PM Blog

About 15 years ago, Carl Pasciuto had a realization while doing the census for his shop, Custom Machine. “I was always the young guy,” he says. “I wasn’t the young guy anymore, and there weren’t too many people behind me.” He knew he needed to bring in more employees, but like many shops, he was having difficulty finding people who were qualified. He’s had a sign in front of the building for a while, advertising open positions in nearly every department.

One advantage of working at a machine shop prior to a career with a supplier is understanding exactly how a product is used in a real-world scenario. Keith Goodrich is a perfect example of someone who took advantage of his early shop work and learned as much as possible. Keith’s eagerness to learn is what ultimately landed him his current job as product specialist at CNC Software (developers of Mastercam).

The Precision Machining Index registered 45.9 in September, which marks for a third month of quickening contraction of business activity as reported by surveyed precision machinists. Readings above 50 indicate expanding activity, and values below 50 indicate contracting activity. The further away a reading is from 50 the larger the size of the change in activity. Gardner Intelligence’s analysis of the underlying index components revealed that weakness in exports and backlogs were the significant drivers pulling the Index lower. Production, new orders and employment had little influence in the Index’s September movement while supplier deliveries registered the highest reading for the month among all components, helping to offset some of the Index’s fall. Even so, supplier deliveries registered a contractionary reading for the first time since the third quarter of 2016.

Contracting activity in both domestic and foreign new orders in September further weighted on backlogs, which have experienced strong contracting activity in each month since June 2019. Additionally, employment activity that has historically been slow to respond to economic changes and typically less volatile than other Index components, experienced its largest ever single month move during the third quarter of 2019. The recent and sharp contraction in employment activity this early in what is expected to be a slower economy in 2020 was unanticipated. Manufacturers often hold onto talent while evaluating the anticipated duration and magnitude of an economic slowdown first before releasing hard-to-replace talent.

The Siemens Foundation has provided a $1.25 million grant for a comprehensive workforce development program for cybersecurity in manufacturing. The grant will fund the development and implementation of a highly skilled cybersecurity for manufacturing initiative as part of MxD’s workforce strategy known as MxD Learn.

While manufacturers need qualified workers to protect against cyber attacks, only two-thirds of respondents in a 2017 Global Information Security Workforce study said they lack the cybersecurity professionals needed.

Quality documentation can be improved. Whether you use a simple word processing program such as Word to document your processes, or a more sophisticated documentation software program, organizing your material and identifying the simplest way to meet your needs is the key to documentation success. Let’s reaffirm the purpose of work instructions:

All documents within your quality system should be reviewed at some point. Not only is this a requirement of most standards, it just makes good sense. Whether you are developing a new system or just going through a review, the following four steps will help you as you go through the process of definition, review and simplicity.