Keystone 
Industries
CNC machining
Machine capacity is the constraint, and planning improves when utilisation is measured from the control rather than estimated.
What is different about running one of these
- 01
Capacity is machine-limited, but only during the hours somebody is there to load and check.
- 02
Some work genuinely runs unattended overnight; a lot of work that is described as lights-out does not.
- 03
Setup time and run time behave completely differently and should never be one figure.
- 04
Utilisation is quoted in meetings and rarely measured from the machine.
Where it usually goes wrong
Utilisation nobody can evidence
Most shops estimate machine utilisation from job bookings, and those bookings are incomplete. The figure appears in a report that nobody relies on.
Lights-out in the plan but not in the building
The schedule assumes a machine runs through the night. It does, on the jobs that can be trusted to, and not on the rest. Treating both the same makes the plan optimistic without showing where.
A stoppage that nobody links to an order
A machine goes down for four hours. Somebody works out the effect on the promised delivery date later, if at all.
What helps, and why here in particular
- 01
Finite scheduling, labour aware
Keystone narrows capacity to the minutes somebody is rostered to the machine, and counts genuine lights-out capability separately. - 02
Read-only machine telemetry
Keystone reads machine state from compatible controls and joins it to the works order that was running, so a stoppage reports against the job it delayed. - 03
Actual job costing
Operators book setup and run separately against the operation, and Keystone values each at the rate recorded on the movement.
Next step
See it against cnc machining work
A walkthrough starts with your orders, your production flow and your material problems. We follow one of your jobs through the system rather than presenting a feature list.