Ramping up production at the new plant and shipping our first order.
Building the Production Line
I busted into the new plant like a man on fire. Actually, got here the first week of April, then showed up for work the second week after unloading the U-Haul into my tiny new apartment. Jim and Joe got the truck unloaded that first week, so by the time I showed up I found our new corner of the plant heaped full of boxes and disassembled tables.
This was a LOT of work. Junk was piled everywhere and while the two maintenance guys rebuilt the disassembled workbenches, Jim and I began piling the boxed up equipment in their new locations. For two days the whole production floor was heaps of tables and boxes that we slowly unpackaged and assembled. By Wednesday most of the benches were in place with their specific equipment sitting on top. By Thursday Jim had most of the solder stations assembled and working, while I set up the test stations and computers.
On Friday Joe did a setup on the big laser machine and Rosana did a quick production test. This was all right on schedule by my estimation - we now had enough equipment working to build products and we could start bringing in people by Monday to start training.
The training schedule we agreed on was to bring in three people at a time, every other day. We didn't want a situation where we had more trainees than trainers. Our most difficult part of the process is soldering, so we started everyone there so we could determine quickly if they were going to workout on this line. With Rosana as the line lead, Elia as the lead trainer, and Vilma flown in from Vancouver for two weeks, we were all ready to go.
This isn't your normal hand soldering, this is hot-bar soldering of tiny coaxial cables under a microscope. Our typical cable is a ribbon of about ten coaxial cables in a width of a half inch. We use Joe's laser machine to strip ends of the cable, and expose the center conductors and shields, then we solder them to the circuit board using a hot bar that solders the whole thing at once.
It's a difficult process to master, but after the first few days our new group was looking pretty good. We kept two of the three from each day and by the end of the week we had several that were making high quality cables in two different sizes. As the week rolled on the early arivals were branching into other areas of the process to free up solder stations for the new folks, and that gave us a good mix of skills for starting production next week.
While we were still training and evaluating the new people that first week, word came down from our main customer that they wanted us to move up our production schedule. We need to build 5 evaluation units for seven different products and they wanted them in one week, which is flattly impossible. They were originally scheduled for the end of May, so I had to come up with an agressive schedule that was more do-able.
Then at the same time we got word from another customer that they wanted us to build a big pile of cable assemblies that weren't even on our build plan. So now our new plan was to attack this big pile (70 of them) as quick as possible to see if we could get a big chunk of money rolling in before the end of the month. It seemed like a big pipe dream to me - the trainees haven't even been there a week yet.
I whipped together a detailed schedule based on the standard build times that we document in our assembly instructions, but then I had to guess as to how fast this group of trainees could actually build product. This second customer's order of 70 actually worked in our favor because it was the easiest product of the bunch and would be a great way to get this group to work like a team.
But it just so happened the first customer wanted their products in the order of most difficult first, which was suicidal in my mind. So I reversed the order to give us a simple progression where each product got more difficult, building on the previous product with new skills at each step. After guessing at the timing, this new schedule had us completing all the builds in only four weeks, leaving us a week to spare before the end of May deadline.
So on that third week we all went at it. Rosana and Elia coordinated the six new workers dispersed throughout the process, while Jim and Vilma continued training, and I assembled and tested a few last pieces of equipment. And then by the end of the week we shipped our first order of 62 on schedule! We had 8 damaged units that couldn't ship but this was impressive - a week to build the line, a week to train new people, and a week of production to ship our first big order.
So in our second week of production we are still on schedule, but we will quickly be off schedule because the stock room can't get us our parts on time. But that's another story for the next section.
Mike
Click these thumbnails to popup the big pictures
Team HDSI in Vancouver
Joe, Rosana, Tran, Me.
Team HDSI doing lunch in Long Beach
Me, Elia, Joe, Jim, Rosana.
Rosana trying out the newly installed equipment. The big picture windows are a nice touch.
Long Beach Index
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