00:00:00:00 – 00:00:14:08
Unknown
we haven’t added any resources. We don’t have a dedicated person who’s just, you know, populating information. Everybody’s participating, and it’s it’s kind of resulted in a little bit of a cultural transformation
00:00:14:08 – 00:00:41:15
Unknown
Welcome to the Manufacturing Transformed podcast, where we dive deep into the world of manufacturing and uncover the transformational journeys of companies that are powered by Pro Shop by Pro Shop. Get ready to explore the stories behind the machines, the people, and the innovations shaping the future of this industry. Welcome to manufacturing transform real shops. Real stories.
00:00:41:15 – 00:01:11:22
Unknown
Hello my friends, and welcome to another episode of the Manufacturing Transformed podcast, where we dig into the stories behind the transformation journeys of clients using the Pro Shop system. And today I had a very satisfying, I’ll call it conversation with Matthew Sawhill from Innovative Manufacturing and Engineering, in Iowa. Matt is a engineer who got involved with a machine shop and ultimately became, co-owner of that shop.
00:01:12:00 – 00:01:37:05
Unknown
And I what I love about this story is I think Matt’s, and I’m sure his partner as well, but they’re very sort of engineering type approach to the improvement and continual, development of maturing their shop. Sounds like when they when Matt got involved, they were much more of a sort of a quick turn emergency sort of job shop.
00:01:37:07 – 00:02:08:17
Unknown
And they made the very, intentional choice to move into a more highly automated production shop. And, and pro shop has been an essential part of that journey for them, to being, more process driven, more focus on, improvement, more in focus on, solving problems, and investing in the process in order to have better returns and better performance in the long run.
00:02:08:19 – 00:02:36:01
Unknown
I guess it’s it’s sort of, a study of, I guess the longer term success in, in a small part, you know, putting short term wins, you know, on the back burner, in, you know, an example of when you finish a job and you’re about to set up the new job, you really want to take just a little bit of time to make sure you’ve fully documented the past job, rather than just tear everything down and jump immediately right into that new job.
00:02:36:01 – 00:03:11:06
Unknown
And and that that investment of time will more than pay off in the long run. he said maybe an hour invested will save mid day, possibly later in the process. And that is a hopefully a return that anyone could get on board with. so this was, again, a very satisfying and enjoyable conversation. I think, there’s a lot of takeaways, here, that Matt shares, including the cultural change of having everyone, you know, realizing they’re part of a team that needs to invest in the overall team success.
00:03:11:06 – 00:03:33:01
Unknown
And they are a critical part of that. And sounds like that cultural journey has been just as critical, as more to the tactical things that they do every day to, to help their company win. So, thanks for, for tuning into this episode. Hope you garner some, some, some gems that you can take away. I’m confident you will.
00:03:33:06 – 00:03:37:03
Unknown
So get out your pen. And, without further ado, let’s go chat with Matt.
00:03:37:03 – 00:03:58:20
Unknown
Morning, Paul. Happy to be here.
00:03:58:22 – 00:04:24:16
Unknown
Sure. Yeah. I’m Matthew Sawhill. our company is innovative manufacturing and engineering. I’ve been involved with this company now for, seven years. I my background is in engineering. I grew up, loving working on things with, you know, tools, taking things apart, putting them back together again without any extra pieces, that sort of thing.
00:04:24:18 – 00:04:53:06
Unknown
and, that led me into a career in engineering. so early on in my career, I was doing product development, product design, product management. but some of my colleagues, that I worked with earlier in my career, sort of decided to take a different path and, looked into, starting their own business or getting into manufacturing by purchasing existing manufacturing companies.
00:04:53:06 – 00:05:19:10
Unknown
And, and I kind of watched with a keen eye for, a few years there while, they were getting their footing and, and learning, all the ins and outs of owning your own business. meanwhile, I continued my career, took a took a turn into, working for, software company, a kind of a, fast paced, customer facing role.
00:05:19:12 – 00:05:47:15
Unknown
I learned a lot about how different industries function, how high performing companies, you know, achieve success in a competitive market, and that sort of thing. and there came a fateful day in 2016 when, two of my friends and former colleagues had been working together, in, in this company, and one of them passed away unexpectedly.
00:05:47:17 – 00:06:06:23
Unknown
so I remember being on the phone that, night. I was traveling for work. talk to my, no business partner. just about, you know, what do you what do you do to kind of keep everything on the rails? And so, you know, I offered to help him, in any way I could in the short term.
00:06:07:01 – 00:06:30:18
Unknown
just, for continuity in the business, helping on the weekends and, that sort of thing. And as we continue our discussion, it made sense for us to form a partnership together. And from there, I guess the rest is history. But we, really wanted to, develop a shared vision to make this company the best that it could possibly be.
00:06:30:18 – 00:06:52:02
Unknown
And for us, the focus has always been on our employees and our culture, making this a fantastic place to work. so that’s been a, a long journey and a, you know, a story in and of itself. But, you know, today we’re, we’re stronger than ever. we’re still, you know, a small company with a close knit.
00:06:52:04 – 00:07:13:00
Unknown
you know, a small but growing team of people. and, it’s it’s been a fun ride. it’s, it’s every day is interesting. It’s a lot of hard work. but, you know, I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I guess.
00:07:13:02 – 00:07:46:22
Unknown
We are, yeah. We’re a contract CNC manufacturer. I, I call us that because, in our evolution, when I first became involved in the business, we would take, basically any work that walked through the front door, quantities of 1 or 2. we did a lot of emergency, repair work where a machine at a, local production factory would break down, and in a short time frame, we could reverse engineer and reproduce a part.
00:07:47:00 – 00:08:14:09
Unknown
but really, there was an evolution over time where we saw that we had, you know, high value CNC production equipment. very skilled workers. And when when you’re not, planning over the long term to keep your schedule busy, you can have all those resources, idle more than you want. And, you know, the short story is, you want the machines to be the most busy thing in the shop.
