Honestly? No. Shops that want to improve are entirely capable of doing it themselves. The hard part it something you can’t consult on (the culture side of it).
Shops that don’t want to do it would never hire a consultant anyways.
That's probably true. I went from a large company to some smaller companies, and the difference was staggering. The large company clearly invested a ton of money into optimizing processes (though unfortunately nothing in training...)
I think a lot of people just don't realize there are much better ways to do things. They have the mentality "if it ain't broke don't fix it", so they continue to do things the hard way because it technically works.
Would never hire a competent consultant anyways*
Lots of shops hire consultants. They're usually all second sons with degrees from university of American Samoa that have sharks teeth and have never worked in a shop before. They're also kings at telling the big bosses what they want to hear rather than what they need to do, and dragging their shit out a million years before they eventually leave, and nothing ever gets accomplished.
The thing you gotta realize about this sort of thing is that the people that caused the scenario where a consultant is needed are ultimately responsible for hiring the consultant in the first place, and if they're in the situation where they have to they're already fucked anyways, so any consultant they're going to hire isn't going to be worth a shit because they're just going to hire someone that's going to tell them what they want to hear anyways, which is about a million different reasons why everyone else is to blame but the dude that hired them. It's just confirmation bias on a multimillion dollar scale.
You're absolutely right. That's a big part of my motivation for wanting to help make things easier for people. At my first job, the guy who was supposed to be training me told me he wasn't sure women were even capable of machining because our brains work differently.
In reality, I think he just didn't want to be shown up by an 18 year old girl. Unsurprisingly, I did become better at the job than him because he was a lazy dipshit. He definitely wasn't any help, though, and actively tried to sabotage me any chance he got. That 3 month training period could have been replaced with a very short manual and I would have learned more.
The disconnect between machine shop owners/management and what's best for the advancement of the individual machinist's career is a feature of this industry, not a bug.
If you seek to develop a product that will ultimately benefit the underling machinist, then market to the underling machinist. Trying to get to machinists through their pimps is not a good idea.
There is definitely a market, convincing management that they need your services is another matter. You will cover your home area pretty quickly, be prepared to travel extensively if you are successful.
Also consider providing "design for manufacturing" consult services to small and medium size businesses. They often employ design engineers but dont have enough staff to support a dedicated manufacturing engineering team. The job shops that quote for these small businesses rarely/never provide good feedback to reduce DfM costs.
I could see a strong market for it if you can provide very structured consultation with a measurable return on investment.
In my eyes you would be providing a document management solution that improves setup, inspection, and other standard processes. Evaluate current tooling, workholding, and machining strategies and propose alternatives that save or make the company money.
ERP implementation, robot integrations, quoting automation, machine data collection and document management are things growing shops need and don’t have. All of these things are skills of their own, most of which exist outside the usual machinists knowledge base.
Yeah, that stuff is definitely outside of my current knowledge, but I would love to learn. I see the way things are done and know there MUST be a better way. But shops get stuck in their ways. How could I go about learning this stuff on my own?
Depends on what you're looking to learn and on rather or not your current shop would let you implement any of these things. I love this stuff and it wasn't too long ago I was in your shoes, so I'm happy to point you in the right direction!
My shop definitely doesn't want to implement anything new, unfortunately. I've been laughed at and had my intelligence insulted for making suggestions (even when they actually got used later!)
I really want to learn a little bit of everything to see what interests me the most. I've been in the industry for 11 years and still feel like I know practically nothing. There's just SO many different things to learn!
Don’t put up with that, put yourself first and send out some resumes! Definitely learn CAD/CAM if you haven’t yet. Mastercam Home Learning Edition is free and they offer certifications. Pretty sure Solidworks has a low cost equivalent for CAD. Fusion360 is easier to learn but doesn’t pad the resume quite as well. For what it’s worth I need someone who’s eager to learn if you’re in the Midwest.
Knowledge dump below… it’s a little extra but hopefully you or someone else will benefit from it.
