are coming back to see where this blog is going next. Please feel free to comment on these postings, good or bad. Let me know if you are using the RSS feed, and I would be very grateful if you would drop me a quick line and let me know that you have come by and what you think. I promise not to use your e-mail address in any way unless you want me to let you know when new postings are made. I can be reached at: rbagnall@consultingwoodworker.com

As the economy tightens, and businesses look to cut costs, maintenance is often one of the early casualties. As with layoffs, I am convinced that this is a huge mistake. Maintenance for most of us is one of those nagging things like dental appointments. We know we should be doing it, but always seem too busy to properly keep up with it.
The truth of the matter is that maintenance is a really good return on investment. A small amount of scheduled time, and your production keeps running. A few tools and a bit of lubrication and you avoid replacing expensive parts. A few hours of scheduled downtime a year, and you can prevent thousands of dollars in service calls.
The damage caused by unscheduled repairs goes way beyond the cost of parts and technicians. It can be very difficult to truly calculate what is lost when your production is interrupted by breakdowns. There are the clearly visible costs discussed above, but the damage goes deeper. At best, you’ll need to pay out overtime to catch up to the schedule. At worst, you miss deadlines, and possibly lose customers. Lost customers are a blow at any time, but during a slow economy, it is a business killer.
Knowing that a proper maintenance protocol can save money, it is not hard to see how it can be a source of increased profit. While reviewing a client’s operation, I noted that 4 people were tasked to cleaning up edgebanded parts. I spent a few hours with their edgebander operators, showing them how to measure the stock and set the glue line properly, lube and adjust the trimmers, and keep the cutting tools clean. Without having to upgrade their old bander, one person is now tasked to checking and cleaning the parts as they come off the bander, opening up three others for assembling the cabinets.
Good maintenance also pays dividends in quality. A table saw that is clean and aligned accurately cuts cleanly, leaving crisp edges and fewer tool marks. And tools that work properly are safer for your workers, reducing lost time accidents, OSHA fines and lawsuits.
So how do you begin squeezing the advantages from maintenance? Every tool in your shop has, in it’s manual, a maintenance schedule. Compile that data for all your equipment. There will typically be daily, monthly, quarterly, and yearly intervals. Sorting through this information, you should be able to set up a schedule.
Maintenance needs to become part of your company’s culture, and that can only come down from the top. Workers need to know that you expect them to do their maintenance chores and do them right. That any time they find problems like loose bolts, they must take the time to get the proper tool and fix it, or find the person who can. Ultimately, they need to know that their job is not at risk for taking proper care of their machines, but at risk if they don’t.
So begin gathering your data, create a schedule, and devote specified time to keeping your equipment running safely, accurately and predictably. You will find that although counter-intuitive, you will likely realize savings rather than expenses.

Please feel free to comment here or by email. I’m presenting these ideas in the hopes of spurring discussion.
Email: rbagnall@consultingwoodworker.com
Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ralphbagnall

Economic Darwinism

The current market needs be looked on as Economic Darwinism. Those companies that are toughest and leanest are most likely to emerge from the other side, and emerge as the leaders of their market.

The economy and its effect on the future seems to be what everyone is talking about, so I’ll offer my thoughts on surviving the downturn since they dovetail nicely with the ideas I have been exploring in this blog lately. The Lean Manufacturing techniques that I’ve been introducing to my clients, which we began before this crisis, are well suited to carry them through. For the next few weeks, I’ll be exploring some of the typical responses to slowing business and how I think they should be adapted.

One of the first areas that some companies look to for cuts is in payroll. While this may be necessary, I advise saving it for much later. Laying off staff at the outset generates a lot of hard feelings on your shop floor, with the very people you’ll need to help squeeze the fat out. When working with clients, I very strongly advise them to establish better communications with their team. I begin this process during my initial visit, spending time with the employees. I remember being a worker on the shop floor, and seeing consultants come through the shop, dictating changes without understanding what we did or how we did it. I learned that if the people on your shop floor do not buy into your plans, they can easily and effectively scuttle them, and you might never understand why good plans have not had the expected results.

