Bowman Tool & Machining, Inc Delivery Performance

Bowman Tool & Machining, Inc. (BTM) a Rochester based CNC machining company not only ships with very high quality but also has a very reliable delivery history. In fact, Bowman Tool & Machining, Inc. has shipped on time every month for the last 2 years! This is no small feat considering the complexity of the parts BTM machines. Several parts BTM machines are very complex weigh more than 1000 pounds and have more than 900 features. What is the secret to our success? Over our over 42 years of continuously operation we have developed and enhanced our company in four main areas to get to this world class level of delivery performance.

We maintain our own equipment with a heavy focus on preventative maintenance. This assures our machines have very low downtime. As a backup in the low likelihood the machining centers are down, and we have critical deliveries we have backup machining centers that parts can be transferred in a few hours.  This protects our customers manufacturing lines and insures we ship on time.

Our machining centers are scheduled based on a long-term plan. Our Plant Manager, Joe Howe, schedules our line based on a 4-week rolling demand from our customers with daily releases. Joe has 22 years of experience at BTM. He started BTM running a machining center and has worked his way up to Plant Manager. Joe knows every process in our factory as he has created most of them! Joe also has an intimate knowledge of our customers and their needs. Over the many years of working at BTM and communicating with our customers Joe has learned to anticipate problems and schedule our complex machining centers proactively.

Communication is key to setting correct delivery expectations. We continuously communicate with our customers. It is not uncommon for us to have several conversations with our customers daily. This helps us tweak our machining operations to real time customer needs. BTM strives for clear and consistent communications with our customers and suppliers to prevent surprises and keep a smooth flow of machined castings to our customers.

BTM operates at a very high-quality low defect rate to keep daily surprises to a minimum and assure consistent high delivery performance. The ISO 9001:2015 registered team at Bowman Tool and Machining continues to apply advanced quality planning techniques along with robust continuous improvement methodologies allowing BTM to be recognized as a top tier supplier to our customers. In fact, during fiscal year 2018, one of our larger customers received over 135,000 highly complex machined castings 100% on time with an annual parts per million score of less than 120 PPM. Some of the product we produce requires our processes to control tolerance ranges of less than 15 microns and, may include up to 900 features per part. We are recognized as an industry leader at providing cost-effective and successful new product introductions, and really excel at working with our customers design and procurement personnel as a significant contributor/facilitator to ensure the end-users needs are satisfied entirely.

Our Quality Policy contains the words continuous process improvement. While we cannot ship better than 100% on time, we can build on our 24 months of continuous on time shipments and that is exactly what we intent to do!