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How'd you fix that?
Doing It The Hard Way Is Costing You More Than The Fix Ever Would
The cost of not acting is real. And it keeps accumulating while the decision waits.
kevinpduggan
6 min read
Unfinished Extrusion Business on the Shop Floor: How Poor Record Keeping Leaves Good Solutions on the Shelf
Plants can many times be unaware of their unfinished business. Problems that get identified, partially worked, then quietly dropped when the person pushing them moves on. Nobody documents it. Nobody picks it up. The problem just keeps costing money. The Oval HDPE Pipe At one plant, a sharp extrusion technician looked at our equipment and realized we had capacity we weren't using. He pushed the extruders and got 20% more output from the extrusion pipeline...that was huge!
kevinpduggan
6 min read
We Did the Work Right. But With the Wrong Tool on the Wrong Problem
Half of all the Extruded Profiles went directly to the scrap bin We ran five weatherstrip profiles on an extrusion line. Each one had its own compression force target and its own tolerance window. We had been running them long enough to think we understood the process. But the scrap kept coming. The hit rate stayed poor. We were burning through material and time, and nobody had a clear answer for why. So the group somehow decided we should build a FMEA to solve our problem.
kevinpduggan
4 min read
The Job Isn't Done Until You've Verified It.
Three incidents. Three times direction of flow was assumed rather than confirmed. Three times we paid for it in scrap and downtime that did not have to happen.
kevinpduggan
4 min read
A Pile of Money Sitting in the Yard Behind the Plant
The lesson we carried from this one had less to do with feed section/screw temperatures and more to do with how we approached the problem
kevinpduggan
3 min read
Method Over Memory: A Systematic Approach to Extrusion Problems
When Your Checklist Fails and Panic Sets In
kevinpduggan
11 min read
On the Shop floor, Plastic Extrusion troubleshooting, problem solving, optimization tips, and process standards for the plastic extrusion team — from decades of hands-on experience
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