"gives speed to our manufacturing operations, which in turn gives speed to our customers." So says the industrial engineering manager of MPE, a metal fabricator following a roadmap to quick-response manufacturing. From 2006 to 2007, MPE Inc., Milwaukee, WI (with a second plant in Mexico), saw sales of its medical carts and tables, and similar fabricated-metal products and assemblies climb by nearly 10 percent, Impressive enough, but I really sat up and took notice when I learned that over that same time period its material costs dropped by $300,000. How can a fabricator increase sales while reducing material costs? "More efficient material utilization," explains MPE's Jason Grundel, manager, industrial engineering. "Better nesting - which also led to a 15-percent decrease in the average run time of our sheets - has increased our material utilization by 30 to 40 percent." Specifically, material utilization on MPE's combination turret/laser machines has jumped from 50 percent to 85 percent, and on stand-alone laser-cutting machines from 60 percent to as high as 95 percent. The secret to success: the switch from static nesting on separate software packages for its various machine models, to dynamic nesting with Jetcam software.
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