Rutba Manufacturing on film: a walnut table released to the floor, and what it costs

The Rutba manufacturing apps run a workshop from the bill of materials to the bench. The film below shows them at Granite and Grain, a furniture maker in Leeds we invented, which makes dining tables and chairs, kitchen doors and smaller pieces in oak, ash and walnut.

Play the film

Rutba Manufacturing: from the bill to the bench, with the machines behind it (5:18).

The work in hand

Manufacturing opens on the open work orders and the pieces still to make, with charts of finished orders and quality results. Every job is a work order with its product, quantity and due date. A job already on the floor, twenty-three painted shaker doors, shows each routing step given to a maker, and its cost so far against the standard set in the bill, with four steps still to go.

Releasing a job

Every product has a bill of materials and a routing. The walnut coffee table takes walnut board, fixing buttons, glue and oil, through eight steps from cutting to packing, and its bill is versioned. Releasing the order puts it on the floor and pins the bill version in force that day, so a later change to the bill cannot alter this job. The standard cost appears straight away, split into materials and labour, before the first board is cut.

Materials arrive in lots, each delivery of timber or fittings with its own code, so every piece made can be traced back to the boards it came from.

Planning and the floor

Rutba Planning lays the scheduled work against each work centre’s hours. With the table released, the finishing room needs more hours over the next three weeks than it has, and the film shows where. Rutba Shop Floor is where the benches report: a tablet paired to a work centre records when each step starts and stops and how many pieces came out good.

Quality and maintenance

Rutba Quality keeps every inspection, and every fault found becomes a non-conformance with what was wrong and what was done: most of the year’s were reworked, a few scrapped for splits in the timber. Rutba Maintenance looks after the machines, raising services by the calendar or by running hours; the panel saw’s blade change is on the list because its meter is six hours short of the next change.