MT Magazine May/June 2022

FEATURE STORY

JOB SHOPS ISSUE

28

(26%), 48-inch (16%), and >48-inch (15%). This shows a pattern of larger sizes being less commonly addressed by job shops. These businesses, which are mainly independent job shops (48%), followed by contract shops (40%) and captive shops (11%), service an array of industries. The Markets Aerospace is the single biggest market, at 56%. This is followed by machinery/equipment manufacturing at 49%. Military is the third-most served industry segment, at 44%. (Remember: As these are job shops, they likely work for many different industries and make parts of different sizes, so the numbers add up to more than 100.) Automotive and medical are both at 39%, closely followed by oil-and-gas-fired mining machinery at 36%. As industries served follows demand, it is a fairly safe supposition that because of exogenous conditions – from the war in Ukraine to the pandemic to the global energy supply to the electrification of the auto fleet – these top six markets are likely to not only remain at the top but increase as a percentage of business. (Perhaps something of a talking point – or a bit of interesting trivia – is the industry with the least amount of business for the job shops: furniture manufacturing, at 6%. Given the increase of remote work or hybrid situations and reduced in-office hours, the demand for office furniture is not likely to grow.) It is worth knowing that when it comes to customers, these facilities evidently do an exemplary job: the customer retention rate is 98%. The Equipment With regard to types of equipment, vertical dominates for rotational tools, with 89% reporting having vertical machining centers (VMCs), and horizontal for rotational workpieces, with 77% having horizontal turning centers (HTCs).

Gardner Business Intelligence has surveyedmore than 400 job shops across the United States as part of Modern Machine Shop’s Top Shops benchmarking program. The “Top Shops” are the top 20% of the participants, scored on 14 metrics. What follows is a numeric look at what we’ve found. Please keep in mind that: • The percentages cited are median numbers. • None of these things necessarily make any given firm a Top Shop – but it probably wouldn’t hurt to consider what these numbers show and compare it with your operation. • For the most part, this is what is happening at independent operations, not cookie-cutter franchises. Results may vary.

What They Are; What They Do

IMPROVEMENT METHODOLOGIES BEING IMPLEMENTED BY JOB SHOPS

100%

80%

60%

40%

20%

0%

Cellular Manufacturing

Some Improvement

5S Workplace Organization

Benchmarking

Lean Manufacturing

Top Shops have a median batch size of 95 parts. These parts generally fall within a 6-inch cube (65%) and a tolerance of 0.0005 inch (40%). One interesting thing to note on the subject of tolerances is that 0.0001 inch is actually a fairly common spec, as it is reported by 33%, which makes it the second most common tolerance.

Going back to the cubic dimensions, following the 6-inch cube are the following cubic sizes: 12-inch (56%), 18-inch (45%), 24-inch (35%), 36-inch