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Thread: How many jobs can your in-office finishing lab cut in one day?

  1. #1
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    How many jobs can your in-office finishing lab cut in one day?

    Hey there!

    I am trying to get a grasp of how many jobs an experienced lab tech can cut on average in an 8 hour work day. Please let me know your thoughts.

    Keep in mind these details: The jobs are mostly Trivex, a lot of PAL's, and job ETA's and lens ordering must be done per day as well.

    I'd love your thoughts!

    Thanks!!

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    OptiWizard OptiBoard Silver Supporter peyes's Avatar
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    We average 60 to 100 per day. 3 people. Surfacing and finishing.
    Last edited by peyes; 05-21-2016 at 10:09 PM.

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    Quote Originally Posted by JBud View Post
    Hey there!

    I am trying to get a grasp of how many jobs an experienced lab tech can cut on average in an 8 hour work day. Please let me know your thoughts.

    Keep in mind these details: The jobs are mostly Trivex, a lot of PAL's, and job ETA's and lens ordering must be done per day as well.

    I'd love your thoughts!

    Thanks!!
    I'm used to thinking of "in office finishing" to mean you're probably not doing surfacing, and your description of "how many jobs you can cut" tells me you are only finishing uncuts being ordered from somewhere else. That's what we do. In my practice, we have one part time optician doing the "cutting" and he does about 3 pair an hour, although we do drill mounts which is about 2 pair per hour, and the easy single vision ones he can do maybe 4 or 6 pair an hour, including mounting the lenses in the frame.

    In our setup, others in the office do most of the lens ordering and fielding the job status questions. Trivex, poly and high index take a bit longer, mostly because he leaves the room and takes a walk while those are processing. I'm working on installing a more robust exhaust system for the little lab and if that works, maybe supplying him with some protective earphones with some soft music if he ends up staying in for those jobs. We don't finish many PALs these days because the risk/reward ratio seems counter productive.

    Plus we're a big vsp practice, and they don't let us do PALs or really any non-stock uncuts in office for their jobs.

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    Just in terms of glazing, assuming predominantly trivex, I would say possible 20-30 a day? Depending on whether they have additional duties such as repairs or answering the phone.

    We produce about 10 a day but many of the frames we sell are unique and very complex to glaze, and our lab tech does additional duties also.

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    In wholesale productivity is measured as Jobs per man per hour per machine. Based on your material mix and on one edger, cycle times will average 4-5 minutes per lens with total time per job ( sizing, mounting, deblock etc) @ 8-10 minutes. So best case scenario 6 jobs per hour. Considering lunch, break time, ordering next days uncuts , final inspection etc I would estimate 6 hours production time. I would say 36-40 jobs per day from one tech is a realistic expectation.

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    Master OptiBoarder rbaker's Avatar
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    Back in 1957 I worked at the AO factory in Southbridge, MA after High School. One of my jobs there was in the sunglass finishingdepartment where between 3:00 PM and 6:00 PM I used to edge and insert Plano lensesinto zyle frames. I’d show up and find a stack of cartons of glass, 58MM TrueColorlenses and boxes of a single style and size zyle frames. There were six edger’sall set up and size for the evenings run. My job was to feed the edger’s,safety bevel the lenses and insert them into the frames.

    In three hours I could usually crank out about 200 pairs. Thatwould be about 500 pair a day. Pretty good, eh! Of course there were no distractions, ordering, inspection, phone calls or smart phones. Just crank away! Later in life. I owned an ophthalmic laboratory and as chief cook and bottlewasher I enjoyed doing drilled faceted rimless jobs such as were found in the Tura catalog. If things were running smoothly and I were not distracted I could crank out one a day, although the work was often accomplished after the doorwas locked and phone taken off the hook.

    So, as pointed out by others, it all depends.

    As you are located in Pyongyang on the Willamette in the People's Republic of Oregon and have legalize recreational pot you have an additional challenge which may not affect labs in other States. Call it astro turf, bhang, dagga, dope, ganja, grass, hemp, home grown, J, Mary Jane, pot, reefer, roach, Texas tea or weed. Now I realize that it's very difficult to get an honest day’s work out of the Millennial's striving for a $15 minimum wage in today's economy but the addition of drugs inthe workplace may be the biggest issue that you face in getting quality workout of your lab in a timely, efficient manner.

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    Wow, about a minute per pair? I assume you had some high power edgers for the day, or you'd need to etch and hand crib those lenses before chucking them up. Of course you didn't need to lay them out or block them, just center them and move on to the next machine. I edged glass for an o.d. in 1967 but I had to lay them out, etch, crib, edge and heat treat each pair. I think I was getting about a buck 50 an hour to do it, but I had to also pull patterns for each frame. Don't know how many I could do, but I'm guessing 3 or 4 pair an hour back then. Valuable experience, but fortunately it only lasted a few months or my hearing would have been damaged. Your assembly line production job really can only be compared to those robotic edgers of today that need no human intervention except maybe at the blocker and at the insertion into the frame.

