The hallmark of any machine shop is the quality of the parts they produce. While quality is supposed to be a given, the pandemic led to plant shutdowns and slowdowns, including difficulties for manufacturing shops to attract new employees even with competitive pay and benefits. COVID-19 brought on other challenges, including workforce vaccination, travel restrictions, social distancing needs, and rapid shifts in the market for certain goods because of the pandemic, which has strained the demand for the materials and components needed for those in-demand goods.
At Cass, we’ve developed a baseline quality assurance system that guarantees we will ship high-quality parts on every order. Everything we make passes several in-process checks and a final inspection or won’t go out the door. When your requirements dictate, we can customize our baseline system to your specifications, tailoring our quality assurance system to fit your business needs. We have 75 years of experience with quality assurance tools—SBP, PPAP Cpk, 1st Articles, and more—to help you get exactly the results you require in your precision machined parts.
Cass strategically invests in automated quality control and inspection equipment and strictly maintain and calibrate to NIST traceable standards all of our inspection equipment.
Material Requirements Planning (MRP) helps streamline the manufacturing process through production planning, scheduling, and inventory control. MRP systems allow manufacturers to plan and calculate material requirements, coordinate personnel and machine workloads, and optimally plan purchasing to meet customer demands. In short, MRP helps to determine what is needed, how much is needed and when it is needed.
At Cass we utilize MRP by taking inputs of material costs, material availability, expected demand, forecasting demand, staffing ability, and machinery capacity–all to ensure we can satisfy customers as well as our own production goals.
The main steps in the MRP process include a master production schedule that must account for resource, staffing, and inventory needs, purchasing planning, demand forecasting (a product’s lead time can be shortened and production downtime can be avoided), a bill of materials (includes raw materials, parts, and sub-assemblies needed to manufacture a part).
At Cass we rely on honest conversations with our customers concerning everything from raw material availability, production planning, and JIT order releases to resolve shortages. We use MRP via a clear and understood bill of materials process that helps eliminate waste in materials and to better coordinate machine usage and labor.
Customer satisfaction is always our number one goal – which is usually tied to product quality and on-time delivery. Quality is defined as providing parts that are free from defects, deficiencies, and significant variations. At Cass we excel at high-volume production – producing large numbers of an identical part or product in one run. The cost of poor quality parts can be severely damaging, from product recalls and defects to loss of customer loyalty and damage to brand reputation.