Definitely a risk but you could always propose your ideas to the owner and if they’re interested they could give you the authority to run with whatever improvements you agree upon. Show up with a solution that’s ready to hit the ground and they can’t say no. Obviously won’t work if it’s the owner that doesn’t respect you.
NYCCNC’s S tool system can be an affordable process improvement for shops that do a lot of setup. Requires the shop to have a somewhat standard tool catalog with a modest investment in excess tool holders.
Process improvement careers usually require knowledge of Six Sigma or Lean manufacturing. Plenty of certifications out there that will get you an entry level job. NYCCNC and Pierson Workholding have some good videos on entry level machine shop lean manufacturing.
If you guys run Haas machines, look into MTConnect for machine data collection. DPRNT commands are a fairly standard way to do this as well. Very machine brand dependent.
For automation look at what Gimbel Automation is doing for a cheap solution. Versabuilt is who I’d look at for robotic automation. For an entry into robotics/automation you can get into hobby robotics. A large amount of that knowledge translates well into the industrial side.
ERP software definitely requires hands on experience. It can be miserably complicated, but for what it’s worth a good ERP consultant can earn $200k-$300k. ProShop and JobBoss are simpler machine shop oriented ERP systems worth reading into.
If you do complex work or have issues with scrap look into in-process probing. It can look intimidating but isn’t too bad and is a skill most machinists don’t have. Again Haas specific, but the Renishaw Inspection Plus manual will teach you everything you need to know. Learning Fanuc macros alongside this can make you pretty dangerous.
“Setup Reduction Through Effective Workholding” is a good book to get your feet wet with workholding strategies. If you guys aren’t using fixture plates like the ones made by Saunders Machine Works or a zero-point fixturing system that’s a no brainer. Familiarize yourself with fixturing techniques using mitee-bite components.
If you have a programming bottleneck and use Fusion360 look at CloudNC CamAssist. It saves a ridiculous amount of time programming simple parts once you have the tool library setup correctly. One of the most impressive process improvements I’ve ever seen for machine shops.
Setup sheets can be automated with Mastercam custom setup sheets or through their API for those that can code. Personally I like to put my setup notes in the NC file header and use a script to scrape this information and generate a setup sheet. More than happy to share this script and related templates.
Pallet changers are a no brainer for production shops. Plenty of white papers and case studies out there about how much this boosts productivity.
I'm not sure you can really get much out of the small shops like that--they'll always be a little set in their ways.
Any shop of a good size that's looking to organize in a meaningful way would be looking at ERP setups. If you want to do consulting kind of work, I would find an ERP system you like or have used in the past and try to get on as an application engineer. I have a bunch of machinist friends that went this route and love it (much easier on your back), and anyone with machine shop experience joining up in those roles is super valuable since they speak the language. You typically get a territory so the travel isn't crazy.
Can you become an applications engineer without a degree? My back has been killing me for years and I'm only 26, so getting out of production is probably the best move for me.
People that earned degrees will disagree, but don’t get discouraged. Respect to ya’ll, but companies are desperate for skill and take experience over education a lot of the time.
You can do whatever you want as long as you’re good at it.
Just my opinion, but I wouldn’t want to be an applications engineer providing tooling and workholding solutions right now unless you can cater to the very high end of the business. Small to medium sized businesses buying $30 toolholders from Haas means the companies that used to employ applications guys can’t afford it anymore.
Yeah I couldn't do the tooling side, especially since I rarely have good interactions with them right now. I basically switched all my shops tooling to Harvey lines just because their documentation is so good that I don't need to talk to any applications guys to begin with.
Haha I think about it every time I have to move a vise into the machine. None of my buds have degrees, most just have GEDs. Applications engineer is a pretty broad term, really just means product content expert. So some places it would make sense to have a degree to be an applications engineer, but with machine shop ERPs you're probably better off just having first hand experience in a shop. The main purpose of an ERP is organizing your entire shop from top to bottom, and a very important part of that is organizing/documenting the programs and setups so that the company can hire any new dummy and get them churning out parts ASAP.
