A Manufacturer's Stumble: How a Camera Mount Company Can Fix Its Delays
We’ve all been there. You order a high-quality, specialized product—something you’re genuinely excited about—and the quoted delivery date feels far away. But you accept it. Then, that date comes and goes with nothing but silence. Weeks turn into a month, and your frustration mounts. This is more than just an inconvenience; it’s a breakdown of trust.
This is the exact crisis facing a company that makes high-quality, professional camera mounts for the motion picture industry. They are caught in a downward spiral. Their lead times are double those of their main competitor—a staggering 10 weeks versus 5. Worse, they consistently fail to meet even that lengthy promise, with on-time delivery rates plummeting below 70%. Inside the factory, the symptoms are clear: record-high levels of inventory gather dust, while the actual time it takes to complete an order, the cycle time, has ballooned to an average of nine weeks. The business is bleeding cash, hemorrhaging customer goodwill, and losing ground to nimbler rivals.
The gut reaction to such a crisis is often to crack the whip—demand more overtime, push machines to run harder, and chastise employees for not moving fast enough. But the people on the factory floor are already working hard, with clerks putting in extra weekends just to keep up with chaotic order entries. The problem isn't a lack of effort. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what creates speed in a manufacturing environment.
Here’s the counterintuitive truth: in most production systems, the time a product is actually being worked on—cut, milled, polished, or assembled—is a tiny fraction of its total journey, often as little as 5%. The other 95% of the time is spent waiting. Waiting in line for a machine, waiting in a massive batch for its turn, waiting for a missing part. To fix their business, the company must stop focusing on the 5% of "work" and launch an all-out assault on the 95% of "wait."
Let's dissect this waiting time into its core components and explore the powerful, practical strategies that can transform this struggling manufacturer into a model of efficiency.
Tackling the Traffic Jams (Reducing Queue Time)
The single largest component of wasted time in any factory is queue time. This is the time parts spend sitting idle in bins, on pallets, or on the floor, waiting for their turn to be processed. It is, quite literally, a traffic jam of physical inventory. At the struggling camera mount company, this is evident in the piles of parts and the ignored dispatch lists—the drivers (operators) can't move because the road ahead (the machine) is gridlocked.
These traffic jams are not random; they are the direct result of two systemic issues: excessively high utilization and uncontrolled variability.
The Utilization Trap: Many managers believe the goal is to keep expensive machinery running 100% of the time to maximize return on investment. But a machine running at 100% capacity is like a highway operating at 100% capacity—the moment one extra car enters, the entire system grinds to a halt. There is no buffer, no capacity to absorb even the slightest hiccup. Queues don't just form; they explode exponentially as utilization approaches its limit.
1 The Variability Virus: Variability is any form of unpredictability in the system. For this company, it’s rampant. The polisher has long and unpredictable downtimes. The setup times for the mills are lengthy, causing inconsistent processing intervals. Quality problems create scrap and rework, unexpectedly sending parts back to the beginning of the line. Even the arrival of customer orders is variable, clustering at the end of two-week periods. Each of these events is like a random car accident on the factory highway, causing unpredictable backups that ripple through the entire system.
The Solutions:
Strategically Manage Bottlenecks: A bottleneck is the single slowest process that constrains the output of the entire factory. The first step is to identify it. Once found, the goal is not to run it at 100% utilization. Instead, the company must protect it and increase its effective capacity. This can be done by adding another machine, but cheaper options exist. Reducing setup times on the bottleneck machine creates more processing time. Having dedicated, cross-trained operators to keep it running through breaks and lunches can boost output significantly. The crucial insight is to subordinate everything else to the bottleneck; the non-bottleneck machines should be paced to ensure the bottleneck is never starved for work nor overwhelmed by it.
Wage War on Variability: To create a smooth, predictable flow, the company must systematically attack every source of unpredictability. Implement a robust preventative maintenance program to reduce machine breakdowns. Standardize work procedures and invest in operator training to minimize differences in processing times. Institute rigorous quality control at each step to catch errors before they get passed on, eliminating the need for disruptive rework loops. On the front end, they could incentivize customers to place orders earlier in the two-week cycle, smoothing the flow of work for the order entry clerk and, consequently, the entire factory.
Stop Making So Much at Once! (Shrinking Batch Sizes)
A core problem for the camera mount maker is their reliance on massive process batches, driven by the belief that this is efficient. Because it takes a long time to set up their milling machines, they run huge batches of parts to minimize the number of changeovers. Their giant heat-treatment oven, which can hold 1,000 parts, reinforces this "big batch" mentality.
