Machine Shop

For decades, the Toromont hydraulic machine shop was neglected and received little support due to the niche knowledge in its operations. The machine shop consists of 13 machinists, and 4 welders spread over three shifts and operate 115 hours a week supporting as the backbone to the remanufacturing process.

My involvement in the machine shop was initially to introduce the Toromont service scheduler, a planning tool and work to plan the machine shop operations and integrate the operations of the machine shop into the planning tool. As more special functions were added to the software, I transferred the machinists from an excel spread sheet based planning, to the dynamic scheduling tool completely within 1 month.

I realized the functionality of the program would allow for a concise form of communication for the machinist on off-shifts to communicate as well as provide all the necessary specifications for all the remanufacturing they would perform.

While performing this I took responsibility on the floor making sure machines were in working order say in and day out and they had the appropriate tooling to complete all jobs at hand.

The WIP list ( Work In Progress) is a list compiled for each department showing all jobs that are open that have not been worked on for greater than 60 days. At the start, the machine shop had a WIP list that contained 55% of all open jobs. Within three months and coordination with multiple supervisor, I quickly brought the QIP list to 0%.

Beyond that, the machine shop went from having too much uncoordinated work, to having insufficient amount of production work due to the planning efficiency brought forth. While at the beginning of my internship I had supervisors coming to me to ensure the jobs for their department where completed, it came to it that I was going to them asking if they had more jobs to do even though their production rate never changed.