Andrew Loescher, Ultra Tool & Manufacturing Automation Specialist, shares the importance of #automation and #optimization of the shop floor. Andrew is a SuperNova award finalist for Constellation Research and tells his story to Editor in Chief Larry Dignan.
View the full case study here: https://www.constellationr.com/node/33436/vote/application/view/1068
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Full video transcript (Disclaimer: this transcript is not edited and may contain errors)
Hi, I'm here with Andrew loscher. He's Ultra he's an automation specialist at ultratool and manufacturing. So first off, congrats on being a supernova Award finalist. Let's just start a high level. What does Ultra tool and manufacturing specialize in? Sure, ultra tool and manufacturing specializes in on time, high quality metal stampings, sheet metal stampings. We also build high quality tools for the stamping industry as well as we provide a full fabrication department for customers who are looking for smaller runs of sheet metal goods. We also have a value added department that can add nuts, bolts, weld parts of the sheet metal, parts that we stamp. And how large is the company? So we're about right around 100 employees. We're right around $28 million in sales per year.
Okay, so I know you were trying to, you know, scale things up and, you know what? What were your challenges in doing that and just sort of getting the data you needed to optimize? We really started the journey about four years ago now. So what kicked off the journey was really just hearing a lot of the talk about IIoT right away. We had some conversations with a company at the time called cores engineering. They were bought by Plex was bought by Rockwell, but so they provided a solution for us. But really, even before they provided a solution for us, they helped us really figure out how we could benefit from smart technology. Plant monitoring on the floor as I talked with representatives from at the time Coors engineering about what you know, plant monitoring in general, can do for you. One of the most powerful things that they had said at the time was really it can do anything for you. It just takes a team of people who have eyes on the floor, who can see what the problems are, the inefficiencies are. And once you really have that kind of mindset looking for those inefficiencies, there's there's always a tool, there's always a smart tool, or some logic you can build behind the scenes to improve those inefficiencies and save money.
So did you have any infrastructure in place to, you know, measure these processes and manufacturing in place to begin with? Or is that something that you worked with Plex to kind of just integrate some of our machines are fairly smart, at least the stamping presses. They have mountains of data that you could pull from them. They all are driven by industrial computers, PLCs and we had Plexis ERP ahead of time, so we kind of had these two pieces. We had the ERP was working behind the scenes, and we had our machines, but we didn't really have anything tying them together. So really, the first time, I personally looked into one of our stamping presses to figure out what data we could pull from it, I was I was pretty surprised and very excited to be honest about what we could get from that machine and feed into our ERP system, or just create a dashboard for our own visibility. So Plex really provided that that intermediate piece to connect our machines to our ERP system, and that that connection was mostly a software layer, yeah, mostly a software layer. I really all we had to add was switches in any of our older machines that didn't have them, and we standardized right away how we were going to communicate. So we had stamping presses that didn't even have a PLC, that were just built off and relays all the way up to a new, new servo stamping press that has, you know, way more technology than we'd ever look at or need to deal with. The presses kind of come with a monitoring system that we just upgraded those across all of our presses. So, so really seamless implementation, because we just really needed to upgrade those boards on each press and then connect an Ethernet cable and you're good to go. So how has this changed your processes, and how you go about optimizing keep. Biggest change for us was, again, just getting into a mindset of what were our processes that were inefficient, first of all, and prioritizing which ones we felt we could make more efficient with this, with this technology, and then getting people on board and train to deal with that. So right?
