It is known that Managing Companies' Proprieties outside the Company facilities is a challengeable task. It is not only the fact of knowing what is involved and with whom it is, but how is its condition, integrity and if the third part is keeping the assets in good maintenance. Also loosing the tracking of the lifetime and costs involved such as depreciation and amortization may cost to the Company a huge amount of money, it can cost intellectual propriety shared, product quality and flexibility to move from one critical supplier to another. In a global market having the control of these assets can be the difference among success and failure either thinking about costs or achieving better quality results. There is also an understanding that this is a complex management and it presents a hard work to be done, considering the passives the companies' already have, the projects being developed, and what is worse not to be sure that the companies own devices, tools, machines and gages may lead in addition expenditure. These situations can lead to a not necessary design change to avoid extraordinary costs which could turn to a poor design just to avoid building a new set of tools while the companies may have already the set or a very similar set built lying in a commercial partner forgotten due to the difficulty of managing all these assets.
The purpose of this paper is to present the Tooling Management System, project which was implemented after 2 years of work. This achievement impacted in: Pricing & Tooling Cost Reduction; Quality Improvements - being able to anticipate quality issues, or drive the issues to a solution without jeopardizing the assets owned; Managerial Efficiency - budget can be driven in the assets that really are urgent based on the market demand; Capital Resources - expend the resources only when it is needed, avoiding planning a budget that may not happen at the time the expenditure was originally allocated; Purchasing Timing Optimization - the system will show based on the internal timing needs when it is necessary to launch the RFQ; Cost Recovery - giving the supplier the importance they do have - addressing the lack of maintenance, or failures that may happen involving company's assets making easier to recover the debts company considers unnecessary; Decision Making - this system also can lead the steering committee to make tough decisions like make or buy, even if it is really necessary to perform an internal process if company has the assets necessary outside its plant lying in a partner facility; Avoid Waist - Most of times companies underestimate the resources they have, and working together with the supplier's and customer's base it is possible to reach the full success in managing the resources.
Resource is the key word for achieving success in this global market of ours, every day growing exponentially, and fast.
The Tooling management System now referred as TMS has a lot of advantages. Being an online database, integrated to the Company Enterprise Resource Planning, it can be remote accessed, and it automatically checks the tooling lifetime; equipment and gages usage, and updates the database as the parts are being delivered to the plant, and possess triggers to advise when it is time to start planning the replacement; when it becomes critical and helps the company to prioritize which assets must come first. Also it monitors interventions such as corrective maintenance and design changes that may affect the total tooling lifetime.
As results it can be stated that for the partners involved, mainly supplier base the benefits of having this system also helped them to use the system to manage all assets that are involved in MWM production, even not propriety of MWM, in their management system helped them to work advanced, making sure that the PDCA circle will do happen and of course, spare a lot of money and resources.