Blog
Practical articles for production managers and shop supervisors at SMB job shops and CNC machining centers.
Oil & gas machining doesn't run on a manufacturing-belt rhythm. It runs on rig counts, capital project gates, and well completion schedules. Scheduling here is fundamentally project work.
EDM is slow, expensive, and unattended-friendly. That combination makes it the most-overlooked bottleneck in mold and die scheduling.
In most job shops, the bottleneck is a machine. In a mold and die shop, it's a person. Capacity planning has to account for that.
Mold and die shops are the longest-cycle work in machining. A single program can occupy a machining center for 6–14 weeks. Scheduling that is a fundam…
Textbook scheduling assumes you're either high-mix-low-volume or low-mix-high-volume. Real job shops are both, often on the same machine in the same w…
Most missed due dates aren't operational failures — they're quoting failures. A quoter promised a date the shop couldn't keep. Here's how to break tha…
The general job shop is the hardest scheduling problem in manufacturing. Not because of volume but because of variability — every customer ships diffe…