When I got home after my first day, I was asked for my impression and I blurted out that: I was working for the biggest bums on the face of the earth! On the second day I found out this wasn't true because I met the customer who was taking half their volume. He was numero uno; the inventor of just-in-time but without the present concept of partnership alliances between vendor and customer.

Every day at 10 AM he called and said: "I want for tomorrow" ... and then hung up the phone. His wants were full truckloads of wooden, lock-cornered, jewelry boxes and this first job dumped me right into a snake pit of short interval scheduling and inventory control. We were indeed a customer driven company. Calling my bosses "customer driven" is perhaps a gentler term than what I called them then, but they realized that survival and prosperity depended not only on giving this customer the delivery, quality and quantity he wanted, but on the need to balance all this with profit.

These were commodity products and the only way to keep this business and make the profit necessary for survival was to control manufacturing with efficient systems. Not only was overnight delivery expected, but the customers also expected the lowest price. And, we shared this business with four competitors. Our game plan was simply to be the lowest cost, on time, producer. One of the partners, Louie, had only one idea for increasing productivity; that was to squeeze the shop. He worked on the simple premise that his shop was staffed by apes while the chimps worked in the office and he deflected mutiny by occasionally throwing bananas. The other partner, Bernie, and I took a more enlightened approach; we looked to mechanization and systems. Some incidents still remain etched in my mind.

Bernie and I went to the Woodworking Machinery Fair which, at that time, was in Greensboro. (This was two venues ago -- before Louisville and Atlanta.) I really looked forward to it, for I would finally see the double end tenoners and boring machines often pictured in "WOOD" but rarely seen in real life in the New York area. We did the unthinkable! We bought a Jenkins slat bed panel saw for $30,000 at a time when the most expensive piece of equipment in the factory was a manual overhead router costing $2,000. Louie accused me of taking Bernie out and getting him drunk. He wanted to fire me for wasting his money. Needless to say, this machine became Louie's pride and joy and was the first thing he showed to visitors. It enabled them to double volume without hiring more employees.

Our first modern machine opened my eyes to some disturbing production realities. Initially, setup time on the panel saw was longer than run time and we were outperformed by a table saw costing one-tenth the price. Our apes, who could fling 4' x 8' panels all day long, could barely read and were lost with the arithmetic calculations required to position the saw blades. We had to simplify manufacturing instructions so they could do their jobs and the office chimps had to spend time on the floor training them in their new jobs. The chimps quickly learned how back breaking the labor was and acquiesced to installing scissor lifts and other material handling devices so we could recruit shop employees for their brains rather than just brawn.

To meet our short term scheduling goals we needed to track labor hours, machine utilization, and inventory usage ... long before IBM came on the scene. We had a wonderful computer, Selma, who tallied up the labor for 100 employees and the inventory changes, all while chewing gum and talking on the phone to her friends. Although we eventually added more production control staff, hands on management control and manual systems peaked out when we tried to exceed our critical mass of 100 shop employees. Louie and Bernie realized this and rather than expand, they milked this cash cow and sold it to a conglomerate before it went dry.

My first exposure to real computers was in the late 60's at a furniture company which had one dimension mill and five assembly plants. Luckily it also had a plant making rocket grenades for the Army. Uncle Sam bought us a beautiful mainframe computer, at a time when our competitors were just using mechanical calculators. We could track labor and material usage, not just for 100 employees but for more than 1,000; knew our productivity on a daily basis; and could accurately project material and labor needs. This operating information prepared us to stare down a corporate bum - a leading department store chain that gave us open ended promotional orders that allowed their stores to order any finish or fabric. It was a one sided deal where suppliers couldn't be guaranteed quantities but were penalized for late deliveries. Our ability to convert orders into factory requirements on a daily basis was the key to survival.

Some bums I cursed weren't people, but machines and factories. I remember trying to help edit a simple program to cut out a speaker baffle on an early Ekstrom Carlson CNC router. It was far from user friendly and you had to key-punch the code directly onto a paper tape which was then read by the CNC controller. There was not even circle logic; each change of direction and acceleration of the X and Y axis had to be entered on the paper tape. By the time we were done there was more Scotch tape than paper tape but it worked. How early in the CNC's evolution was this? - I remember a project in Japan the same year (1970) and a visit to Shoda whose premier export machine was a surfacer/planer and to Heian who was building double end tenoners. At that time, Porter, (a name long gone), dominated the automatic router market with a machine which used electric eyes to trace the path of a full size drawing. It wasn't very sophisticated but it was almost as user friendly as the post-processing programs today that transfer an AUTOCAD drawing directly into CNC machining center code.

Although computers and software remained an American product, the shift from solid wood furniture to panel products opened the door to many innovative foreign equipment manufacturers. Their most important contribution was not raw technology but the equipment that was targeted at short run and custom producers. They also opened the door for new sales companies who had been frozen out of the traditional franchises. Some of them built their organizations on service and have prospered. Many, who meant well, were plagued by their European sources who thought that after-sales support meant bracing the machine in the crate. While converting equipment salesmen's dreams into workable factories, I learned to say bum in many languages.

These new sales companies plugged 32mm frameless cabinetry as the best thing since holes in Swiss cheese, scaring the hell out of many face-frame kitchen cabinet companies. What some of them didn't understand was that 32mm was developed as a cost-effective tool for custom shops rather than a mass-production, mass market solution. It meant that a small shop with $100,000 in equipment could become a local producer of cabinets or furniture fragmenting the established market. While the dinosaurs were busy swatting at these flies along came the home centers with an insatiable demand for conventional kitchen cabinets as well as k-d frameless cabinets and furniture. Winners and losers in this commodity market were quickly determined by their ability to deliver large quantities of quality products on time.

Successful small companies face a different problem: how to distance themselves from new startup operations. After all, they themselves had started with just a table saw and staple gun. They need to get a cost advantage and improve customer service. On-time delivery and quality have become just as important for them as for the home center suppliers. On a smaller scale, their needs are the same; machines that are easy to set up along with effective methods and systems.

Regardless of size, the truly defining factor of success is effective factory management. "Bum" machines or managers are creatures of your perception; they continue to exist only because of blind loyalty and inertia. Improve your work environment and they'll disappear. You need dependable equipment that doesn't let you down and you need a supportive management team that works to solve problems not just for today’s "home runs" but to ensure your company's future.