The Aerospace Group at Parker Hannifin Corp, located in Irvine, CA, is a leader in the development, design, manufacture, and service of control systems and components for aerospace and related high technology markets. Recognizing a need to control tooling inventory, tooling costs, and machine downtime, the Group initiated a search for a tool crib management system.
As far as their tooling requirements were concerned, they realized that they could not calculate tooling cost per component and that the tool purchasing process was uncontrolled. To alleviate the lack of control over tooling, and in order to obtain optimum stock levels, they needed to streamline their many tooling suppliers. By so doing the Aerospace Group hoped to simplify logistics, reduce the variety of suppliers, and maximize their buying power, thus reducing costs. Senior tool engineer Dan Girdner, who had extensive experience dealing with the tooling industry, was assigned the task of bringing tooling under control.
"We decided that we wanted to maintain a minimum of tool suppliers and we looked to set up a cooperative rather than a partnership," explained Girdner. "We wanted to select primary tool suppliers, each providing their specific 'best-in-class' products, that could provide tooling on a just-in-time basis."
Once they had orchestrated this part of the process and chosen their primary tooling suppliers, the Aerospace Group wanted to automate the tooling process, and began the search for a tool management system. Every tool management system available was reviewed. After extensive evaluations, the ToolManager® system from RealVision Inc, of Eagle, ID, was selected. Basic factors in the decision were functionality, RealVision's willingness to further develop the system to Parker Hannifin's requirements, and "because it was the only fully Windows® compliant system on the market."
Because all tools were identified with a random number, they needed a system that would incorporate smart tool coding, "a system that was intelligent enough to identify the tools by the tool ID," according to Girdner. The ToolManager software has a user configurable "tool wizard," which creates a consistent and meaningful tool ID, and description, ensuring that every user creates and accesses Tools in the same way, thus avoiding costly duplication of data in a system with literally thousands of tooling items.
"Our main goal in utilizing the ToolManager system was to decrease our stock of tools in 6 different tool cribs. We were previously ordering either too much or too little to satisfy our needs," said Girdner. "Now with the visibility of seeing exactly what we had in each tool crib, we've been able to refine our actual requirements. By implementing the ToolManager software, alternative tool suppliers can be set up in advance, so if one supplier cannot deliver to our time and costs, we can automatically switch to an alternative, thereby giving us optimum stock levels."
Implementation had to be fast and furious. Perishable tooling was the first to be added to the system, followed by tool lists and fixtures. The ToolManager system has thousands of MEs, tool crib personnel, programmers, machinists, and assemblers logged in at various times during the day, accessing and updating information.
"After speaking to other companies who have implemented similar systems and experiencing the implementation process with RealVision," says Girdner, "we couldn't have made a better choice."
