Thanks guys, definitely some great points and suggestions to begin the process of getting this sorted out. There I definitely some worker ethic issues to work on as there tends to be a lot of time spent at the bench discussing the approach or reviewing the shop dwg's. This seems to be a challenge of some of our guys, in that they have difficulty visualizing the end product. I also know there is a bit of communication problem between the shop foreman and the bench workers and some of the finer details are being left out on the tasks required. I am already working on improving this.

Right now our work flow is a follows for cabinet boxes / sheet goods: shop dwg's and Cnc fabrication dwg's produced by our tech and given to our Cnc operator who cuts the job batch(Es), as each sheet is cut and the offloaded pushes the parts off onto the table they are all tagged and stacked on carts for edge banding. They are put through the edge bander and again put on carts and taken to the benches for fabrication (sometimes the Cnc operator edge bands but most times it is the guy taking the job for fabrication). Boxes are assembled (mortise/tenon, screwed). If MCP boxes and doors the doors are also cut on the Cnc and taken to the Blum machine for drilling and mounting hinges. If laminates we apply laminates to one side of MCP sheets before Cnc fir the appropriate parts and then apply the additional laminate faces on doors as example during assembly.

Currently it takes better than an hour and a half to edge a box, assemble, drill and hang doors and Friday I timed a guy drilling doors and it takes 2-1/2 mins per door from the time it is picked off the cart to the time the hinged door is stacked on another cart. So the time is in the edge banding and assembly.

We had issues where guys would tinker with the edge bander setting and it would leave and edge that had to be filed, I nipped this quickly and no man other than the designated guy who maintains the edge bander is permitted to make any adjustments, eliminating the time spent on filing edges.

I have had the coffee and donut discussions asking what the bottlenecks are but there is always pushback indicating not enough time is given, yet we know what our pricing has to be for the local market and we all buy the same materials and we have competing wages so the difference is in the productivity/efficiency.

Next week I am posting a productivity board in the lunchroom listing all the individual jobs, the allotted hours, and each week I will post the hours spent.

The straw that broke the camels back so to speak is a job that is just cling up where we had to clad the stringers and posts of a steel pan stair with wood (primed only, painted on site by others), treads and risers were not included. Fabricate a cap rail (stained/ pre-finished) to cover the steel flat bar between posts with a fillet underneath, and handrail both sides. It is a two flight stair turning 90 degrees with one intermediate landing. I started with two guys and had to put two more on it to meet our deadlines. They approached 700 man hours to clad an existing stair. Not too long ago I outsourced a so,I'd mahogany stair with two intermediate landings, which required stringers, treads, and risers c/w turned balusters and bastrades, easing so, etc. And the cost of that stair, all materials, supplied and install was just over the labour cost of this most recent stair, suffice to say there was no profit retained on this one!

I have a lot of soul searching and fixing to be done and will be back looking for some feedback I am sure. I find this to be a wonderful forum for hearing about similar experiences and suggestions/critics of process.

Thanks!

I'm not convinced you have the production equipment to meet your time expectations. I would do some private time studies rather than a public productivity board. If you don't have morale problems now, you probably will after that. No one likes public shaming.

Most of the responses have to do with LEAN in the operation. Look at some books & videos concerning LEAN production as they will help give clues to how to look for waste.

I was in the same boat as you that I just knew it was taking too long to move product out. Couldn't get people to move quick enough to be profitable. Then I discovered LEAN being talked about on this forum. What an eye opening ride it was. Changed a lot of the processes and took advantage of some of the government programs that were promoting manufacturing in our state. All of this helped me to see the little things that were blocking my path. Then we lowered the batch size and more rocks appeared. Figured out how to reduce them to a manageable size. Then we lowered the run size still further. Now we run into problems but we have been learning how to solve them together.

At our morning meeting everyday, one of our topics is discovering what slowed someone down yesterday. Then as a group we discuss potential solutions. Then we try them out to see if they work, if they don't we try something else or modify what we did. It is an ongoing process that will never stop. Our meeting last about 10 - 20 minutes. If it is going longer than that, it continues till the next day. Also at our meeting the daily goal for the shop is discussed as well as individual goals and how they fulfill the shop goal.

One of the things I would look at right off the top of my head, is how the material is being stacked on the cart. Is it just piled on top of each other or is it being organized by cabinet? If organized by cabinet, are they stacked horizontally on top of each other or could it me stood on edge vertically grouped together? Might have to modify the carts but it might be easier for someone to find all of the parts for the particular cabinet.

Concerning the stair tread issue. Did everyone working on the project know the goal of time allotted? Is there a possibility that the job was underbid?

Sorry for the length but lots of questions come to mind about this topic.

I may adopt the following steps.

Identify major operations involved in each job / project.
Find meaningful estimates of operation durations and resource requirements of operations
Generate a meaningful schedule of workload without overloading resources
Compare the actual progress on shop floor with the scheduled progress on a regular basis like once or twice a day.
If actual progress falls behind, investigate and find the causes of deviation and mitigate those causes which could be due to issues related to machines, workers, material, rework/rejection, etc.
Identify bottlenecks in production and add capacity appropriately to improve overall shop productivity.

A good production schedule should give you a target and lead your shop towards the target.

Go spend a day in the shop just watching. That will tell you a lot. I Also have security cameras in hat I review every now and then. That idle conversation between 2 employees can kill productivity. Put a screw in look up and talk for a second put another screw in repeat can take hours of productivity away.
The actual value added time is normally very small compared to the waste in the process. Drilling doors and installing them has 3 values added point, when the hinge bit is touching the wood, when the hinge is placed in door and when door is snapped on the cabinet. Everything else is non value added motion. Look at all of that stuff first.

Again folks, thanks for the feedback. we had a coffee and donut meeting this a.m. and there were some good points thrown out. I took the approach of team effort and not looking to point fingers but to solve problems, out of that came discussions of productivity and time wasted, every man admitted to probably discussing too much at the bench, but then there were also good points to optimize workflow. we will start implanting the easy ones first and build on the rest. I'll keep you posted in a months time to see where we are.

Bash,
Lot of things I see in your post, but some things to consider:
What are your guys discussing at the bench? Are they questions that should be answered already on the drawings? You are running cnc so I presume you have a capable cad program that can accurately show things in 2-d & 3-d with notes as needed for any clarification? If there are questions on the shop floor then IMO there are things that did not get done right in the design & engineering offices.

What is your cnc operator doing while the machine is cutting? Our CNC and EB are closely linked, and one operator does both machines and then parts get sorted onto carts by cabinet for the assembly area... If your cnc operator is needed at the machine to baby-sit it while running, time for a better machine or better procedures or programming perhaps?

You have been given a ton of good thoughts on this thread, but realize most constraints, at the core are policy constraints. Whether written, or implied. Ie, in a small shop it is usually the owner (me, you) that is the constraint and is creating (or allowing) the problem(s). The good news in that is, it is in our power to correct them!

Best to you!