Niche Market Preparatoires: Job Shops - Part 1

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Webster defines 'niche' as "a specialized segment of a market for a particular kind of product or service," or as "a comfortable or suitable position in life or employment." We will examine various niche markets that may present themselves as opportunities to expand or refine your practice.

So much of the time we hear about "finding your 'niche'..." or "how to select a 'niche' specialization..." or "the pluses and minuses of 'niche practice'..." but we rarely see articles or experience courses that delve into actual 'niches' available to ProAdvisors and other small business consultants. Well, in the Niche Market Preparatoires that will be making up this feature, and the future installments of this 'series,' we go beyond the 'find,' 'how to pick,' and 'pros & cons' theory and dive into some of the specifics of 'niches' which may have escaped your attention. We will have a little look at their history, their development, their current status, and where they are going. We will examine trends that are impacting those 'niche' businesses and the kinds of issues and problems that they tend to seek help for, especially the help in which you as a ProAdvisor or business consultant might be best suited to give. We will also examine the kinds of information you need to become acquainted with so that you are not blind-sided when talking to a business owner for the first time. And, we will look at some of the tools and the software and apps that may be available to assist you with developing a niche practice for such clients.

Most of all, we want you to recognize that many of the niches we will present in this series may be businesses you might have been overlooking right in your own backyard, neighborhood, or business park without realizing that numerous others exactly like them exist within 20, 30, 50 or 100 miles of your own practice. So, as we begin this new series of Preparatoires, we do so with one of those that might well be right around the corner.... your local 'job shop.'

Job Shops

Long before there were assembly lines there were 'job shops,' and still today many of our small start-up fabricators and manufacturers are really 'job shops' working to produce small batches or custom products to meet specific needs. Many of them don't have a clue how to take care of their business needs, but they are easily turned off by the accountant or bookkeeper who walks in the door and begins talking over their head with facts, figures and terms they don't understand while at the same time not understanding the 'jargon' that these job shoppers speak.

A 'job shop,' sometimes called a 'fab shop,' can be defined as a form of small business manufacturing or fabrication which occurs in small batches or involves a variety of custom products. Most manufacturing today actually began as job shops and grew into bigger manufacturing operations as volume and other processes allowed.

Examples of early job shops includes machine tool shops, small mill-works, cabinetry shops, wheels, leather goods and coffin makers.

Even as small job shops progressed, they still maintained their job or fabrication shop layouts in which the shop processes arose from the fact that most of their products being produced required a unique set-up and sequencing of work steps. Machining shops, fabricators, lathe and die-cast metal, gasket and hose and custom piping assemblies, along with paint shops and commercial printing have all been common forms of job shops.

Over time, as customers requested repeat jobs, or volume grew, many job shops were able to group or grow machines into work cells to process batches of like jobs. One example of this is the custom, or piece-meal, garment industry.

Many Job Shops perform custom manufacturing for other businesses. In other words, they produce components or sub-assemblies. They deal in customization and relatively small production runs, not volume and standardization. As a result, economies of scale are typically not part of a job shop's competitive edge, they must therefore compete on the basis of factors like work quality, timeliness of product delivery, customization, and new product design and turnaround. This means that job shop operations must be geared toward offering these competitive factors over cheaper prices that larger, mass production manufacturers may offer but can not effectively meet the unique production offerings of the smaller job shop.

Job Shops represent the beginning configuration for most manufacturing process life cycles. As production increases and manufacturers standardize product offerings, processes change from the job shop to batch flow and then to assembly line and finally a continuous flow configuration if they grow large enough. Over this life cycle, flexibility decreases due to high volume and standardization, but unit costs can decrease as well.

The job shop is organized by process, and not every product will be produced using the same process steps, but this assure flexibility in production. In contrast, assembly lines or continuous flow operations are organized in a product layout in which equipment or work processes are arranged according to exact steps in assembly to streamline them into a straight line in which all products travel through the exact same assembly steps.

Job Shop Layouts

In the job shop, similar equipment or functions are grouped together, such as all drill presses in one area and grinding machines in another area, all within a process layout. The process layout is designed to minimize material handling, cost, and work in process inventories. Many Job Shops use general purpose equipment rather than specialty, dedicated product-specific equipment.

On the other hand, some Job Shops that specialize in very specific technical related work may have several highly specialized pieces of expensive equipment that require highly skilled workers with years of experience to achieve the desired outcome.

But today, even Job Shops are not immune from computerization and technology that has not only improved the accuracy, reliability and speed of some aspects of production, but which is actually taking over some aspects, or all, of a limited Job Shop production process.

Job Shop Routing

When an order arrives in the job shop, the part being worked on travels throughout the various areas according to a sequence of operations. Not all jobs will use every machine in the plant. Jobs often travel in a jumbled routing and may return to the same machine for processing several times.

One big 'human issue' is to coordinate routing/scheduling to maximize efficiency within the Job Shop in order to insure every job is being processed in such a way as to maximize productivity and achieve promised delivery.

Job Shop Scheduling

Jobs are characterized by their routing, their processes, and their priorities. This means that their schedules are a combinations of these factors combined with their expected or promised completion dates. Therefore, in a Job Shop, one of the key issues is deciding how and when to schedule jobs since individual jobs are not necessarily scheduled or completed based upon either their 'intake' or the arrival of their related materials. 

If you think 'job scheduling nightmares' like the one above are bad, just imagine when Job Shops use to do this kind of thing using blackboards and chalk. Heck, some shops would have blackboards the size of one entire shop wall with rolling ladders so that the scheduling clerks could reach the top of the blackboards to easily make changes. 'Drag-n-drop scheduling' wasn't even a concept back then.

Capacity is difficulty to measure in Job Shops and has much to do with job scheduling. Factors related to the availability of the appropriate machines and personnel to accomplish the work all come into play. The complexity of jobs, and process movements impact scheduling of jobs. Believe it or not, 'actual space' might be a consideration as some work in progress may consume such a large amount of space that sufficient 'free space' may need to be scheduled within secure areas as to secure the job(s).  

Then of course, budgetary considerations including sufficiency of cash-flow for the purchase of raw materials to complete jobs may be a consideration if jobs have not been agreed to without requirements for either down payments, deposits, or pre-payments. Many small Job Shops may require one or more of these forms of job-security when taking on work, especially from new customers, or work requiring 'new configurations,' new layouts or large quantities of raw materials.

In part two of this mini-series we will look at several other factors related to the Job Shop 'niche' including trends impacting today's 'job shops' and problems they tend to be seeking help for, especially help in which you as a ProAdvisor or business consultant might be best suited to give. We will also examine information you need to become acquainted with, including some of the 'shop-speak' and 'job jargon' so that you are not blind-sided when go to talking to a 'job shop' business owner for the first time. So be sure to stay watchful for our next installment of 'Niche Market Preparatoires - Job Shop'.