The first step in the process was just getting our key players, managers, supervisors, together in a room and just kind of having a roundtable discussion on what everybody's problems are, what if, what inefficiencies were there specifically right away related to monitoring and recording production on the plant floor and interfacing with Plex. So we were trying to take away anything that an operator had to do specifically in Plex manually so that they could focus on making parts. Really just took away some processes, to be honest, like recording production, scrapping parts in the system, and printing labels. Have you been able to tweak the processes from your learnings initially, I guess, how often do you go and kind of tweak how things are done? I would say, from an implementation standpoint, the Plex engineers that take on the implementation are very hands on, very thorough, also very capable and interested in training people within our company to tweak background logic and parts of the automated processes, especially with our some of our machines did require fairly custom logic. So what used to be called Mach two and a Plex automation and orchestration has a pretty, pretty good set of templates, logic, templates and things that they've built out to work for customers. But with some of our machines, there was quite a bit of custom, custom building behind the scenes. Their engineers helped out with but I kind of picked up the ball and was able to learn how to build that logic behind the scenes, which was really helpful for us, and I know it has been for other companies that I've spoken with, so that, you know, even little things here and there that come up, they're able to build additional logic, or tweak logic, or use some kind of history of transactions to make make the processes even better. What? Um, what have the returns been like? What?
What have been some of the benefits you've been able to quantify? Yeah, so right away, the ROI for me was really just in recording, production and printing labels. So just on our stamping floor alone, we have 13 stamping presses. 10 of the 10 of them are automatic. And some of those, some of the, some of the jobs that we run, I mean, we're making parts anywhere from really 20 up to 200 strokes per minute, parts per minute. So we have some people that are making, you know, hundreds and hundreds of boxes every day. So for that person, have to walk up to their computer and type in how many parts they've made, and then, you know, click through a couple of screens in Plex, which, you know, Plex is great, but it's still all extra work. So they're trying to record production, print a label, apply a label. And I would say, probably in at least a third of our jobs, they're stopping the machine to have to do all that. So now all of that is done, recording production, recording scrap, printing labels, all that's done automatically, so an operator just can walk over, quick, pull a label off, slap it on a box. So the return on investment. On that process alone, paid for, paid for the mach two product, but Plex ano product for us, just in one year's time, if we have all of our machines running on our shifts, and again, it kind of depends on the job, if it's if it's one where the press is stopping or not. So we're really saving money. We were seeing returns upwards of $48,000 a year just on label, printing itself and production recording. Now we're also planning on building, building a lot, quite a few other initiatives out. We have some pretty good ROI numbers for some additional logic that we built in house to track track setup time for machines, so if an operator z is struggling with a setup previously, we didn't really have very good real time visibility into that to have a supervisor go out and assist. So. Something maybe turned into a five hour setup on a machine, maybe a complex setup where now we can track what's going on there via machine statuses and send out the correct people to assist the operators so they can get a machine up and running faster. So we saw a really good ROI numbers on that as well, and decreased setup times because of that.
So the How long will this scale out take? We've had the product or about two and a half years now. We've just done stamping the build out, wasn't it was probably over a couple months. So our the way we did it was, let's roll this out on two machines to start out with. So we just get our feet, our feet go on, and we get people seeing how it's working. Because once you kind of build out the one or two machines, especially with us in our stamping facility, our presses are mostly the same. So we were able to build out just, really two, two machine templates that we could then apply to the rest of our presses. So after we had those two kind of done and taken care of and running well, an implementation for another one was less than a day. It's really just applying that template to another work center, testing it out for an hour or two, and then just kind of letting her rip. We do have, like I said, we have our full fledged fabrication department and a value added department with spot welders, welders press brakes, whole bunch of different machines that we also plan on implementing at some of those implementations will be simpler. For example, our spot welding machines, we plan on also recording production, and that's kind of already something we've done. So applying that to another work center is just a matter of really getting one piece of data from the machine. Hey, am I stroking up and down? But in addition to that, we have we have other initiatives that we are going to get going. We plan on building a dashboard to track cycles on all of our spot welders, so that we know how many times a consumable, like an electrode on a spot welder, how many hit sets, how many strokes it's made because they wear out.
So that can be a problem if we have, if we're not changing those in a certain time frame, then you might start getting bad parts. So now we can have a dashboard with real time visibility into how many, how many, how many strokes a machine has made, so that we can be proactive and change machine consumables when we need to. All right, thanks for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me. Larry.
