The Challenges in Aerospace Parts Manufacturing and how Superior Thread Rolling is Overcoming Them

In today’s challenging times, supply chain delays have become commonplace, including in the Aerospace parts manufacturing sector. The difficulties have been expounded by recovery from COVID and the raw material shortages. These supply chain issues have caused many Aerospace manufacturers to experience delivery delays to their customers. 

The recovery from the pandemic has revealed a lot about the importance of good scheduling and organization when it comes to the manufacturing process. Accurate cycle times at each step of the manufacturing process contribute to the overall efficiency of the company, and a well-organized schedule can improve the company’s ability to reliably manufacture and deliver products to their customers. 

How COVID Affected Aerospace Parts Manufacturing

When the pandemic first hit, the Aerospace parts manufacturing market crashed entirely. No one wanted to travel, let alone in an airplane, and as a result, the manufacturing of aircraft slowed to a halt. That in turn led to less material purchases for airplane parts and related applications. There was complete uncertainty too over whether or not business travel and similar functions would return. Complicating this concern was the necessity of using video calling platforms. 

This led to mass order cancellations and as a result, mass layoffs at companies, especially the mills that produce the necessary materials for the industry. And this was already a slow-moving sector of the industry, because processing raw materials into a workable product takes a lot of time. 

There were other unexpected changes that arose. Two industries related to Aerospace that didn’t shut down, Defense and Space, experienced little to no impact from the pandemic. They had much less competition now for the resources that had traditionally been dominated by the much bigger Aerospace industry. Once the Commercial Aerospace industry started ramping up, material suppliers experienced increased demands beyond what they were currently capable of handling. 

All of this had led to a shortage of raw materials. Mills haven’t been able to keep up with the needs of all these industries, especially as there’s only a handful of mills that can process some of the necessary raw materials. As a result, many manufacturers can’t find the materials they need and have to wait for them to become available or find an alternative, leading to increased lead times and later delivery dates. 

How Those in Aerospace Parts Manufacturing Can Combat These Challenges

Over the past several years, Superior Thread Rolling has been taking steps to improve our efficiency and our delivery times. Throughout this progress, we have improved our system in order to provide more transparent communication with our customers. These steps have helped us greatly as an aerospace parts manufacturer, especially when the pandemic hit. 

Setting up expectations

The most important thing in Aerospace parts manufacturing we’ve made sure to do for our aerospace customers is set up reasonable expectations. We let them know ahead of time whether or not the material they want is available, when it will be available, and offer alternatives such as a different size or grade of the material that is more readily available. Our team does this during the quotation, making sure that we never promise anything that can’t be followed through, and maintain transparency throughout the rest of the process as materials are ordered. 

Good Scheduling

High-quality aerospace parts manufacturing companies use MRP software, or Material Requirements Planning, as well as other valuable scheduling software, to give us a much better idea of our capacity and material availability. We utilize a Master Scheduling program which allows us to quickly analyze our customers’ needs and our open capacity, which in turn allows us to better respond to our customers’ expedited requests. This helps us know what we can and can’t promise at the quoting stage of our manufacturing process. Essentially, MRP is one tool that has allowed us to mitigate supply chain challenges and provide accurate estimates for each job.

The MRP system allows us to analyze the different operations that the job will go through and create a full schedule for it, from start to finish. This schedule then helps us to prioritize, expedite, and organize jobs within each step of the process, and gives us an accurate, real-time view of our entire shop’s capacity. We take steps to ensure we have accurate cycle times throughout our shop, which also helps us to be more organized in our job scheduling. The MRP system also has the added bonus of allowing us to view priority schedules or job lists for each section of our shop, so that our team members are always aware of what they should be working on, how long that process should take to complete, and then what project comes next. 

Without a system like this, other aerospace part manufacturers could be at risk of overpromising and late deliveries, which can negatively affect their relationships with customers. We believe that it’s better to be transparent upfront about what we can and can’t accomplish within the customer’s initial timeline. 

Transparency

At Superior Thread Rolling, you don’t have to call us and ask what’s going on with your project–we have systems in place to tell you. Recently, we’ve added a system for automatic job status updates for all of our current customers on the thread rolling side of our company. This system sends automatic updates letting customers know where the job is at in the process, how many operations need to be completed, and other important information. This way, we can easily provide customers with information that traditionally they would have to call in order to get. This is not only less time consuming for them–it also frees our customer service team to be able to better assist other incoming calls. 

We have been heading in this direction on the CNC manufacturing side of the company as well. Much of the software has been implemented, and is currently being beta tested by volunteers. 

Final Thoughts

Good scheduling is the backbone of customer service and communication. A good scheduling system should be flexible, easy to change, and provide an overview of what’s happening in the shop. However, there are many other steps beyond just a good schedule in order to better understand our shop’s efficiency and capacity, and find ways to improve. The goal is to mitigate supply chain challenges as much as possible, and be transparent to customers about capabilities. 

In need of aerospace parts manufacturing? Superior Thread Rolling is an industry leader specializing in critical and flight safety components for the Aerospace, Defense, and other industries. Contact us to learn more!