The working requirements in 24/7 manufacturing facilities is different than most 8-5 jobs. When you have $30B invested into a facility you have to maximize output and that means keeping all of the equipment up and running.
Facilities are part of the equation. But people have to be trained and measured and certified. Those processes have to be designed and documented. The population needed for any process varies with the task - it'd be a coincidence if it was the same for a different pipeline.
And the facility is full of jigs and benches and tools and doorways and props and a million things that are bespoke to a process too.
Making very complicated things isn't the same as making toasters.
> You want the machines producing as much as they can to balance out their costs
And you may have a single operator who's responsible for keeping multiple machines going. Loading raw material, attending to alarms, etc.
To add to what you said, there's a concept known as "lights-out manufacturing" wherein the machines are continuously reloaded by robots/automation with raw materials (and if needed there's other automation to offload completed parts) so they can continue making parts even after everyone's gone home for the day.
The machines are expensive. You want the machines producing as much as they can to balance out their costs. Workers don't like working 24/7, so they'll stop working after a few hours (this is good!).
If each worker has their own machine, that means the machine probably ceases to be producing when the worker is done. Coupled with potentially longer startup processes (many machines are way easier to keep running than do a cold start) it means these machines sit idle for most of their existence. This is sub-optimal.
If you centralize the machines, then you can trade off workers and keep the machines running. You then also potentially don't have to worry about startup processes eating into productive time as often. This is than a major efficiency boost.
On top of that, many times several different jobs might be related to the operation of that machine. You might need someone who specializes on cleaning the machines, you might have people specializing on the inspection on the machines, you might have people specializing on the day to day operations of the machines. Having that specialization can be a net benefit overall.
Think about repair turn-around times. So you've got a CNC operator way off in the middle of nowhere, super distributed. He knows the basics on how to use the machine, but maybe not a lot more. Then it throws a fault, and he doesn't know how to repair it or doesn't have the equipment and parts. Now he's going to call up the head office, who is going to dispatch a repair person from somewhere (maybe close? maybe far?) to come out to some far away remote location to repair it. Meanwhile, for larger operations they might have some techs on-site who can do repairs within just a few minutes and get the machine functional sooner. You can co-locate a smaller cache of spare parts for a larger pool of machines, because multiple failures is probably pretty rare. All that downtime avoided turns into productivity gains as the machine gets to functional levels faster and the CNC tech gets back to work faster.
It takes about 5 people to run a whole automated factory. The design and development is where the real money is. Let the assembly go to the lowest bidder.
I'm currently working at a place that produces 30,000 euro machines. It's pretty handy to be in the same place as the other developers, so they don't have to ship everyone their own 30,000 euro machine to work with. And that's just the developers; if there's a problem with the motors or other bits and pieces, that's another department that needs to be called in to have a look. Not very convenient if everyone lives in different places.
Here's a video from Beta, a wrench manufacturer in Italy.[1] Think about what it would take to build a plant like that from a cold start. What you'd need to know. All the ways you could screw up. How much it would cost to recover from a bad decision. Notice what they automated, and what they didn't.
Who wants to be a millwright? Or a production engineer? To build a factory, you need both. Once you've built the factory, you don't need most of them them any more. It's a job with high layoff potential. Top pay is maybe $125K.
You need people who've built your kind of factory before. Here, they need people who've built mechanized hot forging shops. Since few of those are built in the US each year, there's no pool of such people.
Stanley, the company, had forgotten how to build a plant like that.
They relied on the equipment manufacturer, and perhaps some consultants. That didn't work out.
It takes a long time to get a good factory going from a cold start. It took Airbus 21 years before they made a good airplane. It took Tesla 15 years from start to significant production volume.
Thanks again to both you and mswen for the kind words and encouragement.
Sorry to not offer more specifics but I need to be careful on what I reveal about our workflow and ops since my employer guards those things pretty seriously but we have quite a large array of CNC, milling, lathes, spin forming, autoclave, welding, 3d printing, and other machines. The building I work in is a couple hundred thousand square feet and is constantly overflowing. We definitely have software tracking uptime/downtime and things like that.
It's not a question of knowing how to build industrial capacity, it is actually building that capacity. Before you can build a fab, you need to build all the machines that go into a fab, and before that all the machines for building those machines, and so on and so forth. 9 women can't make a baby in a month, at some point you come across steps that just take time.
That assumes there is enough juice remaining in manufacturing optimization. After a certain stage in a product's lifetime, you've done the bulk of the optimization and doing manufacturing in-house could bring minimal benefit.
I meant 2 months more as a floor across a majority of items(and it’s been a long time since then so there’s a certain amount of rounding). Production wanted to eliminate shortages whereas executives and accountants wanted to optimize turn rates while claiming to care about shortages.
Overall, each of the projects had around 2000 unique parts (at least for what this particular plant was making). Occasionally, newer contracts would get a much higher prioritization and could grab parts (and employees) from older projects. Another scenario that would lead to extra demand was having test failures on a project that was nearing design freeze.
I ended up changing industries to financial services, but will always have a deep respect and appreciation for what went into those projects.
Why would you turn off manufacturing equipment to do routine maintenance? It’s making you money when it’s turned on, and not when it’s turned off, after all.
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