Strength in Numbers
The ABCs of High-Speed Converting BY MITCH KLINGHER
O
ne would think that with a high unemployment rate, finding people to work in your plant would be easy, but in my travels, this is still one of the biggest complaints that I hear from converters. Almost everyone is busy, and lead times on orders are getting longer and longer. And while the larger issue is a shortage of paper and sheets, the longer-term problem may very well be difficulty in finding quality people. In the last issue of BoxScore, I talked about whether the current economic conditions for converters would continue, and if they do, what moves converters should be making to secure their futures. I’ve written many articles on the fact that for most of you, machine hours are your most finite resource, and I still firmly believe that. But many of you have challenged this thinking by telling me that they are having massive problems finding people to run the machines. So, in an
64
BOXSCORE May/June 2021
environment in which converters need to find more machine hours to be able to sell and are having difficulty finding good factory workers, the obvious answer is to embrace high-speed converting. This means machines that set up quicker and run faster. It means robotics, pre-feeders and automatic takeoffs, palletizers, more conveyorization, and improved systems. In short, it means a significant retooling and reinvestment in your businesses. But how can you justify this investment, if it does not add any new capabilities for you to sell to your customers? Unless you are a three-shift operation, it is unlikely that labor savings alone will justify the expenditure, unless you are OK with long payback periods. So why spend the money? The short answer is that, for the most part, the more people you have, the more headaches you have, and as I said earlier, it is very difficult to find people who are
happy working at fairly menial jobs in your plant. In addition, people are far more prone to error than machines are, so your defect and damage losses will be minimized. But the key to all of this is that by running faster with more uptime, you will create more machine hours per shift to sell. Every plant has a different set of constraints that they have to overcome, but the biggest common constraint that everyone shares is the finite number of hours they have to utilize their productive capabilities. In my opinion, the goal of every manufacturing company should be the maximization of the number of hours that the company has available to utilize. Management will then have the most options available to it use in the effort to maximize profits. In some circumstances “speed-based” investments are easy to justify. If you assume that the overall cost of each person per shift is $50,000, and you
