Companies continue to struggle to maintain, manage and control sheet metal stamping operations in a manufacturing environment, but proven strategies and procedures can turn things around. Author Thomas Ulrich, who has been in the die construction business since 1964, played a leadership role in developing a successful and comprehensive preventive maintenance process for large body-panel stamping dies at Chrysler Corp. In this step-by-step guidebook, he delivers a technical, methods-centric examination of the challenges of maintaining, managing, and controlling sheet metal stamping operations. You'll learn how outsourcing, downsizing, and slashing costs can hurt firms; how to take internal steps to improve existing manufacturing processes to improve performance, sustainability, and the bottom line; and how to apply specific methods to bring sheet metal operations under control, thus allowing profit centers to flourish. This is a practical and functional guide that any company can use to successfully improve its sheet metal tool and die operations. Written in easy to understand and precise prose, it serves as an indispensable resource for managers, comptrollers, production managers, PM coordinators, engineers, and anyone working on the front lines of a sheet metal stamping operations.

tooling repair; die repair; just in time manufacturing; JIT practices; manufacturing process control; die maintenance; tool maintenance; sheet metal stamping; stamping maintenance; lean manufacturing practices; work flow management; die downtime; die PM; tooling PM; pressroom optimization; TLC for dies.