Crib Sheet: General Industry Coverage

Managing tools should be no big deal. Each machinist simply calls his favorite sales rep, orders a pack of whatever insert or endmill sounds right for the job and stashes it in the bottom of his toolbox until needed. That’s how it was done when I stood in front of a machine.

Image courtesy CribMaster.

The problem was, we eventually had hundreds of tooling brands, grades and geometries floating around the shop. When a job repeated, delivery was often dependent on how well the machinist managed his mini-inventory, whether the tool was still available and whether the job had to be reprogrammed because tools were replaced.

It was a tool-hoarding free-for-all—error-prone and costly.

Cribs Aren’t for Babies

Tooling is a sizable investment for any shop and should be treated as such. Without a secure and predictable toolcrib, one stocked with known quantities of cutters, inserts, holders, collets and hardware, machining processes will not run smoothly.

To do it right, each item number in the toolcrib should be accompanied by documented feeds and speeds, tool and assembly dimensions, supplier data, inventory levels and tool life management data. That’s a lot of stuff to keep track of. Fortunately, tool management systems (TMS) are available to organize the massive amounts of information needed for efficient tool usage.

While a good-sized shop could easily buy a new lathe or machining center for the cost of a high-end TMS package, management would do well to look beyond price and consider what TMS brings to the table.

Dan Speidel, sales director for tool data management software developer TDM Systems Inc., Schaumburg, Ill., said the inefficiencies and duplication of data without TMS may easily cost more than the software itself, but added that such systems are often a tough sell. “TMS isn’t like a machine that actually produces something,” he said. “But without it, companies are left with silos of information and tribal knowledge to run the shop floor.”

Speidel offered the example of a shop that managed its tool data in a homegrown, Excel-based system. Because such systems are typically poor at data validation, accuracy is often suspect, making the search for tooling part numbers difficult. Shop employees often found it easier to simply enter a new number when looking for a tool. After moving to a centralized TMS database, the company soon discovered some tooling part numbers had been entered 200 times. Tools that were in stock under one number were being reordered under another, often with expedited shipping costs. In some cases, there was sufficient inventory to last several years.

TMS can eliminate this problem, Speidel explained, often reducing tooling costs by 30 percent or more. It brings all relevant tool data to a single location—the TMS database—that everyone in the company can access.

Opening Doors

TMS does more than lower inventory costs. The transparency of information gained minimizes the time lost searching for tools and keying in data, in turn increasing the amount of time people can spend doing value-added work.

Kevin Duncalf, product manager of Tool Management vending systems for cutting tool manufacturer Guhring Inc., Brookfield, Wis., said TMS provides far greater control than manual tool management, eliminating errors and reducing tool consumption. One example of this is a Guhring customer with more than 3,000 tools in its database. After implementing Guhring’s software for managing tools, operators are able to login and tell the system what tool number or job they are working on and let the software do the rest.

“Instead of having to sort through thousands of items to find what they need, only the ones assigned to that particular job appear,” Duncalf said. “There’s no more head scratching, trying to figure out what they need. It’s a fast, user-friendly transaction that removes the chance of somebody taking the wrong insert or cutting tool. Everything they need is right there.”