Beavers—changing to low inventory manufacturing

This paper is in two sections. The first outlines the case history of how Beaver Machine Tools of Norwich introduced just-in-time manufacturing techniques as a lifeline to survive in its highly competitive market. Following a successful pilot in sheetmetal the full implementation was introduced including: supply, GT cells, set-up reduction, quality improvement and the simplification of systems and procedures. The second section focuses on a special project developed by production engineering to convert a normal CNC machine into a zero set-up machine using low technology. This gave Beavers the ability to manufacture very small batch sizes on short lead time in line with both JIT and OPT philosophies.