Miles Free Director of Industry Affairs, PMPA

12 May 2016

PMPA Political Action: What’s at Stake for Your Business?

PMPA is involved and working to minimize their negative impact on your shop. Here is a quick review of a few of them.

21 Apr 2016

Some OEM Customers Lack Insight into Market Demand

Lousy forecasting by some OEM customers beats lean and JIT every time, leaving the OEM’s supply chain bloated with inventory and starving for releases.

15 Apr 2016

Why Tool Life Can Vary: Carbon and Alloy Steels

Despite the use of our best technology and our efforts to control our processes, tool life can vary when machining carbon and alloy steels.

15 Apr 2016

Unknown Knowns: Rumsfeld Missed One–Will You?

What is your plan for harvesting the ‘unknown knowns’ so that your team and your culture can continue to thrive?

14 Apr 2016

Upset Testing for Steel

An “upset” can be performed to determine how the steel will perform under compressive load.

8 Apr 2016

A Member’s View of a PMPA Washington, D.C. Trip

Mike Reader, president of Precision Plus, shares his take on PMPA’s recent two-day Capitol Hill fly-in.

22 Mar 2016

Getting the Most out of Drills in your Shop

The three keys are keeping the drill short, getting the feed rate right and replacing the drill on schedule before it dulls.

16 Mar 2016

Plan, Do, Study, Adjust: The Engine of Continuous Improvement

“The organization shall continually improve the effectiveness of the quality management system through the use of the quality policy, quality objectives, audit results, analysis of data, corrective and preventive action, and management review.”

16 Mar 2016

Stable Process, Stable Profits

The role of stable processes to provide profitability in our high-mix/high-volume shops is often overlooked.

Automation 23 Feb 2016

Automate to Eliminate Non-Value-Added Labor

Automation should free up employees to add even more, higher value-added items to your operations.

15 Feb 2016

Material Influences on the Weldability of Carbon Steel

Carbon equivalents of 0.35 or less are safe to weld without any pre-weld or post-weld heat treatments required. At higher carbon levels, steels may require either pre- or post-weld heat treatment in order to prevent stress buildup and weld cracking.

Workforce Development 15 Feb 2016