What?
Have you ever won a big sale but were afraid you didn't have the capacity to run the product? Or have you had the suspicion that you needed more machines for your current workload, but didn't have a way to prove it? One common way customers use Amper utilization data is to justify purchasing or not purchasing a new machine(s).
Time Commitment: Medium
Features Required: Utilization Monitoring
Notes: First, decide what type of equipment you think would best benefit the shop. Find the utilization of similar machines in the shop, and use this formula below to estimate your actual capacity.
(Utilization x Scheduled hours/day = machine hours per day).
You can estimate the machine hours per year you would gain, multiply by your shop rate, to estimate production value gained from ordering a new machine.
- Another Example: An Amper customer suspected that they needed more machines to fulfill their existing work orders. They followed similar steps to the ones listed below and actually determined that they had enough capacity, but were not running their machines efficiently enough. Instead of purchasing new machines, they invested in more labor, machine upgrades, and setup reduction to handle the workload, which increased their overall utilization from 26% to 70%!
How?
Below is an example of how you can use Utilization data for Capex decision making. In this example we've just signed a new deal for a large recurring order. These general steps also apply to situations where you are not increasing your workload, but suspect you don't have enough machine time for existing orders.
- Determine how many parts you're expecting to run.
- Multiply that by the expected cycle time to see how much time per week/month/year will be needed.
- See how much time you have available to run on the machines by looking at utilization data. If you don't have enough available time on the machines that need to run the job, you can continue to justify new equipment.
- Identify how much a new machine would cost.
- Determine how much revenue the new business is worth, and calculate and ROI on the new machine.
-Example: 100,000 pieces per year
-Example: 2 min/piece. Will need 200,000 minutes, or 3,333 hours.
-Example: This part can only run on Mazak #1 which is available 8 hours a day, 7 days a week (2,912 hours/year). According to Amper data, it is utilized with existing work 70.5% of the time, leaving just 859 hours of available time to run the new product.
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-Example: $100,000 for a used Mazak.
-Example: 100,000 pieces sold at $5/piece is $500,000 in revenue. ROI = 400% with a payback period of 2.4 months.