Good morning, and welcome to our Webinar this morning with Makino. My name is Tim Jones, I’m the Horizontal Product Line Manager here at Makino. Our topic this morning will be Error Proofing the Machining Process.

I chose the topic of Error Proofing the Machining Process because I thought it would provide a lot of beneficial information to our listeners. Most, if not all, of you have at least been aware of or familiar with lean initiatives, and many of you have been trained in lean initiatives. 

The main topic of lean initiatives is eliminating waste from the manufacturing process. A lot of that waste is created by errors in the process that can occur. It’s not necessarily anybody’s fault, but they occur somehow, and we’re going to cover some of those areas that are the most likely places where errors can occur in the machining process. 

As we’ve developed the error proofing, for today’s Webinar, I just wanted to comment on why I thought this topic might be relevant to our listeners. Number one is because of the global economy and our continuing quest to become more competitive in our own business. Certainly, we need to reduce costs and one of the major areas of cost increases can come from errors that might occur in a manufacturing process when you think about scrap and things like that.

The other thing that I believe is really important is the lean initiatives. Most of you have been very aware of lean manufacturing processes and techniques. Many of you have actually been trained in them and, as you know; lean initiatives are centered around waste and getting rid of waste and errors in the manufacturing process.

The way I approach this topic is to go down through the flow of manufacturing as you're thinking about producing your parts. When you get a new part to produce within your manufacturing processes, one of the first things you do is develop how you're going to hold the part, your history and your processes.

I want to go through the same flow that you may go through in developing a part process. First of all, we’re going to kind of look at fixtures and what we can do with error proof fixtures and holding the part to reduce errors. The second thing we want to look at equally as important, of course, is the tooling. Programming is another big area, especially as we’re looking at environments that would include both low volume type production and high volume production, because obviously there's big difference in the two. 

But, programming is a key piece of this and the machining process, and what can you do on the machine itself to improve the process in terms of eliminating errors?  We’re going to talk about that and if we can do all this better and with more efficiency and less errors. Obviously, we can then offer better deliveries and be more consistent in on time deliveries. In all that, you want your customer to be satisfied so they come back to you for more services.  We’re going to kind of go through that flow.