00:08:14:09 – 00:08:39:01
Unknown
Not the least busy thing. And, through looking at how to, work with existing customers, focus in on what we feel like we are better at, from our own past experience than what our, other shops in the area might be able to do. Well, we, we started going down the path of automation and unattended production.
00:08:39:03 – 00:09:06:19
Unknown
and that was, we found that our capabilities were better suited to higher production quantities. and developing our ability to run lights out, to operate with a high level of automation. And that that got us into, where now we do higher production quantities. longer term relationships with our customers. So we usually expect that we’re going to continue working with the customer year after year and continue to produce the part.
00:09:06:20 – 00:09:31:22
Unknown
and we’ve we’ve done very well with that over the last few years. And in building out that strategy, related to pro shop. we saw an opportunity to, get an industry quality certification, and we were trying to navigate that space and settled in on, going for our Ace 9100 quality certification. and we achieved that earlier this year.
00:09:32:00 – 00:09:56:18
Unknown
and that was, pro shop. Peter, that played a crucial role in that. So, that’s that’s a new area for our business. we’re still learning the ropes. And, as you’re well aware, the the complexity of, you know, meeting security requirements with your, business systems and and those sorts of things. it’s a moving target, a lot of complexity.
00:09:56:20 – 00:10:41:21
Unknown
And, you know, we’re we’re learning to navigate in this new space. but it’s it’s been exciting so far, and we’re looking forward to what we’re going to be able to do in that space.
00:11:09:01 – 00:11:41:19
Unknown
That’s. That’s a big one. It. It’s hard to imagine a bigger, kind of more foundational change that you could make to a business. but we had to, you know, it’s it’s like eating an elephant. I guess we did it one step at a time. and it was really just, a process of continuing to identify areas where we would stumble and come up with strategies to prevent stumbling and, you know, to make it sound maybe simpler than it is.
00:11:41:19 – 00:12:07:09
Unknown
That’s essentially what we did. But we we started by really looking at, the capabilities of our existing equipment to, sustain unattended production. We already had, a two axis lathe with a bar feeder, a couple other, machines around the shop that could, you know, load their own material and catch the parts with the parts catcher.
00:12:07:09 – 00:12:26:08
Unknown
And we started with the, you know, at that basic level. And it was really just a realization one day that we had this, piece of equipment. It was running the same part in this case for a couple of weeks. And, and, for us, you know, maybe a quantity of 1000, which to us was a huge, a huge order.
00:12:26:08 – 00:12:51:01
Unknown
And, and the machine was running, but but we had an operator standing in front of it the whole time. and it wasn’t that that we were, you know, doing our accounting and trying to think, how can we eliminate people? We had other machines that could run if we could operate the machine in a different way, so that a person could walk away from it and know that it was going to continue to make good parts.
00:12:51:03 – 00:13:27:02
Unknown
So, you know, really it’s that that was the beginning of it. But the evolution of it has, you know, over time, it’s we’ve realized that, you know, you it’s critical that you, have, clear roles and responsibilities for people so that they, you know, if one person is, is supporting production on a work center, and then you need to swap out a different person, you know, to maybe load balance in the shop or get somebody working on a set up, just just to be able to sustain production with more than one person involved over time.
00:13:27:04 – 00:13:47:03
Unknown
requires, a lot of discipline and a lot of definition of process and roles and responsibilities so that everybody knows when they walk up to an active work center, they know what to expect. they know where to find information. They know how to get an accurate read on the status of the production process and that sort of thing.
00:13:47:03 – 00:14:17:00
Unknown
So from a people standpoint, there’s a lot of complexity. Also, over time, we’ve we’ve, sold off the, machinery that we had in-house that could not sustain unattended production. And we’ve been purchasing, new machines that are capable, you know, that have the level of capability that we need. you know, every every machine has basic capability to to stop at the end of the cycle and start up at the beginning automatically.
00:14:17:00 – 00:15:05:20
Unknown
But, you know, managing the limited life of the tooling and, and other process variables, you end up using just about every capability that the machine has in order to, maximize the reliability of the process. So it’s it’s been quite a transformation for us to go through to get to the point where we can, reliably, just execute, production work order and achieve the performance that we need to.
00:15:05:21 – 00:15:35:14
Unknown
Yeah. It’s, the, our we have a fantastic, member of our, team, who is responsible for sales and he, had a lot of, you know, stress, I would say, to put it in the word, to make the transition. But we did have relationships with customers who, worked with us on smaller volume, orders.
00:15:35:14 – 00:16:04:13
Unknown
But as we, as we worked with them and shared that we were investing in capability to do higher production quantities, to some degree, we were able to retain, existing customers. And in their, cycle of looking for new vendors for, for new parts and that sort of thing. We were able to start to, adjust their, their focus to where they would bring, us opportunities to do higher production volume parts.
00:16:04:15 – 00:16:44:11
Unknown
so it took a lot of close work with existing customers to look for, the, the segment of their, works that we might be able to do that was higher production quantities. you know, some, some customers over time. we just, worked with them to find other suppliers. you know, I think it’s probably unusual in our industry for a company to, you know, develop relationship with, relationships with other shops who might be thought of as competitors, to find sources for some of the good work that we were doing, but that we, you know, could no longer fit into our schedule.
00:16:44:11 – 00:17:03:01
Unknown
So, so we did a certain amount of that activity. in the end, we were able to maintain good relationships with past customers, even as we scaled back the quantity of business that we did with them. While we, continue to look for net new customers who, had the kind of works that fit closer to our profile.
00:17:03:01 – 00:17:10:01
Unknown
So and this was a multi-year, transition.
00:17:20:21 – 00:17:42:01
Unknown
Yeah, yeah.