The man or woman standing at a bench or machine, working with it day in and day out, if they have any brains at all, can give you valuable insight into what works, what doesn’t and how to improve the overall process. In short, you have an entire team of consultants on staff already if you only take the opportunity to access the knowledge.

These folks are also likely to be nervous right now. They watch the news, see the dire predictions and wonder daily when and if they will be able to continue to provide for their families. Even if the news you have to share is bad, keeping them in the loop can’t really hurt you. If your company is struggling, they can help. Ask them to come to you with their ideas on cutting waste. Encourage them to let you know when things might be made more efficient. I’m not talking about trying to scare them into submision, I’m telling you that they will respond to your trust and honesty. It is in BOTH your interests to keep the shop alive through the downturn. They know that getting another job won’t be easy and will want to keep theirs.

One employee at a client suggested shifting the plant to a four day work week. By working four ten hour days, it would keep the production schedule full, allow for overtime without losing the weekend, and reduce absenteeism since chores like doctor’s visits and car registrations could be scheduled for the off day.

The system is working out very well for the client. The employees love having regular 3 day weekends, and are more willing to work overtime if needed. The company has realized several opportunities for more efficiency, and the crew is impressed and energized by seeing that management is listening to them. This encourages others to come forward with their ideas. This is just one example of how the people on the shop floor were able to contribute to their own and the company’s success.
Darwin told us that those who adapt the best to a changing environment will survive and even thrive in nature. Business economics is no less brutal, and you need to be looking for adaptive strategies. But you don’t need to be doing it alone. Enlist your team, from top to bottom. Be honest with them. Cuts may yet be needed, but they have worked with you to fend off those cuts as long as possible.

Please feel free to comment here or by email. I’m presenting these ideas in the hopes of spurring discussion.

Email: rbagnall@consultingwoodworker.com

Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ralphbagnall

In my last posting, I introduced my belief that Lean Manufacturing in the custom cabinet shop is tied to material handling. This time I’ll look at some examples to demonstrate what I mean.
In “traditional” cabinet making, sides are cut into rectangles, then carried to the next stations. These parts are drilled horizontally, then carried to a saw for notching out the toe kicks. Next they are picked up again and carried to boring machine, edgebanders and so on. With each step, the parts are lifted off a stack, processed through the step, then restacked.
Machines have helped reduce the time needed to cut, drill and band these parts, but the handling time is still there, and in all but the most sophisticated shops, it hasn’t changed much.
Nested based manufacturing represents the first step in reducing this handling time. Now, a single operator can perform many of these functions at one station. The handling time for the steps represented is now included in one. That one step does take somewhat longer, but the machine does the work, and the operator can be performing secondary operations. Also, instead of needing to reset various machines for each different cabinet, Nested based manufacturing means that every cabinet in a project can have different milling by simply calling up the right program. More time saved.
Most automated shops have about stopped at this point, and profit can be had here, but I’m going to look at taking this idea one step further along.
Given that modern software, coupled with modern machines can efficiently produce a single cabinet at a time, why not structure the entire shop to efficiently produce a single cabinet at a time? Before you scoff, think carefully about what I propose.
The nest is formatted to group all the parts of a cabinet together. They are cut, dadoed, bored, etc. as a group. The group is stacked on a tray and sent along a roller conveyor to the next station. There they are edge bored and banded if you dowel, or straight to the edgebander if you use screws.
Once milled bored and banded, they move along to assembly. Hinge plates and drawer slides are added and the box is built.
And consider further that since all the parts travel as a group, there is much less need for trying to label all the parts and search around looking for the ones needed. No more printing hundreds of labels that get torn and fall off. And the reduced stacking and unstacking helps keep surface damage down, whether or not you use prefinished materials.
A single shop drawing can have the CNC program name on it, or better yet, a barcode for the machine to read. This sheet travels with the parts to instruct the various stations and identify the cabinet.
This is something of a radical idea, but give it some thought this week. In my next blog, I will discuss my proposal for throwing out tape measures in the assembly area.