Who is TIM WOODS?

Transporting products from one stage to the next adds absolutely no value to your final product. The only contributions made by transportation are increased labor costs, potential safety risks, and a higher likelihood of incurring damage.

Solutions:

By integrating weighing components into existing process steps, we can virtually eliminate the transportation time associated with weighing. For example, if your process involves weighing pallets on a floor scale, we can easily integrate a scale into your existing forklift or pallet jack. If you have multiple smaller containers that must be removed from a shelf and brought to a weighing station, our battery-powered weighing carts allow you to bring the scale right to the containers. This solution can dramatically reduce transport time at a minimal cost. Another common solution is integrating load cells into an existing piece of equipment. This modification allows for valuable weighing data to be captured without adding unneeded transport or process steps.

Stocking too many raw materials and final products not only ties up capital, but it also creates excessive lead times, unneeded storage costs, and adds unnecessary transportation time.

Solution:

Taking the first step towards inventory reduction can be a little more complicated than overcoming transport times, but it is worth the effort. To begin, you need to gain a deep understating of your facility’s business cycles and production times. Gaining these two pieces of knowledge allows you to purchase raw material and create products right as there is a need rather than having potential capital sitting around in storage. This production philosophy is known as Just in Time or JIT. As we’ve discussed before, data collection is the key to gaining this sort of production knowledge. From Intuitive counting scales/ terminals to state-of-the-art data collection softwares, Premier Scales & System offers a wide variety of products designed to give you the data and knowledge you need to maintain the lowest possible inventory levels.

Any movement beyond the minimum required to perform a process creates additional labor costs, production errors, and injury risks.

Solutions:

Our systems team can eliminate repetitive operator motion, reduce walking distances, and simplify production steps through custom automated systems. For tasks that require the finesse and flexibility of a manual touch, we have a wide range of intuitive terminals designed to reduce movement through on-scale formulation software, ergonomic adjustable mounts, and programmable keys.

For many products, a large portion of production time is spent waiting to move from one stage to the next. A product sitting in production means a longer lead times for your customers, and unused resources sitting around adding no additional value.

Solutions:

Fortunately, the same data collection systems employed to manage inventory can also be used to cut down wait times. The key data points you need to analyze are production times and process bottlenecks. By introducing barcodes or RFIDs to your system, you can track specific raw materials as they flow through the production process and identify your bottlenecks. We offer a wide range of data collection terminals, barcode scanners/printers, and state-of-the-art data collection softwares to give you the data needed to pinpoint production bottlenecks and make adjustments in realtime.

Over-processing is one of the most difficult forms of waste to understand. It’s important to identify the line between achieving your desired quality and wasting resources. If you are committing more resources than necessary to meet customer specs, you are creating over-processing waste.

Solutions:

When picking the correct measurement solution, there is an entire book of factors that need to be taken into consideration. It’s easy to get overwhelmed and buy the first thing that seems to fit every criterion, but how do you know it’s the best fit for your process? Our highly-skilled team is here to help. We will consider the necessary factors and select the perfect instrument for your application. For weighing equipment, Mettler Toledo has developed the revolutionary GWP standards. These standards, and their corresponding software, help customers select the exact weighing equipment needed for any process. Simply plug in your requirements, then select equipment from the generated list.

Manufacturing products before they are needed and producing more products than are needed creates additional storage costs and ties up unused resources.

Solutions:

Yield control and data collection are the two keys to avoiding overproduction. The ICS series bench scales with ColorWeight technology provides intuitive packaging and tracking options to reduce overfilling error. The ISC series is also easily integrated into our collect+ data collection softwares to giving you ultimate control over your production data.

Beyond additional safety risks, defective products are a costly blow to your company’s reputation. The costs associated with defects are even higher when recalls, lawsuits, and remanufacturing are introduced.

Solutions:

Whether it’s a formulation, packaging, or production errors, we have solutions to catch, reduce, and analyze defects.

For formulation and packaging, the ICS series features intuitive ColorWeight technology and customizable operator instructions. For more advanced manual weighing and formulation tasks, we recommend the IND 890 series. This revolutionary windows-based terminal can direct users through complex recipes and calculate on-the-fly adjustments to correct operator errors.

Regular preventative maintenance procedures, such as calibrations, will keep your precision instruments in peak performing conditions. To help our customers reduce production and quality errors, we offer one of the area’s largest ISO/ IEC 17025 accredited calibration scopes and an unmatched preventative maintenance program.

No matter the precautions your company takes, errors can still occur. When they do, it’s important to analyze what went wrong and prevent it from happening again. To assist in this effort, we offer advanced augmented reality CMM services designed to identify dimensional production errors.

People are one of the facility’s greatest resources. Under utilizing the skills or potential of an employee, can cause excess labor costs and missed opportunities.