Tool Room Integration

Article From: 6/20/2007 Production Machining

Ice Development Systems designed a tool room to help effectively manage and maintain tooling inventory and reduce the time necessary to plan, locate and reorder tooling. The company integrates the tool room with the shop floor control, inventory, and purchasing system. This decreases job planning, setup and manufacturing time because users can easily check tooling availability, schedule tooling to the operations, track usage and location and transfer the tooling to other operators. Also, the integration allows the tooling information to be tracked simultaneously with job information such as material description, cycle times, piece counts, operators and work stations. When integrated with inventory and purchasing it allows the most commonly used consumables to be reordered to a desired quantity. The tool room’s advantages include decreased cycle times, increased production hours and automatic stable inventory control. Without the integration the tool room is said to lack efficiency and accountability because operators have to spend extra time checking tooling back into inventory every time they log off an operation and separate inventory. Purchasing systems also have to be in place, and tooling can not easily be scheduled per the job.