Production Control Update

It’s time for a Production Control Update from the department that manages logistics, material handling, and trucking.

This year, the Production Control Department’s greatest achievement has been taking a more active role in managing our raw material supply chain. We’ve worked hard to negotiate pricing with our long-time steel suppliers and keep material costs stable. Raw material is Fastco’s largest expense. Keeping steel costs controlled enables us to better support our customers and avoid price increases. It also helps us remain competitive in the market.

Goal for 2024 (and beyond!)

Another Production Control Update is that our number one goal for 2024 is to lower machine downtime both internally and due to waiting on supplier. The more the machines run, the higher our absorption can be. This leads to higher productivity and better on-time delivery to our customers.

Open Book Management

Open book management has had a significant impact in helping us achieve our goals. The biggest impact has been the success at engaging everyone in the profitability of the company. Everyone likes the little extra money a profit share can provide. Understanding that cutting costs on raw material and keeping machines running is a big bonus (pun intended) to the potential for continued and higher profit sharing among team members.

Tool Room Update

Recently, the Tool Room’s greatest achievement has been the ability to keep up with required production. We have been a little short-handed. All of our tool room personnel have done a great job working together to keep the tooling output at a high level in order to minimize downtime in other areas due to waiting on tooling. We also had some help from the Engineering department filling in. Thank you to those who helped us out.

I would say our #1 goal for 2023 would be to focus on working on the right tools and keeping up with production. By doing this, we can help to ensure parts are available to minimize downtime in other production areas of Fastco. This allows production to continue and get more parts out the door. In the long run, this means more profit for Fastco and more profit sharing for the employees.

The positive impacts I have seen from open book management in the tool rooms is more buy in from the employees. People have begun to ask “what can we do to help.” I would like to see the tool rooms continue working on new and improved ways to increase our output and overall abilities. I want to see Fastco continue to move forward and try to perfect the Great Game of Business.

by Tom Fredricks, Interim Tool Room Team Leader

Customer Service and Distribution Update for 2023

I’m very proud of our team for meeting their accuracy metric of .22% or fewer errors vs. lines shipped per month all but one of the last 19 months. Any mistakes made in our departments are very visible to the customer, and we want to ensure Fastco is viewed as competent and reliable to our customer base. They’ve done a great job the last year and a half with being accurate and thorough in their jobs, and in turn, serving our customers well. They’ve also managed to do this with the smallest crew that we have ever had in Customer Service & Distribution (CS/DS.)

Team Work and Meeting Goals

Our biggest goal as a team is to get as many shipments out by month’s end as possible. Customer Service looks for opportunities to move up orders and works with our customers to ship orders early when possible, while Distribution really pulls together at the end of each month to push out as many last-minute shipments as they possibly can to help Fastco reach its sales goals for the month.

Open Book Management as a Tool for Success

Open book management has given us all a better grasp on how we are doing as a company, and helps us to see the impact of the shipments we can make by the end of each month on our profits, which will hopefully turn those into profits that we can all share.  It helps provide motivation and gives everyone a better idea of how they can impact our sales numbers through hustling on shipments, pushing for orders to ship early, or asking to sell excess inventory when available.  The improved awareness has also made the team more mindful of looking out for little things we can do to save the company money and help the bottom line.

by Emily Bradfield, Customer Service & Distribution Team Leader

Productivity Improvements in Inspection

In recent months, Inspection has made great strides in improving productivity through our mini game, which started in May and ran through July. Mini games are part of playing the Great Game of Business, which Fastco has been doing for over two years. The purpose of the mini-games is to bring focus and awareness to a particular area needing improvement and to motivate and incentivize the team members involved to improve in that area.

The goal of this mini-game was to increase the department’s labor productivity and volume produced on a monthly basis, averaged over the three months. For 2023, Inspection’s labor productivity goal is 57% and our volume produced goals is 67%.  We worked hard and finished strong, beating our goal in May, June, and July.

Inspection’s Overall Goal

Productivity improvements in Inspection have helped us meet our department’s #1 goal, which is to positively impact net income and on-time delivery. With open-book management, the team has gained awareness of how each department impacts one another. In addition, it has helped us develop a line of sight to reaching our goal.

Personal and Professional Development

As we grow as a department, I’m eager to help each sort crew member meet their development and career goals, along with their personal goals. This includes goals outside of the workplace.