00:17:42:03 – 00:18:08:08
Unknown
Yep. Yeah, it’s it’s a it was exactly that sort of a conversation when it was really important. we we value our relationships with our employees and, and the team of people that we have within these walls, but also our customer relationships. we recognize that, you know, we we are completely dependent on our customers to, be able to come in to work every day and, and do what we do.
00:18:08:10 – 00:18:33:03
Unknown
And, maintaining good relationships with those customers is critically important, even when we see that, the future direction of what we can deliver and what our customers need might, might diverge and we might be going in different directions. So to this day, we’ve, you know, there were no no customers were injured or harmed during the during this transition.
00:18:33:05 – 00:19:02:22
Unknown
we still have good relationships with those customers. And, and really, I think, one, one, one thing that I recognize as I look at our path forward is that, you know, we still have the skill set that we, that we used when we were doing the lower production quality work. And that may be something, that we, that we, bring back in place sometime down the road to, you know, to, to balance out our, our customer balance or our overall portfolio.
00:19:02:22 – 00:19:23:15
Unknown
So, you know, it’s not it’s not that we’ve, given up on that kind of work. we’ve found it to be a a good way to go, but I think it’s it’s best in part of a balanced portfolio, for us. So.
00:19:23:17 – 00:20:05:14
Unknown
Yeah. Yeah, we do a certain certain amount of that. Yep. That’s, in fact, we more and more, we try to, work with our customers to, you know, the a design engineer who’s designing a piece of machinery, having done it myself, a lot of times they’re faced with their own schedule constraints and, and design challenges and, you know, as a design progresses from from early concept to, manufacturable, in product, you get more and more constrained and boxed in, and it gets hard to give each, component the time and attention it needs to be really optimized.
00:20:05:14 – 00:20:36:21
Unknown
And, we’ve had really, good, success in working with our customers to, share with them ideas that we have on how to how to tolerance parts differently. But in a way that doesn’t, doesn’t compromise functionality in any way but improves manufacturability, tolerances, finishes, you know, even how to take a design with multiple components and maybe, break down the features differently to optimize for manufacturability.
00:20:36:23 – 00:21:24:00
Unknown
so if we can if we can work with a customer early in the production process, we can often, save them cost in their, overall project by, designing parts that are more suited to, reliable, manufacturing. So.
00:21:37:17 – 00:22:00:16
Unknown
Yeah. So you know that that’s a genuine. I feel like it’s. It’s a really genuine value that we’re creating. It’s not a it’s not a marketing effort or anything like that. It’s just really that, you know, these things require time and attention and care. And if you can, work with someone who has expertise, you know, we we deal every day with the limitations of our machines and the capabilities of our machines.
00:22:00:16 – 00:22:20:16
Unknown
And, and we have a keen eye for a certain set of constraints so that, that if you address them in the design, you can have a lot more reliable, production. And, you know, it’s good for us, but it’s also good for our customer when they’ve got good parts that fit and they can meet their production schedule as well.
00:22:20:16 – 00:22:42:10
Unknown
So it, it’s been a really, it’s been a good direction for us to go.
00:22:42:12 – 00:23:10:22
Unknown
yeah. we, to say that we’ve matured in our journey and embracing pro shop would be an understatement. and I, as we get into this discussion, I think you’re, you know, kind of see a common thread where, you know, we were they were just, kind of a plain old basic job shop, for a number of years, where decisions were just made off the cuff.
00:23:11:00 – 00:23:43:13
Unknown
the, the schedule was really just an idea in the back of somebody’s head. And usually the, the customer who, was calling us, not necessarily the most upset, but with the most urgency. They usually got got the focus in the schedule. and our, our legacy ERP system was essentially, document generator that we could use to print off of and or P.O. it was a place where we could save a customer P.O. and we could print, a job traveler.
00:23:43:15 – 00:24:10:21
Unknown
and, it’s it’s sad to say it, but really, beyond that, we weren’t getting much value out of the system. So the shop ran on paper and on decisions that were made off the cuff on the production floor. and so as we transitioned into pro shop, it was it was a it was driven by recognizing that we we couldn’t scale the business.
00:24:10:23 – 00:24:44:08
Unknown
we were running at the limit of our, pace in which we could, you know, make ad hoc decisions. And so, that was that was really where we, recognized that we needed to make some fundamental changes to our processes.
00:24:44:10 – 00:25:08:20
Unknown
Yeah. Yeah. You know, it’s it’s almost like our, legacy ERP system was a place to to, you know, you had to go looking for problems. It didn’t really show you where where the issues were, or it didn’t give you a perspective on what was going on in the shop floor that you could make decisions from.
00:25:09:00 – 00:25:31:16
Unknown
And a lot of it’s because, you know, while the system was a database that, you know, ran on our PCs, it was it was sort of really ran off the paper documents that we were routing through the shop. that didn’t give us a good opportunity to, really, plan anything with the rigor that we needed to.
00:25:31:18 – 00:25:52:02
Unknown
We didn’t necessarily have good uniform set up documentation. So if if one machinist would set it up this time and another one would do it next time, they would essentially throw away each other’s work and start over. that we it was hard to find, you know, we couldn’t duplicate a set up because we couldn’t find the tool.
00:25:52:04 – 00:26:11:23
Unknown
that had been used last time. We hadn’t documented problems that we were having, with the prior run. So when we set it up, the next time we, we duplicate the problems of the prior run, you know, we duplicate the setup to some degree, but also the problems we had. And and it was a slow evolution to try to make things better.
00:26:11:23 – 00:26:43:12
Unknown
So, we were at the end of the day. Yeah. When, when every job going through the shop hasn’t been carefully planned and not well documented. and there’s not a clear status, of the job at any point during production. you’re kind of flying blind, at every every level. And just the, the, the issues that we would encounter, and running that way became self-limiting in terms of our production capacity.