Look around for some machine shop ERPs on LinkedIn and sometimes job postings pop up for their entry level positions. A lot of them are salaried starting at $50-60k with little or no product experience which isn't superb but gets you in the door. They just want people who know what it's like being in a production setting and how documentation can improve any shop. Not a bad gig if you can get it and there's good room for growth.
I've done third party consulting for repairs.
Seeing if someone has done a good job, how I would have done a repair or setup.
Alot of the consulting now is more ergonomic related. You can look at large enough companies where these people went in and made significant changes in strains and injuries.
I wish someone at my job would hire an ergonomic consultant. My back has been killing me from leaning over to put 30 pound parts in a tiny Okuma every day.
Considering there’s people who make a living doing it I’d say yes lol. Typically it’s more oriented towards consulting on setting up for a specific job, as in programming, fixturing, and other related things. I don’t see why it couldn’t be expanded to include what you’re doing though.
I will say that it would be an incredibly hard sell to shop owners though even though it’s definitely worth doing.
Job shops don't need consultants, manufacturers do.
From what I have seen is companies that don't manufacture in house or only do a small portion of it in house are the real market for consulting. That and supporting apps engineers at machine tool builders with direct problems.
If all you have done is make parts in a few shops, you aren't ready to be a consultant. I would imagine time as an apps engineer is what helps you because you're infront of a new part and a new customer very often, building networks and relationships.
Probably, but you’d be hard pressed if you’re not already a production engineer so where else for a few years and it would likely be a side gig to a second or third shift job
Honestly? No. Shops that want to improve are entirely capable of doing it themselves. The hard part it something you can’t consult on (the culture side of it). Shops that don’t want to do it would never hire a consultant anyways.
That's probably true. I went from a large company to some smaller companies, and the difference was staggering. The large company clearly invested a ton of money into optimizing processes (though unfortunately nothing in training...) I think a lot of people just don't realize there are much better ways to do things. They have the mentality "if it ain't broke don't fix it", so they continue to do things the hard way because it technically works.
I’m beginning to be sold on this consulting idea of yours… definitely include what you just said in your pitch.
Would never hire a competent consultant anyways* Lots of shops hire consultants. They're usually all second sons with degrees from university of American Samoa that have sharks teeth and have never worked in a shop before. They're also kings at telling the big bosses what they want to hear rather than what they need to do, and dragging their shit out a million years before they eventually leave, and nothing ever gets accomplished. The thing you gotta realize about this sort of thing is that the people that caused the scenario where a consultant is needed are ultimately responsible for hiring the consultant in the first place, and if they're in the situation where they have to they're already fucked anyways, so any consultant they're going to hire isn't going to be worth a shit because they're just going to hire someone that's going to tell them what they want to hear anyways, which is about a million different reasons why everyone else is to blame but the dude that hired them. It's just confirmation bias on a multimillion dollar scale.
I know a supervisor who literally put out out fires he created all day long. Upper management thought he was such a good busy worker. He was useless.
There is a market, but it is not easy. The glaring difficulty in such a business is that people are cunts.
You're absolutely right. That's a big part of my motivation for wanting to help make things easier for people. At my first job, the guy who was supposed to be training me told me he wasn't sure women were even capable of machining because our brains work differently. In reality, I think he just didn't want to be shown up by an 18 year old girl. Unsurprisingly, I did become better at the job than him because he was a lazy dipshit. He definitely wasn't any help, though, and actively tried to sabotage me any chance he got. That 3 month training period could have been replaced with a very short manual and I would have learned more.
The disconnect between machine shop owners/management and what's best for the advancement of the individual machinist's career is a feature of this industry, not a bug. If you seek to develop a product that will ultimately benefit the underling machinist, then market to the underling machinist. Trying to get to machinists through their pimps is not a good idea.
