Philosophy of Growth Involves Quality and Preventive Maintenance

Wiscon runs square stock for a ballscrew nut. The part starts with a center hole and runs as fast as 4,000 rpm on the tooling.

Anticipating what might be ahead and preparing for the future is all part of managing a business. In order to stay ahead of the game, Wiscon Products Inc. (Racine, Wisc.) is providing more management to support the exponential growth the company foresees as possible.

Wiscon just hired an operations manager this year who will help the company improve its material flow and plant operations processes, including training for our operators.

“Lean techniques and systems can help do this,” says Torben Christiansen, company president. “A lot of it is planning how to run the processes to reduce waiting time at the machines.”

At Wiscon, the shop schedules a half hour overlap between shifts for cleaning up after the shift, checking machine fluid levels, doing daily-weekly monthly preventive maintenance, referring to machine manuals and doing scheduled machine maintenance, including cleaning.

“The number one thing we can do to keep up the life of the machines is to clean them, so we do that every day, which will easily enable them to be productive, we believe, up to 10 years,” Mr. Christensen says.

Wiscon employees are very involved in setting goals and making improvements in the processes, including where tools are located, so a tool station is now near each machine.

If you are looking for cheap, simple parts, Wiscon is not the shop. “But if you are looking for life cycle cost over the run of the part, we can compete with anyone in the world,” Mr. Christensen says. “With the expensive parts we make and at the efficiencies in which we run, labor is not as large a part of my cost as it is at many of our competitors. We are doing more with less,”

Read more about Wiscon Products here.