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    Master OptiBoarder rbaker's Avatar
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    AO was, at that time, the largest producer of Plano sunglasses in the world. Thousands and thousands of pairs went out the door every day. Our manufacturing process was quite different than that found in the typical ophthalmic laboratory or optical shop in the day. Glass lenses, which represented 95% of the ophthalmic lenses did have to be cribbed and edged with vitrified grinding wheels as there were no diamond wheels available for the edgers of that day. American Optical in Southbridge Massachusetts working closely with the Norton Company just down the road in Worcester Massachusetts developed some production edger's utilizing some of the first diamond wheels for the mass production of ophthalmic lenses. Each edger utilized two wheels, one to rough and one to finish V bevel. Of coarse a pattern was used to control the size and shape of the finished lens. As I recall, it took about 15 seconds to rough cut and bevel the lens. There was no need to block the lenses as the 6 base clamps supplied enough pressure to prevent lens slippage or rotation.

    As a production operation, that is to say, the fabrication of thousands of lenses of the same material, shape, size and base curve economies of speed and quality could be achieved that were unattainable in the ophthalmic prescription laboratory.

    When I first started in 1956 lenses were not heat treated. I believe that they did start to heat treat Plano sunglasses lenses a few years later. I'm sure that the production rate did not suffer as a result of this additional step. I'm sure that they had a big mother heat treat unit capable of processing a couple of hundred pairs an hour.
    Last edited by rbaker; 05-22-2016 at 02:11 PM. Reason: Spelling

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    opti-tipster harry a saake's Avatar
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    there are too many variables on a question like this, especially when you throw in the person doing other tasks at the same time, however, with a modern day edger a person could easily do 50 jobs a day, if all they were doing was edging and glazing. Its all a matter of doing something else while the lens is edging.

    to dicks point about the old days, they use to work 3 shifts around the clock, assembling the raybans, which gives you an idea of how many of these were being sold at the time, this was at the time up in rochester.

    my largest job ever, was in 1970 to 71, B@L bought a glass lens coating machine from somewhere over in europe. they made up a hard, binder like folder that held 10 lenses each coated a different color to be sent out to docs and opticians. My job was to edge down 30000 glass lenses to apx 48 eyesize, to fit in a monocole type holder. I had three coburn rocket edgers, one on each side of me and one in the front, and all i did all day long was edge and then pin bevil them afterwards. when we had so many thousand, they were sent down to the B@L lab in atlanta, GA for coating. who the sent them back to our plant in newburgh, NY, where i worked, and now i had to insert these one by one into the monocole holders, used old time salt pans, would hold 5 or 6 of these in my hand, heat them up and insert, sometimes i even had someone help me, i sure would like to have one of those folders, just for the memory.
    in the end it never really worked as the machine could not make the colors the same every time, and they gave up on the idea, as the spanish would say, mucho trabajo, poco denero

  10. #10
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    Two people, a 6ES and a 7E, about 160 jobs per day. Few distractions.
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    If all I did was edge for 8 hours straight probably approaching 80 jobs on my 7EX. Material plays a role in the equation if all were CR-39 and Poly non A/R lenses that total would be closer to 100 jobs. 40 per day of our current mix of 90% A/R coated including tracing, mark-up, blocking and glazing and delivery to the dispensary.
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  12. #12
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    We do a lot of "program" jobs, so we save the traces on many of our frames. This saves a ton of time.
    Ophthalmic Optician, Society to Advance Opticianry

  13. #13
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    Id say it depends too.. last place i was at, 15 was a busy day.... but its not all I did.. interrupted all the time for repairs & troubleshooting sales... .

    If I got left alone. I have done 10 in an hour and a half.
    Last edited by Slim; 05-24-2016 at 04:20 PM.

  14. #14
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    I can do about 15-25 but it also depends how much other stuff am I being required to do - if I'm just a "lab tech" that day I can cut a lot on my 9000sx (which is an admittedly slower, yet great, edger) but if there are a lot of high minus that require hand work and problem solving from the floor, phone calls, lab issues - basically what I'm saying is if you are going to hire a full time dedicate lab tech you can get a LOT more done than a jack of all trades labsman(or woman) and optician etc.

    Also if they are already dotted and checked in before the edging begins its WAY faster, and at least for me trivex takes a lot longer, at least 5 minutes extra per job

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