There comes a point in every machines life where you have to look at letting it go.
One of the big issues that seems to come up more often is about training.
Polishing, you love it and hate it at the same time just like everyone else. I still think brushed finish exists due a person somewhere getting fed up while polishing and giving up, "That's good enough my arm hurts" is what I bet was said.
One thing I learned early on in machinery was to look to the future. Many times folks will look at a situation with blinders on. The issue here is they miss the larger picture and only see the topic right in front of them. If you focus on just the issue at hand your decisions may let you down later when other issues come to light.
I seems like when I ask someone why they do a task a given way the answer is very often "its how we have always done it". My next question is why? It is very rare anyone can answer that question and I end up with "Well Bill showed me this way". Then I go find Bill and ask the same question and he also has no idea as to why. You can continue this process moving person to person until you end up with the janitor and still have no answer.
As is the case in every market and business costs are key. Doing more with less or getting as much as possible from the resources you have are always important things to look at. When manufacturing is the market in question it can mean many things. So lets look at some of them.
One of the aspects I am able to see in fair detail is where manufacturing work is being done. While I will admit this more of a rant than anything else it is information none the less.
There were so many good questions sent my way on this topic I wanted to do a follow up. So what I am going to do is answer some of the questions here so more folks can have the same information. These are just some of the more common ones and please feel free to send your question if its not answered here.