00:26:43:15 – 00:26:51:04
Unknown
So, you know, that that we had to do something different.
00:26:51:06 – 00:27:01:21
Unknown
you know, it was easy to.
00:27:01:23 – 00:27:44:17
Unknown
Pull off. you know, we, we started looking to other, other shops that we had good relationships with, to see what systems they were using and listening to the kinds of issues that they were having. and, getting familiar with the different, the different options that we had. my business partner actually first found out about Pro Shop, and I don’t even know, where, where he came across you guys, but, we, we decided to set up, a call, and learn a little bit more about what you offered.
00:27:44:17 – 00:28:06:13
Unknown
And it was pretty clear to me out of the gate. The pro shop had some differences from what we were seeing, from the other options, and, it just seemed like it was, but I don’t know how to say it, but in a way, it was more tailor made to fit our set of problems that we were experiencing and address those.
00:28:06:15 – 00:28:31:01
Unknown
And in a way that I thought was, maybe a little more, you know, more targeted and more attainable for us than than what I might have seen in some of the larger, more complex systems and also more capable than the the kinds of systems that we already use it. So.
00:28:31:03 – 00:29:02:21
Unknown
We did. Yeah, we looked at it was really down to, two different systems that we were looking at, but, yeah, kind of filtering down from a, a larger pool. and, and we’d even contemplated just, you know, using spreadsheets and databases ourselves that, kind of going that route. but the. The administrative effort and the visibility, the real time visibility of what was going on in the shop, were, you know, kind of key in the direction that we needed to go.
00:29:03:02 – 00:29:30:14
Unknown
And certainly with Pro Shop, it was it was clear right out of the gate that, the the way that it’s architected, fit really well with, with the way we look at the world. So, it seemed like it was kind of going to be a good fit.
00:29:30:15 – 00:30:11:11
Unknown
Yeah. Well, so, yeah, in essence, I, I kind of kept it close to the vest just by doing the implementation myself. We, started, I started being trained on how pro shop works. I think, I’m thinking in my mental calendar here, but the middle of 2020, two, I think July of 2022, and we went through the series of, training meetings where, we’d go through the different modules, learn how they worked and that sort of thing.
00:30:11:13 – 00:30:36:18
Unknown
beginning in October of that year, I started running pro shop in parallel, with our other system, to, familiarize myself with how work orders, got put into the system and how to keep them up to date. and the considerations on what we would need to do to train our internal users, to be productive.
00:30:36:20 – 00:31:01:14
Unknown
then, around I think mid November of that year, I got everybody signed into the system and we started tracking the work. in, in pro shop instead of in E2. I would keep E2 up to date at that point. in the background so that we, we had that, you know, continuity of, of, the progress.
00:31:01:14 – 00:31:29:02
Unknown
And once I was comfortable that we had work through several work orders and that our own, machinists were trained on how to use pro shop, starting, at the beginning of 2023, January 1st, 2023, we went live and never looked back.
00:31:29:03 – 00:31:55:18
Unknown
Yeah. And it’s it’s certainly could have gone faster. but, you know, to some degree, we’re a small company and we run pretty lean, and I, I knew I couldn’t afford a hiccup and a misstep, so I wanted to make sure that I had 100% handle on on what to expect and how to make it successful. and, it, it went off, very well.
00:31:55:20 – 00:32:20:16
Unknown
so, you know, we could have accelerated it. and looking back, I might have been a little more aggressive with our time frame because, Yeah, the benefits that we’re getting out of pro shop are substantial. And, to, to have accelerated things a little bit, we wouldn’t have had a hiccup, and, we would have started getting better information and better execution on the floor right away.
00:32:20:16 – 00:32:44:13
Unknown
I think we could have done it sooner.
00:32:44:15 – 00:32:59:17
Unknown
Yeah, yeah.
00:32:59:19 – 00:33:44:05
Unknown
It was, But, you know, we, Where do I start? we had, we had a calendar. We had a calendar that we made from a Google sheet that showed people what to expect. that was coming up in the schedule and the timeframe that we wanted things to start. we had, word document, setup sheets, and, to some degree, people were using Excel and notepad and whatever they wanted to, we managed our, CNC programs just using notepad and, and structured files on a server.
00:33:44:07 – 00:34:11:07
Unknown
we, our planning existed as a process on paper, but, really, jobs were, seldom planned other than just the minimal, level of planning on how much material we needed and when we should order it. but it wasn’t unusual for a job to have to sit for a day or two waiting for tooling that we hadn’t gotten ordered when we entered, the work order into the system.
00:34:11:09 – 00:34:44:05
Unknown
so that was. Yeah. And I guess the main, the main system that we used to get work done, was people walking around and asking questions. So we had a, a copious amount of that. So, yeah, it was it was just system after system. Another issue that we had was that, we had been trying to, mature, our processes and document our processes and get people trained, and following the processes.
00:34:44:05 – 00:35:10:18
Unknown
And I’m talking about how do we go about staging a job, how do we, go about the process of planning a new work order? how do we do a set up? How do we train a new person on a set up? so we had, you know, a lot of, word documents that were defined, processes that were, you know, not well adopted, not always up to date.
00:35:10:22 – 00:35:32:15
Unknown
And I was really having a hard time getting the team to buy in on, on having defined processes at all, but then also being diligent about making sure they were followed. you know, really signing off that they understood the content. so a lot of dynamics around that to kind of limited our ability to grow and bring new people on board.
00:35:32:17 – 00:36:01:03
Unknown
So, you know, there was this whole parallel world of, of trying to define how we operate the business, step by step, again, with the ERP system just being, essentially a document generator. So we had a lot of challenges around that.
00:36:01:04 – 00:36:10:20
Unknown
So.
