Keystone 
Industries
Precision engineering
Small repeat batches, tight tolerances, and drawing revisions that have to be controlled across the life of a part.
What is different about running one of these
- 01
Batches are small and repeat, often on call-off against a schedule rather than a single order.
- 02
The same part may be made to several revisions over its life, and the customer expects you to know which one shipped when.
- 03
Inspection is a routing operation, not an afterthought, and first article is its own piece of work.
- 04
Margin per job is thin enough that an hour of unrecorded setup matters.
Where it usually goes wrong
Which revision was this batch made to
A drawing is revised, a repeat order arrives, and the job is raised against whatever is current. Six months later the customer asks about a batch delivered in March and the answer depends on somebody remembering the timing.
Setup absorbed into nothing
Setting up for a batch of twenty takes as long as it does for a batch of two hundred. When setup is not booked separately, the small batches look profitable and the large ones carry them.
Repeat work quoted from memory
The part has been made before, so the price is “what we charged last time”, without knowing whether last time made money.
What helps, and why here in particular
- 01
Parts, revisions and routing snapshots
The works order records the revision it was raised against, so what shipped in March is a matter of record rather than recall. - 02
Actual job costing
Setup and run are booked as operations, so the cost of a short batch is visible rather than averaged across the month. - 03
Quality and traceability
First article and in-process inspections sit in the routing, and a non-conformance links to the material it came from.
Next step
See it against precision engineering 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.