Whew, a lot of responses but none on use of a full blown ERP suite. Well we use a product called Visual Enterprise which has an interface to a number of CAD packages. It is a full blown ERP suite of the tier2 level, tier1 being SAP and the likes. We don't use the interface for the CAD package as...
I suppose from a different angle, the theory of constraints dictates that the process is controlled by the slowest operation, therefore if you know that it is around 80 seconds but you are producing at say 20 second intervals then you know that the limiting process has a cycle time of 20 seconds...
I work in the spring making industry and what you are describing is what we call a scrag. When applied to a spring the material is placed in a state of higher stress than normally applied (but lower than yield - so long as they don't mess up), and this allows the material to be mechanically...