00:36:10:22 – 00:36:42:11
Unknown
Yeah. those those things all go together. and I. Yeah, I guess just to break it apart a little bit, the adoption for the users, in pro shop was really straightforward. we we sat down in this conference room, and went over the basic concepts of how to clock in and out, how to access a work order, how to know which work order to navigate to on a given work center.
00:36:42:13 – 00:37:20:15
Unknown
and, you know, just a really basic introductory training to start to track, production progress on a work order. that’s where things began for our machinists. And, beyond that, you know, the first time they went through a set up, we would walk them through, where information was meant to be saved in the system and, how to how to navigate and search for things, how to populate the, the tool records, for instance, and take a picture and save it, you know, just all the little basic things.
00:37:20:15 – 00:38:05:05
Unknown
We pretty well did that on the floor, learning as we went and, and in an environment where we were, trying to make people comfortable sharing knowledge with each other and sharing tips and best practices and that sort of thing. so the the initial training to get people on board, was, was very basic. and then it turned, we turned our focus, toward, how do we really, get the most out of pro shop by carefully documenting, the, the production process we’ve used in, in the information that stored in pro shop so that we could duplicate the set up on the next run.
00:38:05:07 – 00:38:31:18
Unknown
and how to document issues that we were having, you know, process development issues. you know, we had to work as a team to agree on, you know, is it okay to spend time, putting, tool records into pro shop so that we, you know, can can assign a storage location and, and, track the quantity of inserts of a certain type that we have and that sort of thing.
00:38:31:18 – 00:39:00:16
Unknown
And so we work together as a team to kind of figure out what to prioritize, when in the evolution of a work orders, the right time to, get that information initially put in and updated, and, and that sort of thing, and then, really, the, the deep implementation of pro shop, evolved over time where we had the basic, functionality to, to set up and track work orders through the system clock.
00:39:00:16 – 00:39:28:08
Unknown
Our time, tracked job progress. and then we built it into our full, you know, a repository for everything about how we set up the machine, every component that we need to pull when we’re staging a job. all the all the details of of how to set ourselves up for success on the next run, that’s been, essentially on the fly that we’ve been able to do it.
00:39:28:10 – 00:39:53:23
Unknown
and we haven’t we haven’t added any resources. We don’t have a dedicated person who’s just, you know, populating information. Everybody’s participating, and it’s it’s kind of resulted in a little bit of a cultural transformation where people it’s really clear to people now when they look at, setting up a job that we might not have run for, you know, 18 months or two years.
00:39:54:01 – 00:40:10:17
Unknown
And they have to go back to that old legacy, you know, hodgepodge of data sources, try to figure out what we did back then. They realize they kind of get an eyeroll. And, and they, you know, they say, man, this is going to be a lot more work. I have to go back and pull all this stuff together.
00:40:10:17 – 00:40:39:09
Unknown
It’s not just there for me. and that’s a that’s a good reinforcement on, you know, spending the time to, carefully document things, that we’re working on now so that a year from now we don’t have to, you know, do that. I roll and, so, yeah.
00:40:44:09 – 00:41:20:22
Unknown
Yeah. You know, this is, an area that I’ve put a lot of time and effort and thought into over the last couple of years. and it’s, it’s as much a function of a as our culture, I think, as it is the capability of the ERP system. But, yeah, it’s a I think in our industry, there’s a, there’s a, certain number of, of, machinists in our industry who have learned from, you know, the environments that they’ve worked in, that if they hold their knowledge close and don’t share that, that’s what makes them valuable.
00:41:21:00 – 00:41:49:03
Unknown
And essentially preventing the flow of information is, is the thing that that, gives them job security and, we’ve really worked, carefully on, on defining our company values and, hiring people with the, the right set of attributes where, we reward openness and sharing of knowledge rather than, than being closed and preventing others from learning.
00:41:49:03 – 00:42:11:20
Unknown
So and and some of that, too, has to do with how you reward, members of the team. you know, if we, if we, if we reward people for seeing an opportunity or coming up with a new nugget of knowledge that we can apply to our processes, and we reward sharing that with others and documenting it in the system.
00:42:11:22 – 00:42:36:15
Unknown
then then we see more of that, kind of open behavior and, it’s, you know, it also, team members have to trust each other and, and trust their leadership to know that, they really are valued for their ability to be a good, productive member of a team. And, you know, the the, you know, a rising tide lifts all boats.
00:42:36:17 – 00:43:06:14
Unknown
if you can get people to turn that corner over time and, and have them trust that sharing knowledge is something that the company values, that then you start to see it, self-perpetuating. And we’re in a really good spot now. But that was, that was as much of a cultural journey as anything else for us.
00:43:06:16 – 00:43:40:06
Unknown
You know, it’s, we we do, and, you know, we’re far from perfect, and we still have a lot to learn and things that we can do better. But, you know, anything from just, in our, in our morning, gemba walks that we do where we’re talking about, what’s going to go on, on the shop floor for the day, if we highlight, successes or, you know, good examples of the kind of behavior that we’re looking for and reinforce it in those discussions.
00:43:40:08 – 00:44:05:10
Unknown
so we will tackle it at that level. We also, create situations, on the shop floor where we ask people to work together to solve a problem and, not necessarily in a defined structure where one person is higher in the pecking order than the other. In fact, we might work to invert that in different ways, to make sure that everybody has an opportunity to contribute.
00:44:05:11 – 00:44:34:13
Unknown
we do, give out, gift cards, you know, just as kind of a spot recognition for someone to, to show them that they’ve done well, and we appreciate it. we do. It’s, an important topic of discussion in our in our employee review. So, you know, all the way from just a really basic day to day conversations up to how we, work with employees on their career development.
00:44:34:15 – 00:44:56:01
Unknown
we, we try to reinforce that at every level.
