Dazzle the Competition With Your Speed
Cut Lead Times to Drive Profitability
By Brad Kuvin, Editor
Welding Design and Fabrication Magazine

A potential customer calls to invite your shop to bid on a project. If you or someone else in your shop has ever responded with an "I’ll get back to you…" you’ve opened the door for a competitor to sneak past. Metal-fabricating job shops can win or lose orders based on their first response to an inquiry. Shops that have implemented plans to compress lead time and that can quickly promise product delivery in response to an inquiry, are the ones that will grow and prosper.

The goal of lead-time reduction is one that I am sure every job shop manager grasps for every day. A new book addresses this subject very clearly, I think. It’s called Speed to Market-- How To Cut Lead Time and Increase Profits in Job Shops and Custom Manufacturing Environments. Author Vincent Bozzone, President of a training and consulting group, offers readers a step-by-step approach to analyze their shop operations in order to compress lead times. I recommend the book to any owner and manager of a job shop or custom manufacturing business. Allow me to share with you some of Bozzone’s thoughts.

Increasing your speed to market starts by being the first firm to get your bid in front of the buyer. A common cause of delayed bids is issuance of incomplete bid proposals, often caused by poor communication with the customer. Therefore, "your estimators should have well-developed working relationships with technical people in your customers’ organizations," Bozzone writes. The idea is to make it easy to work with your firm. "Many companies have a policy limiting who can communicate directly with customers," Bozzone continues. "If yours is one of these companies, you might do well to revisit the logic."

In striving to reduce lead time, too many companies focus solely on manufacturing. Bozzone astutely points out that a big source of delays comes from orders that arrive to the shop late, contain inaccuracies, or lack critical information. He calls the exercise of moving a wining bid to the shop floor "pre-production procedures." They include order entry, production planning and scheduling, engineering, and purchasing. Some key points regarding pre-production:

• When customers require bidders to provide an accurate delivery date as part of a quote, shops should coordinate pre-production functions during estimating.

• Don’t allow orders to stack up for batch processing. "At the very least," writes Bozzone, "check and enter new orders on the day they are received."

• Don’t route an order to the floor until tooling and materials are available.

• Measure on-time performance from pre-production as you would on-time delivery to customers. "In effect," stresses Bozzone, "delays in pre-production eat up shop time."

In Chapter 5 of the book, titled Closing the Loop, Bozzone offers advice to help shops avoid repeating the same problematic procedures time after time, so that they can make incremental reductions in lead time. The key is to collect the right data on each job processed by the shop, then analyze the data to find opportunities for improvement. For example, by redesigning the shop router, a manager can collect volumes of data about each part and assembly produced. Bozzone gives a sample of a redesigned router that should "communicate expectations to operators such as productivity rates and expected times to complete each operation."

In summary, this book is long on theory—practical and useful—and it contains concrete examples of ideas that will drive process improvements. A handy 6-by-9 inch paperback, it consumes only 136 pages and can be read and highlighted in about an hour. Price $44.95. For a copy, call 248-333-0482, fax 248-333-1916, e-mail ddilink@aol.com.                      Welding Design & Fabrication September 1998

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