As Fastco continues to progress with open-book management, I hope we continue to focus on beginning with the right leadership. Having the right people in the right places is important. In addition, it is important to build a strong foundation of servant leadership for each team member. We can all be servant leaders in our areas.

by Julie Rogers, Inspection Team Leader

Thread Roll Update 2023

Thread Roll’s Improvement in Cost of Poor Quality

This year, Thread Roll’s greatest achievement has been reducing our cost of poor quality. As of the end of June, we were at about half the  COPQ as we were at this time in 2022, so this is a huge achievement. We are meeting our COPQ goal for the year and I’m really proud of my people for this. We have been emphasizing visual inspections along with parts being in spec and the team has been keeping their eyes on the parts. Our goal for 2023 is to be at less than half the COPQ that we had in 2022 and we are well on our way to meeting that goal.

Thread Roll Update on Productivity

Another big achievement for Thread Roll this year has been our productivity. We have even been able to incorporate additional volume from an cold header that was struggling to keep up with their thread roll volume. I have been pleased with how everyone has come together to add these parts into the mix. Receiving bonus checks as a result of our hard work has helped show the team the importance of working together and the impact of what we can accomplish. In addition, the quarterly incentive profit shares, financial education, and huddles have helped me, the Thread Roll team, and many other team members understand the financials in an eye-opening way that has motivated us to do.

by Matt Kik, Thread Roll Team Leader

Fastco’s Purchasing Department

Fastco’s Purchasing Department’s unofficial mantra is “What we need, when we need it, and what provides the best value to Fastco.”  We do this by keeping inventory levels accurate and appropriately stocked, predicting future demand for tooling, supplies, and similar items, and finding an appropriate level of quality while negotiating the best price/value balance to sustain ongoing operations.  As the gatekeeper of the discretionary spend, this mindset has driven quantifiable savings year over year for the company, and every dollar not spent is a dollar on the bottom line!  We can’t forget our decentralized buyers either, in maintenance and accounting, who have significantly reduced cost in the Maintenance Department and office supply categories.

In addition to the purchasing function, our shuttle operators’ staging of jobs for the headers and watchful eye over inventory levels keeps us ahead of the game and limit tooling related downtime to a minimum.  Our two shuttle operators (Ginny Beld & Tracy Eno) have both been the backbone of our data collection and recording over the past few years which is critically important to ID requirements, and their participation in streamlining processes and standardizing our inventory will pay dividends well into the future.

Communication is critical, not only for the Purchasing Department, but to the entire company. We encourage all departments to ask for what they need and to notice discrepancies and/or and bring them to our attention.

Overall, I am extremely appreciative of my team’s self-motivation and task management.  It’s a good feeling to know we’re all working to move the Purchasing Department in the same direction with the same goals in mind.

by Aaron Headrick, Purchasing Manager

Fastco’s Cold Heading Department

The primary function of the cold heading process is to produce the “blanks” that are the start of the manufacturing operation at Fastco. Cold Heading is a high-pressure, high-speed progressive forming process that uses a series of dies and blows to form parts. At Fastco, our Cold Heading Department manufactures pins and rivets complete and can form the blanks for screws, bolts, and studs.

Cold Heading’s Goal

Our goal is to manufacture quality parts on time and as close to the manufacturing order quantity (or 10% over) as we can. This is critical to the company because any mistakes or missed goals (defects, late delivery, short order quantities) cause problems in downstream operations. This also has a negative financial impact on the company. Conversely, when we perform well we can positively contribute to the financial health of the company.

Pride in Our Work

Our department takes pride in what we do. That being said, Fastco’s process is a complex one. As such, it is the result of the hard work of many people in many departments. Fastco’s Cold Heading Department takes defects very seriously; scrap and cost of poor quality reduction are significant strategic priorities for our Cold Heading and Thread Rolling.

Given the progressive nature of the manufacturing process, a delay or defect in Cold Heading has significant downstream operation impact. When we recognize an issue, we do our best to correct it for future runs. We are continuously innovating process improvements to avoid defects at every level. These include regular part checks and scrap reduction huddles, among other strategies.

As a team leader, I am very proud that the cold heading team is flexible and open to new ideas. Many of our long-term employees (aka old-timers) have seen a lot of changes over the years. Each time the team is tasked to consider a new challenge, they try to embrace the change the best they can and learn from past missteps. We have learned a lot collectively about what works and what doesn’t. We are constantly trying to adapt and improve.

by Jim Wolters, Cold Heading Team Leader