00:44:56:03 – 00:45:29:21
Unknown
But, it does. yeah. And, we’re we’re, on our lean journey, and we’re not as far down that path as we are with, pro shop, I would say. But, yeah, some of the principles that we do embrace are, the whether the gemba walk is, is a good example where, yeah, the production is fluid enough on our shop floor and, you know, different, different machines will run a great one day and have trouble the next.
00:45:29:21 – 00:45:57:08
Unknown
And so we need, a good way of giving everybody a lay of the land on, on what’s, what’s working well, what isn’t, what people need to draw their focus to. So, we meet, every morning at the same time, to, just. And we’re a small enough shop. I think if we had, you know, dozens of machines and and several independent parts of the organization, we’d probably break this down more.
00:45:57:08 – 00:46:26:16
Unknown
But for now, we, we do a gamba walk where it’s really just an opportunity to, you know, look at the traditional lean things that you would on a Gamba board. but for us, it’s also an opportunity to see if we have a good handle on the production job as it exists right now. You know, we have we have a dedicated person assigned to ensuring, that they have a handle on the, on what’s going on on each machine.
00:46:26:18 – 00:46:54:20
Unknown
And so we get an update from them to, you know, see if it’s on target or if it’s behind. If it’s behind, what do they need help with? what other assistance do they need from supporting operators on a given day? and it’s just, a structured and brief discussion where it’s not, you know, it’s not storytelling and it’s not, it’s it’s not a place to solve problems, but it’s just a snapshot of the status around the shop.
00:46:54:22 – 00:47:36:10
Unknown
And that gives us a good idea, that of of how to allocate, our resources and where to direct our focus to make sure that we get the most,
00:47:36:12 – 00:47:57:18
Unknown
Sure. Yeah. you know, a really good clear cut one right out of the gate. and it one thing I have to hedge a little bit is to say that we didn’t have good production metrics that we were able to get out of our prior system. like I said, it was is more of a document generation resource for us.
00:47:57:18 – 00:48:25:00
Unknown
But looking at our, early, implementation of pro shop in that transition phase and then, looking at what we’ve been able to do to improve our operating metrics since then, our on time delivery was, you know, we were happy if it was 80%, using the old system. And, and now we’re consistently in the 90s. so which for us is a very substantial improvement, makes our customers a lot happier.
00:48:25:02 – 00:48:53:20
Unknown
so, and we’ve seen similar levels of improvement on, our scrap percentage. it’s been driven down considerably. customer returns, has, has gone down. we never we’ve been pretty good about that, for a number of years. But, you know, when you’ve driven your customer return percentage down to a very low level and you can still cut it down?
00:48:53:22 – 00:49:31:00
Unknown
it’s something like, you know, cut it in half again. You get to a really good place with your customers. It’s very rare for us to have a return. for our customers at this point. and, Yeah. So I talked about our time delivery quality. We separately measure, in cars and scrap, a lot of our part, in a, in a volume production environment, we we, do batch inspections, so, you know, so if you’re doing an inspection and it doesn’t pass, the whole batch has to go out in the NCR and you deal with it offline.
00:49:31:02 – 00:49:55:00
Unknown
but we’ve been able to drive down, both our scrap, and our NCR percentages significantly through using Pro shop and it’s and the reason for it, I would say is the, the real time visibility you have on, on the health of your production. you know, your, your clocking parts off in real time schedules up to date in real time.
00:49:55:02 – 00:50:19:13
Unknown
Any machine that you have access to on the pardon me, didn’t realize this phone was still online. at any, any PC you have around the shop is a place to access pro shop, and you’re not looking for a paper job traveler. so, you know, we can change routings. We can do anything we need to in real time, and everybody sees the same thing at the same time.
00:50:19:13 – 00:50:43:22
Unknown
So, seeing where the hotspots are at any moment and, being able to address it with better information is really how you impact your core production metrics. And Pro Shop is fantastic for that.
00:50:44:00 – 00:51:10:02
Unknown
Yeah, we did, yeah, we pro shop gave us, I try to think of a way to put this simply, but, you know, it’s, a pro shop is is a great set of tools that really gives you a good place to put all of the kinds of information that you need to have a really well-defined and successful production process.
00:51:10:02 – 00:51:39:00
Unknown
And that’s one of the it’s one of the opportunities we saw in, in pro shop right from the start. So, you know, you have a good way to, to document all of the setup information on tooling and work holding. and, and for us, there’s a lot of ancillary stuff to on on how to configure, the bar feeder or the robot and the gripper that you’re going to use on the robot, and, the program you’re going to use on the robot and all that.
00:51:39:00 – 00:52:10:19
Unknown
So Pro Shop gives you a place to put all that stuff. And so it’s, it’s it gives you the place to put it gives you an opportunity to, to be diligent about thinking everything through it and documenting it in a good way. so it’s, it’s helped us get to a point where, yeah, you know, it’s it’s not really, we invest so much in creating a stable production process and really tuning in, the details of of what makes our machines run well on a setup.
00:52:10:21 – 00:52:32:14
Unknown
And once we’ve once we’ve made that investment, we want to be able to repeat it. so it’s important to know, exactly the tooling configuration that we used. so we saw early on, with pro Shops that we had an opportunity to, really get down to brass tacks and exactly what, what the setup is, get it all documented in a great way.
00:52:32:16 – 00:53:41:17
Unknown
and, then be able to repeat that setup next time. So we do make extensive use of the tooling module for that purpose.
00:53:41:19 – 00:54:00:07
Unknown
Yeah, yeah. And you know the way. The way to look at that is, you kind of hit on it, but, you know, how long does it take to, you know, from when the last part comes off of, the work center to finish out a work order to in the first part of the next work order comes off the machine.
00:54:00:07 – 00:54:25:09
Unknown
That’s a that’s a critical time. And any guesswork, anything you leave undefined through that, evolution out of one or quarter and into the next, it’s just going to result in, hours or days of delay in getting that job started. So, you know, the, the planning that we do, making sure that our setup details are correct.
