About Hibshman Screw Machine
For nearly 60 years, Hibshman Screw Machine has been a staple in precision manufacturing, and a high-volume powerhouse in Union, Michigan. Under the leadership of President Chad Vanderbeek, the company is currently navigating a significant transition.
They’re moving from a legacy shop of 50+ Brown & Sharp machines to a modern, high-tech facility focused on 6-axis Swiss CNCs. Despite reducing headcount from 34 to 24 employees through attrition and efficiency, revenue has remained steady. Losing contracts have done a complete 180 into profitable client relationships, a testament to Hibshman’s increasing operational density.
The Challenge: The Third Operational Tear Down
When Chad Vanderbeek joined the family business in 2005, the ERP was a stack of five or six binders filled with drawings and handwritten travelers. Over the next decade, Chad attempted to modernize the shop twice. First, he built an elaborate Excel spreadsheet before replacing that system by pushing QuickBooks to its absolute limit.
Neither approach worked for the growing needs of the business. The breaking point arrived during a daily production meeting that devolved into chaos. Parts weren’t running, schedules were slipping, and no one knew why.
“We were in a production meeting and the team kept pointing fingers about whose job it was to run what. There was no clarity. I had just read the book ‘Extreme Ownership,’ and it finally clicked that we needed to stop guessing about our schedules, our inventory, and our margins. This was going to be my third tear down of our foundation, but it was necessary to break the cycle.”
The shop was busy, but blind. They were shipping parts without integrated job costing data. As a result, they had no way of knowing which jobs were fueling their growth and which were quietly bleeding the company dry.
The Solution: The Shop Floor Loved It
Hibshman selected ProShop to serve as the single source of truth that could help them run accurate job costing analyses. However, Chad battled a mind game leading up to implementation. He assumed his younger office staff would embrace the software while the veteran machinists—some with decades of tenure—would reject it.
The reality was the exact opposite. The office staff struggled initially with the rigor of the new system, but the shop floor machinists became immediate power users. They saw ProShop as more than a job tracker, but a way to immortalize their tribal knowledge.
“I was terrified the older generation would push back. Instead, I sat them down and said, ‘We want your tribal knowledge to extend past your retirement.’ It clicked for them. We have a machinist retiring soon whose son works here. He realized he could record videos of his setups, put them in ProShop, and his son would have that knowledge forever. They didn’t fight it; they loved it.”
The Results: Bringing the Receipts
Chad was most impressed with how ProShop gave him instant visibility into the true financial health of every job. In 2023, ProShop’s dashboards flagged an ongoing, high-volume customer relationship. According to the data, Hibshman was losing money year-over-year with this contract.
Armed with this data, Chad requested a meeting with the client to discuss how their relationship must change. He didn’t bring a sales pitch; he brought his laptop.
“I plugged my laptop into their conference room TV and opened the ProShop Part Profit dashboard. I showed them work order by work order: -25%, -20%, -15%. I left that meeting with a nagging worry that I might lose the customer. Instead, they came back and said, ‘no vendor has ever broken it down like that. Because of the way you showed us the data, we trust you more than ever before.’”
By 2025, after two years of using ProShop data to renegotiate terms, the job has become a profitable contract for Hibshman. Additionally, Chad used other ProShop modules to make better financial decisions for the business. For example, rather than buying 10,000 lb. of material to be safe, ProShop calculates exactly how much inventory he needs per job. Now, those larger orders are a fifth of the size and placed just in time.
“We used to buy 10,000 lbs of brass just to be safe. Now, I order 2,000 lb just-in-time. My cash isn’t tied up in inventory anymore.”
Chad and his team also have full visibility and traceability across the entire manufacturing process. Previously, updating a drawing revision was a multi-day ordeal of printing and replacing paper. Today, revisions flow from engineering to the shop floor in less than 15 minutes. In three years as a ProShop customer, Chad has never asked ‘how do we check this thread?’ That’s because the answer is already attached to the digital work order.
The Culture: “Everything Has a Color”
Beyond the metrics, ProShop has become the repository for Hibshman’s generational knowledge. With senior machinists retiring, the team now records setups and unique inspection methods (like non-standard thread checks) and embeds them directly into ProShop’s visual work instructions. This allows younger employees and apprentices to execute complex jobs without needing to tap someone on the shoulder for direction.
The system also drives the shop’s 5S and cleanliness standards. Using ProShop’s equipment module, maintenance and cleaning tasks are assigned via a “Wheel of Fortune” style rotation. At Hibshman, all workers, from the newest company hire to the president of the business—everyone contributes to the daily tasks that keep the shop world-class.
“It’s an interview question now: Are you willing to clean a bathroom? Because if you are willing to take care of the small things, I know you’re willing to take care of the customer’s parts. In our shop, everything has a color and everything has a reason.”
The Future: Building a Healthier Business
As a successful ProShop advocate, Hibshman Screw Machine is no longer rebuilding foundations. They’re building on top of thriving success as they continue a massive push into Swiss CNC machining. ProShop’s Training Module is playing a vital role in these efforts to upskill apprentices.
For Chad, the ultimate success metric isn’t just revenue and accurate job costing data for legacy customer contracts. It’s the peace of mind he experiences every day as a shop owner.
“The business is just healthier. We grew from being busy, and lacking true insight into why we were so busy, into a business that truly understands where we make money. I don’t have to fight fires anymore because I can finally work on growing the business.”