SMITH & WESSON
To support new product launches, Smith & Wesson needed to increase throughput of its production of revolver frames. However, the firearms manu-facturer wanted to avoid, if possible, having to add new machine tools to ac-complish its production goals.
After extensive evaluation, Smith & Wesson determined the best plan of at-tack would be to target aluminum re-volver frames, the highest volume frames produced at the company. The strategy was to chip away portions of time from individual machining operations to re-duce overall revolver frame cycle times. While the reduction of part cycle times is always a goal at Smith & Wesson, the challenge was to do so without compro-mising part quality.