More efficient broaching: Design & Engineering

In our professional and personal lives, time is the most precious commodity. With the economy continuing to show resiliency for a host of reasons that you’re probably aware of, the amount of time that you have for choosing tooling is possibly inadequate as demand for your products or services remains high. This article will focus on broaching applications, which is our primary area of expertise. However, the concepts apply to other applications, and we hope that these tips will help you make efficient use of your time, as well as human and financial resources.

Tip No. 1: Outsource some of your tooling selection work to qualified partners. As we try to shake off the effects of the pandemic, the manufacturing sector has been leading the way toward economic recovery. We’ve been feeling the wave of higher demand for our products, and I hope that you can say the same.

To best meet increased need for products, it’s necessary to hire qualified technical talent. The challenge, though, is finding individuals with the requisite skills, and it’s even harder to keep them as members of your team because they’re likely to find more challenging and better opportunities elsewhere.

To challenge your team with better work and opportunities to grow, along with overcoming the obstacle of attracting and retaining people with non-core tool selection and application expertise, consider outsourcing that function to a company specializing in that field. You then can use your in-house talent to troubleshoot bottlenecks, which is more challenging and comes with the benefit of moving more parts out the door so every order is on spec, on time and on budget.

For example, one of our customers recently struggled to produce slots in a component used in defense electronics. Historically at the company, broaching was a secondary operation requiring a lot of manual steps and costs. We recommended and demonstrated the use of CNC broaching, eliminating the need for secondary operations.

When choosing partners, taking a virtual tour of a potential partner’s facility is an economical way to decide who deserves further consideration. Image courtesy of Pilot Precision Products

Tip No. 2: Outsource some of your engineering or programming work to valued partners. Counterintuitive to an old saying, if it’s
working, break it. That’s because always doing the same thing likely will get you to the same place over and over. Sometimes we need critical thinking and to rely on strategic allies to do the heavy lifting, including analyzing problems and finding solutions. It is a formula for success if the relationship is based on reliable data rather than on assumptions, intuition or emotion.

When you do a back-of-the-envelope calculation or a more detailed analysis, you might find that your overall equipment effectiveness — how you’re using your equipment relative to its potential — may be much lower than you thought. It’s human nature to believe that repeatedly doing the same thing and achieving “good enough” results is the best that we can do. I’ve fallen into that trap on multiple occasions, and maybe you have too. I encourage you to stay out of it by:

• Identifying bottlenecks in all aspects of your operations.
• Determining the “cash eaters” on the production line and anywhere else in the company.
• Taking actions to eliminate obstacles by doing things that initially may be unnatural or uncomfortable but can help improve your bottom line, as well as team morale.

For instance, many of our customers have machines capable of using modern CNC broaching tools and processes. But surprisingly, the companies have CNCs or CAM software that does not offer broaching toolpath support. It must be programmed from the ground up, which is time-consuming and ineffective.