We are a job shop with 9 machinists and a total staff of 22, 30 Swiss Automatics (Citizen & Maier), 1 Brother Speedio 700X1 Mill and a handful of manual machines. I am our Tool Crib Manager, a position that was new to our company a year ago. In the past, tools were loosely organized in divided Lista cabinet drawers. These tools could have been excess tools from a completed job or tooling that was used on a daily basis. All tooling was “on the shop floor” and accessible to everyone. We have a vendor provided CTMS/Matrix vending system provided by one of our vendors that was installed a few years ago. I am very happy with it and it works extremely well for tooling, particularly on long run jobs. We have only scratched the surface on its capabilities. It is very feature rich. One feature I really like is the ability to set up Customers, Part Numbers and Machines as Cost Centers. This also aides me in the creation of Tooling Lists for jobs. This is also something I created as part of this position. It was was pretty easy to set up and is very easy to maintain, essentially just activating/deactivating Customers and Part Numbers as jobs are started/completed. It provides tool costs for quoting and job costing with no extra effort. When a machinist checks out/issues items, they select the Customer and Part Number and Machine #, the light on the appropriate drawer lights and the latch on the bin associated with that tool is released. That transaction is also assigned to a Cost Center. It is a little effort on the machinists part, but they do not complain, and they are able to choose from a drop down list, which should continue to be pretty short, because it is just active Customers and Part Numbers. Our Matrix was recently upgraded to V6.5 and I am experimenting with with a sub feature of Cost Centers referred to as Item Limitation or Adding Items to Cost Centers. It allows me to list the tools related to a particular Customer and Part Number, so only the tools used on that job are available to the machinist for check out/issue. This should essentially eliminate wrong tooling being checked out for a job. I am only planning on implementing this feature for long run jobs or repeat jobs. It it pretty quick to set up, but I don’t see much point in setting it up for jobs that only run a few days. We use a massive white board that has a room for all of our machines and job prints, so you can quickly see staged jobs on hold jobs, jobs that need programming, setup, tear down and those that are running. We have daily meetings with QC/Shipping and Processing at the white board to review jobs and we have a separate meeting with the machinists to again review jobs. Similar meetings but different topics. These have proved to be very helpful and everyone is on the same page! They are usually only 10 minutes each and at the most 15 minutes. I implemented Purchase Requisitions so I know who and how to notify machinists when tools come in that they have requested. Most of the time, they get hung on the machine running the job. Previously, everything was ordered off of a scrap piece of paper at best. We have also implemented Tooling Lists for our jobs. We had very rudimentary Tear Down sheet that didn’t list Mfr or P/Ns for tooling nor did it even list Customer Part Numbers and almost never did it list Revision Levels. I created spreadsheet templates in Apple Mac Numbers for all of our Swiss machines which have some basic information about each machine Machine # Mfr Model Type Bar Feeder Collet Style and OD Guide Bushing Style Main Spindle Collet Style Sub Spindle Collet Style These templates then become the basis for our Tooling Lists. Tooling Lists are essentially defined by Customer Number Part Number Revision Level Machine # Occasionally material OD when we have the same job that has run with different size bar stock I won’t list all of the items that we include, but suffice it to say, it includes enough information for someone to gather all of the needed tooling and begin machine setup. It also provides them with Mfr names and P/Ns so any missing tooling can be ordered. There are probably better ways to do this, but this is working for us at the moment. Of course the Matrix is only used for higher volume items. This leaves thousands of other tools that are not in the Matrix and are not managed. Many of these items are just loose in drawers. It’s a bit of a nightmare and probably results in us not using tools that are on-hand for a job because they tool can’t be easily identified or you have to look through 25 tools to find the one you want. My dilemma is how to manage this tooling. I have spreadsheets Apple/IOS (numbers) for many items now, but that is certainly not a good long-term solution and it doesn’t really manage the inventory. One options is to use the Matrix to manage all of our tooling. We can establish a Non-Automatic cabinet that allows us to use the Matrix software to manage items outside of the Matrix. I have concerns about the file maintenance required to implement this solution and “wasting time” entering one off tooling for a particular customer/job that we may never see again. Of course that tooling certainly could be used on another job.