What is the value in you provide in your job?

Back in the day, I used to wake up at 4:00 AM to be at the plant by 5:00 AM to prep for shift changeover as 3rd makes way for 1st in a real life honest to goodness stamping plant. In those days as a technical consultant, our job was to assist the plant in realizing their goal -- filling parts racks.

We invariably would get into highly theoretical spats (two diemakers, one metallurgist, and me made for just a little bit of over analysis), at which point Lance would remind us; "Guys, don't let perfect get in the way of better." I guess that is why he is the Plant manager now and we are all still dieguys slugging it out in the consultants pool.

Yes we have all been striving to make "science out of the art of stamping", but ultimately the idea is to stamp out sheet metal parts and in many cases the parts and dies don't know that the simulation was or was not done. What is true is that the simulation helped solve some part of the problem, but solving the simulation was not the goal; it was a means to the end.

Now i see the same thing happen with the die processing tool we have been trying to bring to market. We show it to many die process planners who look at it and ask, "Can it make reports that look just like ours?" and I need to ask these same people, is your job planning the process or making reports. And not surprisingly they say that planning processes are their jobs, but their insistence on having just the right reports shows me that they have lost sight of the value the bring to the process, their expertise in process planning (not in report writing). Now just have to get them back on track.

Planning a stamping process is more than making a sketch of the part with some nice little line depicting the trim stages. It should be a critical analysis of the capabilities of the dies and presslines to contain the process that is being described. This requires very highly developed sense of space and 3D visualization skills. Often this planning had been done with little more than a sketch. From which the gurus of processing would be able to define appropriate die tips, trimming segmentation, and process order.

The work was the thinking, the report was a document to capture their ideas. But these days more and more people are focused on making the reports, without the critical thinking. If the report pictures are pleasing it does not matter if a person every looked at the part. That seems wrong. What effort makes process planning better? Prettier pictures or a tool that enable die process planners to better visualize and capture their decisions (which might actually allow for skipping the paper)?

Think about it.