This logic is a trap. While it may seem to optimize the efficiency of a single machine, it decimates the efficiency of the overall system. Imagine you need to bake one dozen cookies for a waiting customer, but your baking process involves waiting until you have orders for 1,000 cookies before you even turn on the oven. That first customer’s order sits waiting, becoming "stale." In manufacturing, this staleness represents tied-up capital, increased risk of obsolescence, and, most importantly, an agonizingly long wait for the customer.
The Solutions:
Aggressively Slash Setup Times: The justification for large batches—long setup times—should not be accepted as a fixed constraint. It should be treated as the primary target for improvement. The company can adopt proven methodologies like SMED (Single-Minute Exchange of Die). This system involves meticulously analyzing the changeover process, often by videotaping it, to differentiate between "internal" steps (which must be done while the machine is stopped) and "external" steps (which can be prepared in advance, while the machine is still running).
2 For the milling machine, this could mean getting the next cutting tools, fixtures, and raw materials ready at the machine side before the current job finishes. The goal is to convert as many internal tasks to external ones as possible, drastically reducing the downtime and making smaller batches economically feasible.Embrace Smaller Batches: As setup times fall, the economic logic flips. It becomes more efficient to run smaller and more frequent batches. This allows the factory to be much more responsive to actual customer orders. Parts for a single camera mount can flow through the system quickly, without having to wait for hundreds of unrelated parts to be processed first. This single change will have a massive and immediate impact on reducing the 9-week cycle time.
The Assembly Puzzle (Solving Wait-to-Match Time)
The final stage of production—assembly—is where everything comes together. But for this company, it’s often where everything falls apart. An assembly station is like a puzzle table; you can't complete the final picture until every last piece has arrived. When locally manufactured legs and booms are ready, but the externally sourced motors and electronics are delayed, the entire order grinds to a halt. This is known as wait-to-match time, and it’s a direct consequence of unsynchronized component flows.
This challenge is magnified because the company has two fundamentally different supply chains to manage: an internal one for fabricated parts, plagued by its own variability, and an external one for purchased components, with its own set of lead times and potential for delays. Without a coordinating intelligence, the odds of all necessary parts arriving simultaneously are slim.
The Solutions:
Synchronize with Smart Scheduling: The company’s ERP system needs to be used as more than just a tool for launching orders. It must become the brain of the synchronization effort. By leveraging the Bill of Materials (BOM) for each camera mount and the known lead times for each component, the system can work backward from the customer’s due date. It should calculate the precise moment to release the order for the legs into the factory and the precise moment to issue the purchase order for the motor, ensuring they are planned to converge at the assembly station at the same time.
Create Upstream Predictability: The best scheduling system in the world is useless if the underlying processes are chaotic. The efforts to reduce variability and shrink batch sizes in the fabrication shops are not just about speeding up those departments; they are a critical prerequisite for effective assembly. A predictable factory is a synchronizable factory. When the assembly manager knows, with high confidence, that the gearboxes will be ready on Tuesday, they can coordinate the arrival of other parts with precision.
A Final Smart Fix: The Relay Race Handoff
Finally, there is a simple yet profound technique to shave off even more time. It involves rethinking the handoff between process steps by differentiating between a process batch and a transfer batch. A process batch is the total number of parts run between setups (e.g., 500 gears). A transfer batch is the smaller container of parts you move to the next station (e.g., a bin of 25 gears).
Instead of processing all 500 gears before moving them, the company should move the first bin of 25 as soon as it's finished. This allows the next machine to start its work while the first machine is still processing the remaining 475. This overlapping of processes, known as lot splitting, is like a relay race where the next runner starts moving before they receive the baton. It can dramatically compress the total cycle time without any new technology, simply by changing the way work is moved.
Conclusion: A Shift from Managing Costs to Managing Time
The path forward for the camera mount manufacturer is clear. It does not lie in pushing its people and machines harder, but in fundamentally redesigning its flow of work. By waging a systematic war on waiting time—by breaking up the traffic jams, shrinking batches, synchronizing the arrival of parts, and creating intelligent handoffs—the company can achieve transformative results.
This is more than an operational tune-up; it is a profound cultural shift. It requires moving from a traditional mindset of managing costs and maximizing machine utilization to a modern one focused on managing time and maximizing flow. By doing so, this manufacturer can slash its cycle time, free up cash from excess inventory, delight customers with rapid and reliable deliveries, and not only catch up to its competitor but leave it in the dust. 📸