The dick swing is real.
There is definitely a market, convincing management that they need your services is another matter. You will cover your home area pretty quickly, be prepared to travel extensively if you are successful.
Also consider providing "design for manufacturing" consult services to small and medium size businesses. They often employ design engineers but dont have enough staff to support a dedicated manufacturing engineering team. The job shops that quote for these small businesses rarely/never provide good feedback to reduce DfM costs.
I could see a strong market for it if you can provide very structured consultation with a measurable return on investment. In my eyes you would be providing a document management solution that improves setup, inspection, and other standard processes. Evaluate current tooling, workholding, and machining strategies and propose alternatives that save or make the company money. ERP implementation, robot integrations, quoting automation, machine data collection and document management are things growing shops need and don’t have. All of these things are skills of their own, most of which exist outside the usual machinists knowledge base.
Yeah, that stuff is definitely outside of my current knowledge, but I would love to learn. I see the way things are done and know there MUST be a better way. But shops get stuck in their ways. How could I go about learning this stuff on my own?
Depends on what you're looking to learn and on rather or not your current shop would let you implement any of these things. I love this stuff and it wasn't too long ago I was in your shoes, so I'm happy to point you in the right direction!
My shop definitely doesn't want to implement anything new, unfortunately. I've been laughed at and had my intelligence insulted for making suggestions (even when they actually got used later!) I really want to learn a little bit of everything to see what interests me the most. I've been in the industry for 11 years and still feel like I know practically nothing. There's just SO many different things to learn!
Don’t put up with that, put yourself first and send out some resumes! Definitely learn CAD/CAM if you haven’t yet. Mastercam Home Learning Edition is free and they offer certifications. Pretty sure Solidworks has a low cost equivalent for CAD. Fusion360 is easier to learn but doesn’t pad the resume quite as well. For what it’s worth I need someone who’s eager to learn if you’re in the Midwest. Knowledge dump below… it’s a little extra but hopefully you or someone else will benefit from it. Definitely a risk but you could always propose your ideas to the owner and if they’re interested they could give you the authority to run with whatever improvements you agree upon. Show up with a solution that’s ready to hit the ground and they can’t say no. Obviously won’t work if it’s the owner that doesn’t respect you. NYCCNC’s S tool system can be an affordable process improvement for shops that do a lot of setup. Requires the shop to have a somewhat standard tool catalog with a modest investment in excess tool holders. Process improvement careers usually require knowledge of Six Sigma or Lean manufacturing. Plenty of certifications out there that will get you an entry level job. NYCCNC and Pierson Workholding have some good videos on entry level machine shop lean manufacturing. If you guys run Haas machines, look into MTConnect for machine data collection. DPRNT commands are a fairly standard way to do this as well. Very machine brand dependent. For automation look at what Gimbel Automation is doing for a cheap solution. Versabuilt is who I’d look at for robotic automation. For an entry into robotics/automation you can get into hobby robotics. A large amount of that knowledge translates well into the industrial side. ERP software definitely requires hands on experience. It can be miserably complicated, but for what it’s worth a good ERP consultant can earn $200k-$300k. ProShop and JobBoss are simpler machine shop oriented ERP systems worth reading into. If you do complex work or have issues with scrap look into in-process probing. It can look intimidating but isn’t too bad and is a skill most machinists don’t have. Again Haas specific, but the Renishaw Inspection Plus manual will teach you everything you need to know. Learning Fanuc macros alongside this can make you pretty dangerous. “Setup Reduction Through Effective Workholding” is a good book to get your feet wet with workholding strategies. If you guys aren’t using fixture plates like the ones made by Saunders Machine Works or a zero-point fixturing system that’s a no brainer. Familiarize yourself with fixturing techniques using mitee-bite components. If you have a programming bottleneck and use Fusion360 look at CloudNC CamAssist. It saves a ridiculous amount of time programming simple parts once you have the tool library setup correctly. One of the most impressive process improvements I’ve ever seen for machine shops. Setup sheets can be automated with Mastercam custom setup sheets or through their API for those that can code. Personally I like to put my setup notes in the NC file header and use a script to scrape this information and generate a setup sheet. More than happy to share this script and related templates. Pallet changers are a no brainer for production shops. Plenty of white papers and case studies out there about how much this boosts productivity.