00:54:25:11 – 00:54:59:08
Unknown
it’s, they get, you know, every, every I don’t know the exact metrics, but definitely every every amount, every hour of time you put into, getting that stuff documented, could save you a day later on. You know, it’s it’s for us. It’s that that level of impact that it’s had, it’s, you know, and to some degree, this this is cultural too, because you have to give the, the team members permission to spend time during break down at the end of a job to, to make sure that that information is right.
00:54:59:08 – 00:55:17:21
Unknown
Most, most people, I’d say in a traditional job setting, by the time they’re making the last part of a work order, they’re already worried about you know, how are they going to get the next thing set up in a timely manner? And so they they don’t want to spend the time documenting what they just got done doing.
00:55:17:21 – 00:55:56:23
Unknown
They want to they want to, shift their focus to the next thing, which is just, perpetual self repeating, problem of never having good setup documentation when you’re starting a job. So we had to address that culturally and then also kind of work with, team members on, on their, you know, way of looking at online versus offline tasks and, recognizing that if you if you keep the set of information accurate throughout a production run, you know, if you are having a problem with a rough year and it doesn’t have good predictable to a life and good chip control, so you switch to a different one and it works better
00:55:57:01 – 00:56:30:04
Unknown
at that, documented in the system. And now it’s there for the next person. so it’s we try to keep that live in and accurate throughout a production run. and then really, reinforce culturally that whatever time it takes at the end to make sure that it’s clean and complete is time well spent. So that’s that’s how we look at it.
00:56:36:07 – 00:57:02:03
Unknown
Yeah, it it is so that, but it’s a it’s a tricky thing to achieve because, you can. Yeah. You know, one thing I’ve learned in, in, being an owner in this business is that, you know, no level of authority. Just it gets you to a point where you can ask someone to do something and then be sure that that’s going to happen.
00:57:02:05 – 00:57:38:19
Unknown
So, you know, again, it’s cultural and for a while, as we were making our transition, into this way of looking at things, we would have people, you know, we’d ask, hey, did you get all that, you know, right and accurate in the system. And of course, we’d get assurance that it was. But then, you know, the next time we set it up, we’d see that it wasn’t, and if you’re spending your time, policing that sort of thing, that it can be, that can be very, resource intensive for the leadership of the company.
00:57:38:19 – 00:58:17:20
Unknown
And so the way to get it, working well, is to get the culture aligned. And the way you do that is to, you find some champions who can, lead by setting a good example. you work with them to make make really sure that they know that, it’s worth spending the time and that we want, we need their help to kind of work out the kinks and figure out what it is that that would cause of, you know, cause it to be difficult to do that sort of documentation and, and let’s just really get this ironed out and then, you know, keep that champion really engaged and doing
00:58:17:20 – 00:58:39:05
Unknown
a good job and then other start to see the results and start to see the difference. And, you know, in a, in a shop environment, people can see each other’s work. And if, if one person is is doing a great job and showing that is possible, others will start to realize that they, they want to also be seen as, as doing good work.
00:58:39:11 – 01:00:19:17
Unknown
So, that’s that’s kind of how we’ve arrived there. but you definitely do have to, you know, find you have to reinforce culturally that what you’re trying to achieve is, is really good documentation. And we’re trying to set ourselves up for future success rather than just trying to get the next part out the door the soonest. You know, it’s a it’s a longer term, mindset that people have to embrace.
01:00:19:19 – 01:00:29:22
Unknown
Yeah.
01:00:30:00 – 01:01:04:08
Unknown
You’re hitting on the some of the high points, I think, you know, for one, in in our prior system, we never thought of, planning as something that was really part of a work order. It was. It was just a that was its own separate process that was outside of ERP and pro shop. the way that, really the way that, you trained us to use it and the way the software is set up, it builds planning into the, the work order itself and you can see the planning status.
01:01:04:10 – 01:01:28:10
Unknown
so, and you can see when the planning is complete. So building the planning into our, our work orders, has really been a good way to draw the level of attention that it needs to make sure that, you know, if it’s if it’s a side project and everyone’s focus is on the, the tangible, visible parts going out the door on the shop floor, then planning never happens the way it should.
01:01:28:10 – 01:01:50:11
Unknown
So, you know, building it into the work order and tracking it and giving it the same attention as the parts, I think has been an important piece of the puzzle for us. And then the other the other component for us that that is more of, it’s in how we how we work out on the shop floor.
01:01:50:13 – 01:02:20:14
Unknown
but, making sure that someone is paying attention to the performance of a work order in the system and addressing issues as they come up rather than letting them linger, helps you, sustain, the production performance throughout the work order. If you have something that’s causing you to stumble, but you don’t quite, address it proactively, and it just tends to, you know, keep things running at 50% pace day after day after day.
01:02:20:14 – 01:02:48:17
Unknown
That’s that’ll stretch out of schedule. So you have to be proactive in jumping on those things. And we have we have our own, ways of, of pulling the troops together. again, solving problems as a team. But, working through, process development to improve, production performance if it’s not achieving the targets.
01:02:48:18 – 01:03:19:20
Unknown
It it it literally we so we literally use that. So again, pro Shop gives you a place to put all of the important information that you need to have a good production process. And and yeah, that was one of the things that I recognized right out of the gate that was just like a magic bullet for us, where, if you if you have a way to log issues in the system that are causing you to stumble, for one, you do not have an accounting of of, what the problems are.
01:03:19:20 – 01:03:44:05
Unknown
You can prioritize those and track, solutions whether or not they’re effective. And, and, so it becomes kind of a knowledge base on, on what you’ve tried. and the other thing that makes that invaluable is that, the next time you’re planning, another work order to run that part again, you can review the process dev items that that had been logged from the prior run.
