Japanese Job Shop Report#3　Musashi Giken(1/2)

Repeated products are the best new products
Musashi Giken is good at machining difficult-to-cut materials for semiconductor manufacturing equipment.
It covers a wide range of processes, from turning to milling.  President Kawano said “Hastelloy, one of the difficult-to-cut materials is not special.”  He pursues the basic skills and improves quality and delivery time.
Repeat orders account for 70% of the total sales, but they cannot be designed or processed under the same machining conditions as much as possible.
With the motto of “repeat products are the best new products,” Musashi Giken will always challenge work with higher machining conditions.

Machining difficult-to-cut materials is not special

Almost order is machining of difficult-to-cut materials.
The machining of Hastelloy C-22(=photo), which has high corrosion resistance, accounts for 80% of the total sales.  It also deal with heat resistant alloys like inconel and titanium alloys.  Especially, there are many business results in thin material processing including SUS 316L of difficult-to-cut material.  For example, the flatness of a ring-shaped work (diameter 300 mm, thickness 7 mm) machined by Musashi Giken is as much as 1/100 to 2/100mm. Much of the work is for semiconductor manufacturing equipment.
Ring-shaped workpieces are assembled and used as modules, so the customer’s request accuracy is high. The semiconductor manufacturing equipment accounts for 80% to 90% of the total, and it deals with automobile development-related parts and aircraft parts. In addition, 70% of all products are repeated order.

“Repeated orders are the best new products. We can learn only from failures,” says President Musashi Kawano(=photo). “So we’re educating our employees to make meaningful failures.”
It has in-house rules that do not apply repeat products under the same process design or processing conditions as much as possible, secure accuracy first, followed by strict adherence of delivery time.  Anyway, Musashi Giken recommends their employees to try “offensive” machining every time.

Mr. Kawano says he doesn’t do anything special, just focus on the basics, but the high repeat rate is proof of customers’ confidence.  It has grown day to day by not doing the same processing.  The amount of work is also stable.
It is a small jobshop with five employees.  Although the number of employees has doubled from the time of startup, it is difficult to handle even if production efficiency is constantly improved by a management system developed and operated independently.  Thus, Musashi Giken is often outsourcing to partner companies. At that time, it will share the processing conditions with those companies to maintain quality and efficiency.

President Kawano is in charge of lathe machining. Though he can carry out the machining of difficult-to-cut materials, he started the metal machining in his late twenties. He remembered his work using a general-purpose lathe for the first two months.
“Hastelloy is the kind of material I cut by machine for the first time.” he recalls. “It takes time for hand-grinding of the bite, and I concentrates it until the day ends. That’s fun. It’s the starting point of my job.”

…..continue to(2/2)