Tool Maintenance Tracking
Do you need to track tool maintenance? And I do mean Tool Maintenance not Machine maintenance, that is a different animal. I spent years working at a stamping manufacturer where tool maintenance was always a challenge. In my case, I am talking about sharpening a tooling die set. The tools were usually built for a certain life span – so many parts or hits before they needed to be sharpened or replaced. The type of steel and whether inserts were used in the tool, what material you were stamping, size and type of press were all factors.
The problem:
Sharpening the die takes time and cost money. It’s a hidden cost, while expected it was usually not well managed. To make matters worse, if the customer ordered more parts, we had no idea how much life was left in the tool without physically inspecting the tool, and we had thousands of tools. So, we would take the order and absorb the unexpected costs and delays.
The solution:
I came up with a method of at least attempting to track the life of the tool by tracking the “hits” without adding extra work to the shop floor.
I created a stock item that represented the tool, used some user defined/attribute fields to store expect hits and last time sharpened. I made sure the item had no costs. I adjusted in to inventory the expected hits, added the item to the BOM’s they were used on and set it to Backflush.
When production reported quantities to the stamping press operation, the bogus tool “hits” were issued to the production order. As the on-hand inventory went down we had a relatively good idea of the number of hits left for the tool.
I created a few reports and queries to track these tools and added a few more UDF’s for more tooling details. A week before a tool was scheduled to run, we could see which tools might need some sharpening, and we would pull them out early for inspection. This helped prevent delays in starting production. And if the customer ordered more parts, we would be in a much better position to make a case to charge them for the sharpening.
I attached a doc to describe in more detail how I set this up in Acumatica.
Is it a perfect solution? No, but for many manufacturers this does enough of what they are looking for to help prevent production delays and losing money by not tracking tool sharpening needs for repeat orders.