01:03:44:06 – 01:04:06:05
Unknown
And you can make decisions to, change the process in the early phases. So it’s not like you set it up. like I said earlier, you know, you can you can repeat to set up and repeat the problems of the prior run. or you can use, better information like, for the process development, in pro shop to make a decision to change something, to prevent a problem.
01:04:06:09 – 01:04:38:01
Unknown
And so that’s a, that’s been a really valuable tool for us.
01:04:38:03 – 01:05:03:20
Unknown
Yeah. I think, you know, we we we’re a year and a half in, and I’m really interested to see how things, materialize this year, but out of the gate. you know, what I’m really looking for is, what’s how can we scale the business if we’re if we’re limited in our ability to make decisions, then, the this the growth of the business is self-limiting.
01:05:03:21 – 01:05:43:02
Unknown
And, you know, we won’t be investing in new machines and hiring people and that sort of thing. So I’m really looking for pro shop to be a tool that we can use so that everybody on the shop has a clear picture of what they need to do, so they can just go execute, and so it really has, helped us in terms of, kind of overcoming, the, the leadership bottleneck of having to make every decision in real time, communicate it face to face with people on the production for, for so, as we’ve embraced that philosophy of using pro shop as the, as the driver and the source of information on
01:05:43:02 – 01:06:08:02
Unknown
what to do, it’s helped us scale, at the end of the day, you know, what does it all boil down to? I guess, to put it in a nutshell, we’ve been able to recently start up, a second shift. we never could have contemplated that before. And not just for the the scalability of leadership decisions, but also getting people trained and on board in a uniform way.
01:06:08:04 – 01:06:35:09
Unknown
we we didn’t really go into detail on that, but we use, pro shops, integrated quality management system, to, we’ve created a, breakdown of, of onboarding training for new employees, so that we know that each new person who comes in is, is going to conduct our processes in the same way as everyone else in the shop, and they see how they fit in with everybody else.
01:06:35:09 – 01:07:14:18
Unknown
So, that’s really the, the kind of the, the foundation of our training and onboarding for new people. And through the use of that, we’ve been able to, you know, hire, hire, new employees, start up, we can shift. And, those people are fantastic. And it’s fun to see the, you know, the pro shop training being the the kind of the root, you know, the, the, the base resource that they use to, develop their careers, but also know the right way to do some detail process or, you know, given resume production on a machine that stopped.
01:07:14:20 – 01:07:47:12
Unknown
so we have that kind of firing on all cylinders, I would say, and, you know, from a scalability perspective, bringing a bringing another shift online is going to be a really big thing for us.
01:07:47:14 – 01:07:54:17
Unknown
Yeah.
01:07:54:19 – 01:08:20:16
Unknown
Yeah. I think it’s it’s that’s pretty easy for me to visualize, because I think we’d be. Yeah. Mostly the same as we were, saddled with, it kind of, you know, just the, the hamster wheel from a leadership perspective of always running as hard and fast as you can, without seeing that the business is progressing or growing in a healthy way.
01:08:20:18 – 01:08:44:14
Unknown
you know, if you if you don’t have good systems, you really do get, stifle by, just, you know, the leadership being the busiest thing in the shop and the machines not being as busy. yeah. Because you can’t you can’t execute without having your hands on everything all the time. And so, you know, I know very well what that looks like because we’ve lived it for a lot of years.
01:08:44:14 – 01:09:12:17
Unknown
And I’m glad that we’re not in that situation now, but, yeah, I think, you know, to contrast that, you know, more and more all the time, you know, a pro shop really is the source of information for the for the workers on the shop floor, on what to do and what to focus on. and as long as we provide, you know, clear expectations with all the team members on how to use the capabilities of pro shop.
01:09:12:19 – 01:09:39:05
Unknown
And then we inject our, our priorities and our insight into how the work orders are written, and prioritized on the shop. Then we have a system that that can scale, substantially. So it’s, it’s a it’s it’s been exciting to see, the difference it’s made on the shop floor and the, kind of how everybody has, has rallied around that.
01:09:39:07 – 01:10:00:14
Unknown
set of tools and, and that information. And people take pride in making it better and better all the time. So can be a bigger contrast.
01:10:00:16 – 01:10:23:10
Unknown
Yeah.
01:10:23:12 – 01:11:06:09
Unknown
Yeah. we have a we have a website. it’s innovative hyphen m e.com. That’s for innovative manufacturing and engineering. so you can Google that. that’ll take you to a, good website that shows what we’re up to and, and how to get Ahold of us. yeah. We’re always looking for new opportunities and, getting better every day, which means, we’re going to we’re looking for more work and, you know, also, you know, as we continue to scale, we’re always looking for, good, employees, good machinists who are looking for a work environment where, their career progress is, is maybe more, defined by
01:11:06:09 – 01:11:20:12
Unknown
themselves than just, waiting for tenure. And some of the problems that they run into another job. So, you know, our websites are great, place for prospective employees. You know, all of us as well.
01:11:20:14 – 01:11:45:00
Unknown
We’re in Des Moines, Iowa, right in the middle of everything.
01:11:50:00 – 01:11:54:04
Unknown
Yeah, yeah.
01:11:54:06 – 01:12:01:05
Unknown
Yeah. But.
01:12:01:07 – 01:12:31:08
Unknown
That, Yeah. The the the sound is more like a baby elephant when the tool is fresh and it’s more like a a Canada goose when it’s dull. So really get familiar with it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there’s another one we do that sounds like a bull frog. So the job to get nicknames based on the sound.
01:12:31:10 – 01:12:49:02
Unknown
Yeah.
01:12:49:04 – 01:13:15:14
Unknown
Yeah. I appreciate the opportunity. And and, you know, I really sincerely feel that, pro shop is is exceptional. You you guys really stand out in your commitment to helping customers. And I’ve seen that reflected in every single interaction I’ve had with Pro Shop employees across the board. So I really do appreciate that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Take care of things.
