In my last posting, I introduced my belief that Lean Manufacturing in the custom cabinet shop is tied to material handling. This time I’ll look at some examples to demonstrate what I mean.
In “traditional” cabinet making, sides are cut into rectangles, then carried to the next stations. These parts are drilled horizontally, then carried to a saw for notching out the toe kicks. Next they are picked up again and carried to boring machine, edgebanders and so on. With each step, the parts are lifted off a stack, processed through the step, then restacked.
Machines have helped reduce the time needed to cut, drill and band these parts, but the handling time is still there, and in all but the most sophisticated shops, it hasn’t changed much.
Nested based manufacturing represents the first step in reducing this handling time. Now, a single operator can perform many of these functions at one station. The handling time for the steps represented is now included in one. That one step does take somewhat longer, but the machine does the work, and the operator can be performing secondary operations. Also, instead of needing to reset various machines for each different cabinet, Nested based manufacturing means that every cabinet in a project can have different milling by simply calling up the right program. More time saved.
Most automated shops have about stopped at this point, and profit can be had here, but I’m going to look at taking this idea one step further along.
Given that modern software, coupled with modern machines can efficiently produce a single cabinet at a time, why not structure the entire shop to efficiently produce a single cabinet at a time? Before you scoff, think carefully about what I propose.
The nest is formatted to group all the parts of a cabinet together. They are cut, dadoed, bored, etc. as a group. The group is stacked on a tray and sent along a roller conveyor to the next station. There they are edge bored and banded if you dowel, or straight to the edgebander if you use screws.
Once milled bored and banded, they move along to assembly. Hinge plates and drawer slides are added and the box is built.
And consider further that since all the parts travel as a group, there is much less need for trying to label all the parts and search around looking for the ones needed. No more printing hundreds of labels that get torn and fall off. And the reduced stacking and unstacking helps keep surface damage down, whether or not you use prefinished materials.
A single shop drawing can have the CNC program name on it, or better yet, a barcode for the machine to read. This sheet travels with the parts to instruct the various stations and identify the cabinet.
This is something of a radical idea, but give it some thought this week. In my next blog, I will discuss my proposal for throwing out tape measures in the assembly area.
