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Component Manufacturing dverti$er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
Adverti$er
March 2020 #12248 Page #28
Knowing the Ideal Manufacturing Cycle Time Ben Hershey 4Ward Consulting Group, LLC
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uilding components is really great! It was a lot of fun in the 1970s when several plants had competitions on who could build the fastest run of trusses (for example, see Joe Kannapell’s article, Vertical Presses—The World Record). Back then, it was really easy to calculate cycle time, because we had very similar trusses and very long runs. Enter the 1990s and, WOW, did that change fast, as we quickly began building more and more complicated roof and floor systems. Today, our team hears a common theme from manufacturers: how do I know what the ideal cycle time is when I have 125 different sample components or processes with varying times ranging from 20 seconds to 20 minutes. Think on that for a moment. Often within the 4Ward team, we will have a spirited debate about the capacity or expected cycle times of a given operation. Because all 8 of us have similar but diverse backgrounds, we can have different perspectives on what the exact capacity will be, but our approaches and how we calculate the cycle time to reach capacity are very similar. Carl Allison, Keith Dewing, and I have very similar backgrounds of originally coming up off the production floor, so we have a common approach. Owen Eldridge and Shane Soule have a similar approach given their similar backgrounds from operations. And, while Roger Wagner, Joe Butler, and Dylan Thomas have different backgrounds, they share our perspectives from their own experiences. Because of this, we may approach capacity from slightly different directions, but we arrive at the same conclusions because we understand and correctly calculate cycle time. Although many within the manufacturing sector claim to know how to calculate cycle time, simply having an equation is no guarantee. The key is having the right variables. So, let’s break it down. Here’s a good definition: Manufacturing Cycle Time is the time of actual production from when a customer order is released to the plant floor for a particular product through to the completion of all manufacturing, assembly, and testing for that specific product. (It does not include front-end order-entry time or engineering time spent on customized configuration of nonstandard items, or time in finished goods inventory.)
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