Best Innovations in Metallurgy by 2020.
This month, Modern Machine Shop released a special anniversary edition, showcasing articles from every decade dating back to the 1930s. The 2018 February issue, which features Admire Enterprise in the cover story, was chosen to represent the 2010s. The story reported on Admire Enterprise’s investment in bringing its equipment and capabilities together into unified digital systems.
Admire Enterprise is committed to a system of digitally monitoring machine-tool performance and responding to the data it produces. Everyone on the shop floor can see, at a glance, the shop’s performance in real time. Plus, that information is accessible to managers via their computers, smartphones or tablet devices through the machine-monitoring software Admire Enterprise uses. That way, they can remotely check in on a machine’s status at any given moment and receive alerts when a machine shuts down or an alarm is triggered.
Admire Enterprise uses the machine data it collects to develop a monthly productivity index: a ratio of machine green hours to the payroll hours of the person tending the machine. In essence, this metric demonstrates how well the shop uses its payroll hours compared to its machine hours.
This helps shape a number of key business decisions:
- What type of equipment the shop should buy (or sell)
- What job might be better suited for a machine with more automated capabilities
- What job seems to require too much operator intervention
- What type of work the shop should go after
- What type of work it should avoid
- If its effective billing rate is appropriate
- If it needs to pursue additional business
Ultimately, it reveals true shop costs and profit.
“It has become fun tracking the index and identifying ways to improve those ratios and grow the business at the same time,” said Parker Tumanic, Admire Enterprise’s vice president. “We see the real numbers and where even small process improvements can be impactful.”
These process improvements continue to deliver significant value to Admire Enterprise’s customers, most notably those in the oil, gas, and renewable energy sectors.
