Machine Shop Growth
The Machine Shop Growth Podcast gives a fresh perspective to help you grow your shop by focusing on 3 key factors - Sales, Marketing and Efficiency. For decades the machine shop industry was build on a “good-ol-boys” mentality and was full of great machinists and engineers that made great parts. What has been discovered is many of those amazing shops have plateaued or are starting to decline - because they didn’t put enough emphasis on getting more work and making more money with the work they had.
On this podcast you will hear first hand advice from machine owners and mangers how they are getting more work and how they are making more money. Now let’s Grow Your Shop!
Machine Shop Growth
Episode #19: OEE & the Cost of Perfection: Are You Making Enough Scrap?
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You don’t have an OEE problem.
You have a perfection problem.
In this episode, Kirk Phelps breaks down Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) and challenges one of the most ingrained beliefs in machining: that zero scrap equals a high-performing shop.
We unpack Availability, Performance, and Quality—and explain how fear of scrap quietly kills throughput, adds downtime, and limits growth. This isn’t about being careless. It’s about understanding risk, planning for reality, and operating your shop like a system.
You’ll learn how to:
- Rethink scrap as a byproduct of manufacturing—not a failure
- Identify how perfection erodes availability and throughput
- Use OEE to see where capacity is really being lost
- Apply standardization to reduce setup time and improve performance
- Balance quality with risk management instead of fear
If your shop is busy, clean, and still stuck, this episode will change how you think about OEE—and what “good” really looks like.
Subscribe to our new 2026 weekly format:
Sales & Marketing (1st & 3rd Tuesdays)
Operations & Engineering (2nd & 4th Tuesdays)
Bonus joint episodes on 5th Tuesdays
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