PM Blog

Can you cut out a mere 15 minutes of your day to learn about a parts cleaning topic you’ve always hoped to one day research? If you answered yes, you’ve clicked on the right link!

Kyzen Corp. is offering a series of 15-minute educational sessions, called Tech 2 Tech, each presented by one company specialist who answers common cleaning questions in the metal finishing and electronic assembly industries. The brief presentations also offer registrants the ability to ask questions within the platform. The sessions cover topics such as:

Innovations in end-of-arm tooling for collaborative robots (cobots), including the introduction of small, precise and lightweight robotic calipers, is now bringing the benefits of cobots into the quality control (QC) lab. The Q-Span System from New Scale Robotics automates small part measurements, relieving human operators from this tedious manual task, while improving repeatability and reliability.

Three recent innovations have made automation for sorting and measurement possible:

The magnitude of the impact to U.S. manufacturing because of COVID-19 is unprecedented. ProShop ERP recently polled our manufacturing customers and found that more than 80% of them have experienced a significant reduction in their inbound sales and opportunities. In addition, 97% of them are looking to add customers. Include the recent explosion of new shops emerging as a result of easy access to low-interest loans for affordable, quality machine tools, and you have a perfect storm of intense competition between machining businesses.

So, the question becomes: How do you market your shop so it stands apart from others in such a competitive environment?

Business activity as measured by the Gardner Business Index (GBI): Precision Machining gained 11 points in July, bringing the latest reading to 48.3. (Increasing readings which are below 50 indicate slowing decline as compared to the prior month, while a reading of 50 represents ‘no change’ in business activity.) The improvement in the index was broad-based as all components reported significantly higher readings in absolute terms. July’s new orders and production readings fell just short of a reading of ‘50,’ reporting gains of nearly 18 and 15 points, respectively.

During May and June, the production machining industry experienced a faltering in overall activity not experienced to the same degree by other manufacturing technologies. This opened a gap between the PM Index and Gardner’s other manufacturing indices. In particular, new orders, production and backlog activity as reported by production machinists experienced a relatively longer and deeper contraction compared to other manufacturing industries. July’s substantial improvement among these components helped to close this gap. By end-market served, production machinists serving the aerospace and/or medical markets reported expanding business activity in July after indicating deeply contractionary activity in prior months.

It was only last year when Travis Donaldson became part of Donmac Precision Machining Inc.’s team full time to assist with his family’s company expansion to three times its physical size. Under Donaldson’s leadership, the Ontario, Canada, company has made extensive improvements, including streamlining its production.