The Mazatrol Cycle Time Audit: Finding the Minutes Your Programs Are Hiding

Here's a sentence I can say after 19 years as a Mazak Applications Engineer and the years since, doing the same work independently through Added Performance Machining in Linden, Michigan: almost every Mazatrol program that has run unchanged for a few years is slower than it needs to be. Not because anyone did bad work. Because the program was written to be safe — safe feeds, safe approaches, generous clearances, a structure that proved out without drama — and once it ran, nobody with the knowledge to question it ever had a reason to. The part shipped. The cycle time became furniture.

The cycle time audit exists to question it, properly.

What an audit actually is

It's a time study, done at your machine, on your running job. I watch the program run the way your operators run it, and I account for where every minute goes: cutting, not cutting, and the gray area in between where most of the recoverable time lives. The usual suspects:

• Approach and retract paths. Tools coming from far away, returning to far away, on every cycle, because that's how the first version was written.
• Feed and speed choices that outlived their reason. A feed chosen for a tooling problem that was solved two years ago is still in the program, taxing every part.
• Unit structure. Operations split or combined in ways that made sense for prove-out, not for production — redundant passes, air cutting, a finishing strategy from a different insert generation.
• Transfer and wait time. On twin-spindle machines especially: one spindle waiting on the other, synchronization gaps, a sub-spindle program that finishes early and idles. This is where the big, invisible numbers hide.
• The non-program stuff. Load/unload realities, chip issues, anything in the cycle that isn't the program but got priced into the quote as if it were machining time.

What you get at the end is written down: the before time, the after time, what changed, and the math in hours per month at your actual volumes. No black box, no "trust me."

What the numbers have looked like

These are documented jobs, and they're the reason the audit exists:

• Second Gear, Op 10, Quick Turn: 10 minutes 27 seconds down to 3 minutes 32 — a 66% cut, across a run of 101 pieces.
• Second Gear, Op 20: 7 minutes 36 seconds down to 4 minutes 13 — a 45% cut.
• Twin-spindle Integrex part, running 200 pieces a month: 24 minutes 17 seconds down to 16 minutes 5 — a 34% cut, which handed back roughly 27 machine-hours a month. Not per year. A month, every month, from a machine the shop already owned.

That last example is the one to think about. Twenty-seven hours a month is a week of spindle time, recovered without buying anything. At any sane shop rate, do that arithmetic against the cost of the audit and the conversation gets short.

Who it's for — and who it isn't

The audit pays when a part runs in real volume, over and over. Repeat production, a part family that's on the machine weekly, a job you've quoted tight and need to make money on. The more times a program runs, the more a minute is worth.

It does not pay on one-offs and short runs, and I'll tell you so. If a part runs four times a year, the engineering time to optimize it costs more than the time it saves, and the honest recommendation is to leave the program alone. Same answer if the cycle is dominated by load time or inspection — the fix there isn't programming, and I'll point at what it actually is. I'd rather hand back a small honest answer than sell you a study you don't need. If your constraint is really that programs aren't written yet, that's contract programming, a different job.

One more fit note: a cycle time audit and training pair naturally. When I find the dead time in your program, your programmer watches me find it — and the next program he writes doesn't have it. Shops that want that compounding effect usually fold the audit into on-site training days.

The pitch, such as it is

You don't have to believe the percentages. Send me a part that runs every week and tell me its current cycle time. If I don't think there's real time in it, I'll say so before anyone books anything.

If a program has run unchanged for years

Send me the part, the machine, and the control version. I'll tell you what's possible.

Thank you, Tom Herzog