Wondering how other companies do their plating sub-contract operations. Let’s just look at anodizing.
Do you have 1 operation for all colors and Types?
Do you have an operation for each color?
Do you have an operation for each Type?
Just wondering what other companies are doing and any pluses or minuses you might have come across.
One operation - all types of anodizing. We may have more than one anodizing vendor. The vendor will be chosen at the time of the PO, unless the vendor is specified by the customer.
We have a handful of various anodizing ops at our vendors. In our system we just call them ANO-OVOP. The rest is handled by the PO, and the comments attached to the operation.
It’s been done this way for years, for better or worse. I expect we will be tightening up this process in the future, but I still don’t expect separate ops for the types of treatment.
Thanks @NateS , we currently do not call out the Type, but I do see benefit in doing so. If we set up anodize Type II and anodize Type III, we could set the operation comment to be the mil spec.
Are you MTO or ETO? I tend to think that having operations that are one to one is better if orders will repeat.
We are mostly MTO. While we have repeating orders it could be years between the requests. I would like to see more clarity in the operations. This leads to your question. How much is too much? I’m also curious how others break up their operations. Since we have only a couple of anodizing vendors, we have lumped it all together. Having said that, we do have other kinds of heat treatments that the same vendors do. So, one vendor might be responsible for anodizing, heat treating, and/or plating. For each of the distinct types of operations we have a unique op, (HT-OVOP, ANO-OVOP, PLA-OVOP) but the details (specs) are all done inside the comments.
We have 4 anodizers we deal with (not sheet but other aluminum).
Rarely do we ship back to the plant before sending to the customer, we just ship direct from the anodizer.
Our subcontract operations just have one operation “OFF” (unless I have multiple subcontractors for one part. maybe one is a fabricator, and then one an anodizer). If that is the case, we have two OFF steps.
Under that operation is everything that should pull to the PO that they need to do to the product as a comment. Most parts are defaulted to a particular vendor, with the price it is so it all pulls to the PO and there is no pricing variance on the jobs.
We use “TBD” vendor (to be determined) when there is multiple and we need to decide later, or it’s been awhile and I would need to get it requoted if we do that part again.
The resource group OFF has all the subcontract vendors.
The Finish is specified in the part as the part finish. We use that description to also pull on the PO to them.
Since finish is option, we have dashboards that we unhid that column. I can quickly then group by finish, subcontractor, etc.