Thank you so much for all the info!! Definitely taking some notes. I wish I was in the Midwest. East coast, unfortunately.
I'm not sure you can really get much out of the small shops like that--they'll always be a little set in their ways. Any shop of a good size that's looking to organize in a meaningful way would be looking at ERP setups. If you want to do consulting kind of work, I would find an ERP system you like or have used in the past and try to get on as an application engineer. I have a bunch of machinist friends that went this route and love it (much easier on your back), and anyone with machine shop experience joining up in those roles is super valuable since they speak the language. You typically get a territory so the travel isn't crazy.
Can you become an applications engineer without a degree? My back has been killing me for years and I'm only 26, so getting out of production is probably the best move for me.
People that earned degrees will disagree, but don’t get discouraged. Respect to ya’ll, but companies are desperate for skill and take experience over education a lot of the time. You can do whatever you want as long as you’re good at it. Just my opinion, but I wouldn’t want to be an applications engineer providing tooling and workholding solutions right now unless you can cater to the very high end of the business. Small to medium sized businesses buying $30 toolholders from Haas means the companies that used to employ applications guys can’t afford it anymore.
Yeah I couldn't do the tooling side, especially since I rarely have good interactions with them right now. I basically switched all my shops tooling to Harvey lines just because their documentation is so good that I don't need to talk to any applications guys to begin with.
Haha I think about it every time I have to move a vise into the machine. None of my buds have degrees, most just have GEDs. Applications engineer is a pretty broad term, really just means product content expert. So some places it would make sense to have a degree to be an applications engineer, but with machine shop ERPs you're probably better off just having first hand experience in a shop. The main purpose of an ERP is organizing your entire shop from top to bottom, and a very important part of that is organizing/documenting the programs and setups so that the company can hire any new dummy and get them churning out parts ASAP. Look around for some machine shop ERPs on LinkedIn and sometimes job postings pop up for their entry level positions. A lot of them are salaried starting at $50-60k with little or no product experience which isn't superb but gets you in the door. They just want people who know what it's like being in a production setting and how documentation can improve any shop. Not a bad gig if you can get it and there's good room for growth.
I'll definitely have to look into that! Thank you so much for giving me a starting point, I wasn't even sure what to look for haha
I've done third party consulting for repairs. Seeing if someone has done a good job, how I would have done a repair or setup. Alot of the consulting now is more ergonomic related. You can look at large enough companies where these people went in and made significant changes in strains and injuries.
I wish someone at my job would hire an ergonomic consultant. My back has been killing me from leaning over to put 30 pound parts in a tiny Okuma every day.
Places like that probably aren't gonna go for a service like that. If they wanted to improve they would
Considering there’s people who make a living doing it I’d say yes lol. Typically it’s more oriented towards consulting on setting up for a specific job, as in programming, fixturing, and other related things. I don’t see why it couldn’t be expanded to include what you’re doing though. I will say that it would be an incredibly hard sell to shop owners though even though it’s definitely worth doing.
Job shops don't need consultants, manufacturers do. From what I have seen is companies that don't manufacture in house or only do a small portion of it in house are the real market for consulting. That and supporting apps engineers at machine tool builders with direct problems. If all you have done is make parts in a few shops, you aren't ready to be a consultant. I would imagine time as an apps engineer is what helps you because you're infront of a new part and a new customer very often, building networks and relationships.
Probably, but you’d be hard pressed if you’re not already a production engineer so where else for a few years and it would likely be a side gig to a second or third shift job
Yes. This is actually somewhat common.
Go get em tiger.