Machine Utililaztion

There is alway's squabbles when people talk about utilization and then there's the fabled effective utilization, which rumour has it is differnt. Most of the time as you say the benchmark's aren't really there and as Mark point's out it depend's on what type of market your in and the product mix as to how good yoru utilization will be. If yoru runnign a real hi volume phone line then you'd expect to be up in the mid to hi 90's, low volume hi mix and you could be as low as 10% depending on the sixe / complexity of the PCB and the number of feed changes. Don't even take into account how good yoru purchasing dept is at buying the right size of reel's....10K?, na easier to by 5K's and let you do more feed changes to slow the lines down....a little pet peav of mines. 1st off you have to decide if your utilization caculation is going to be based on the time the machein is avalable for production i.e. 7*24 and so forth or only the amount of time it's scheduled to run ...see the rub? the true calculation (for me anyway) is the time it's actually doing something devided by the time it's available to dosomething (i.e. 7*24) *100 to get the percentage. the other calculation time yoru placing / time scheduled to be placing is effectivity i.e. how well your using the macheins rather than how much and you need yoru scheduled rates and so forth to make real sense of it. In term's of fixing a base line the equipment manufactures will quote 40,000 placements per hour but that's from 1 feeder in the middle of the table that doesn't need a feed change, not real life. measurign soemthing is only usefull if your going to use it to improve soemthing.... so I guess the next question is why do you want to measure it and is it the right measure to use?.....

JohnW

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This is just a simplistic suggestion but why don't you invest in additional feeders so that you can do a 'complete' feeder setup offline? How much money is 1 hour of downtime costing your operation? If you can reduce the pit stop from 60 minutes to 20 minutes would that not easily pay for the investment in additional feeders?

Everybody wants to step over dollars to pick up pennies. No wonder most of our higher volume manufacturing is moving to China.

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To respond to your message that you are tired of Ken Bliss, obviously you are entitled to your opinion on any subject on this forum, that is what the forum is about. I offer facts on how to make PC board assemly factories work better and more profitability. I also am proud to post my real name and stand behind what I offer for information unlike yourself. I offer all the information on how to fix factories like yours to run the way they should be for free. If they use my products great and if they use someone elses, that is what makes America great. I am unaware of anyone or any company offering anything equal to what we offer to meet the single one goal of evey company, "profit" it is the only reason your company is in business. With that said lets get on with worthwhile questions and comments that help companies meet that goal.

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