Approximately 98% of American manufacturing consists of small to medium-size businesses. There is a real need to equip these factories for a productive future to support the resurgence of manufacturing.
See also: Episode 3 of (R)Evolutionizing Manufacturing: All About AI
Greg Whitt, process improvement manager for RV components manufacturer MORryde, and Ryan Kuhlenbeck, CEO of Pico MES, joined Smart Industry Managing Editor Scott Achelpohl in June to discuss how midsized factories can make the transition.
Whitt shared his experience with how MORryde is using a manufacturing execution system to manage its production floor operations, improve quality control, and provide data for continuous improvement while Kuhlenbeck related Pico's own experiences in error-proofing.
Smart Industry presents the discussion here as an episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast.
These are excerpts from the program with Ryan Kuhlenbeck and Greg Whitt:
Kuhlenbeck: We'll get to a presentation that has some real-world examples, actual costs, actual timing, things that people could follow if they want to. But mostly just an example of technology looks like when it's deployed on the smaller side of the house, what's possible.
So, for us, a lot of the starting points and when we head into the shop floor is just managing the chaos. We've got people, machines, tools, all kinds of different things that are all happening at the same time that have to work in perfect harmony to not make a mistake, to produce with quality, but also produce efficiently price points wise.
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Everything from simple things like scanners and printers all the way up to DC nut runners up over here and all kinds of air tools and things in between exist in all of our factories, at least on the assembly side. The key that we kind of recognize in the world is it's pretty rare. You've got a 3%, 5%, 10% improvement. I believe that most opportunities are actually small and you need to get a lot of them to really move the needle. So, it's a death by 1,000 cuts problem.
How do I get 30%, 1% at a time, day in and day out? Whether it's helping an individual worker perform a task or a technology that's feeding back data into a continuous improvement loop. That can solve a different issue like how do you manage your people on the one side, whether it's training or just executing standard work? What about the equipment that they use, and they're integrated into their days and then the data that connects it all together both to validate you built the thing right, but also that. Where the opportunities are for future improvements so that you're constantly growing.
Whitt: So, I have a heavy engineering background. I'm going to try and stay pointed and not get too far down in the weeds. That's definitely potential kryptonite.
Just to start with kind of an overview of what our company does, we do, based on our location in Elkhart area, we have a heavy connection to the RV industry, but really anything metal fabrication is in our wheelhouse. We have a product line that is Jeep accessories. We do stuff for transit buses.
We've got pictures up here, especially products, and our chassis modification, is a very … it's a good chunk of our business, but there's a lot of things that we don't put or can't put necessarily onto our website. There's a lot of stuff that gets buried underneath a lot of other things, and we do everything from components that go into. A gliding rocking chair and very basic seating components that are metal fabrication all the way up to recent addition is a company that does roll off trucks and we make several 100-pound metal welded assemblies that go into their hoist system for lifting containers, everything in between.
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But what's really important to us, what we try to maintain a consistency in is we want to keep our customers happy, and we want to maintain the culture on our work floor. And that's as we evaluate software equipment technology, that's something that we want to be mindful of. So, what can we use to facilitate that? So quality is something that you never really arrive at, right? You can always improve it, but you're never really there. But error-proofing is a big portion of that.
We have a very high-volume product where we've got over 700 employees companywide right now, and it's a very diverse product. Yes, we do a lot of chassis manufacturing. We do a lot of assembly. You know you name it, but we've got a large powder coat line that is a segment of our business all for our own components. You know we've got 20 flatbed lasers companywide. We've got a bunch of press, brakes, all that sort of thing. And as we integrate technology and as technology improves, how do we do that well?
See also: Episode 3 of (R)Evolutionizing Manufacturing: All About AI
As we were looking at Pico, one of the things that was really important to us was integration with our ERP software. And as we're evaluating different software, how difficult is it to integrate? How difficult is it to learn and is it just going to be a new piece of software that somebody's going to have to be an expert in and maintain every piece of equipment we buy? It seems like whether it's a cold saw, a press break, or tooling, it seems like they offer included software or optional software that you can learn and you can implement if you want, too.
That gets very cumbersome to have a lot of different software. But integration with our ERP system was something that Pico offered and has proven to be extremely helpful. The other thing, because of our diverse product set, as we are evaluating equipment and software, what's the application? So, our investment in the learning curve, our investment in the integration of the setup is really going to pay out long term. Again, something that as we were evaluating PICO initially was very promising and has proven out as well.
