Metal fabrication for the visually impaired

Walter Coats, a visually impaired press brake operator, has been with Beyond Vision since 2008.

A press brake technician places a part against a magnetic backgauge and a fixture that doubles as a clever errorproofing device. Next, the operator releases the part and presses a two-handed control and foot pedal to commence the bending cycle. The whole thing looks precise, efficient, and, aside from the two-handed control, a lot like any other bending operation. Oh, and the operator also happens to be blind.

“Our mission is to employ the visually impaired; currently the unemployment rate for working-age adults who are visually impaired is 70 percent.”

That was Ron Howski, machine shop manager at Milwaukee-based Beyond Vision, a 98-employee not-for-profit organization that began as a state agency in 1903, when it was called Wisconsin Workshop for the Blind. In 1985 the organization transitioned from a state agency to a not-for-profit enterprise.

About 80 percent of direct-labor employees are visually impaired in some way. They range from legally blind (even with glasses) to entirely sightless. They perform call-center work, assemble and package products, and distribute office supplies at military bases. And perhaps most surprisingly, it also has an eight-employee machine shop that recently delved into metal fabrication with a 40-ton press brake and a single-station punch press.

“This is not an entitlement program by any stretch. It’s not a babysitting operation.” So said James Kerlin, Beyond Vision’s president and CEO. “We hire people, fire people, and promote people, and do everything every other company does. It’s just that we happen to be a social enterprise. We run like an enterprise, but we have a social mission that remains our primary goal.”

No Margin, No Mission

Kerlin was traveling recently with a blind co-worker. The hotel clerk asked Kerlin what type of room his blind companion needed. Kerlin suggested the attendant ask his friend directly. So the clerk turned to his friend and proceeded to talk slowly and loudly, as if he were deaf, not blind, and that somehow his condition hindered his mental capacity.

Kerlin doesn’t think less of the hotel clerk for doing this; it’s common for those who aren’t around visually impaired people regularly. But it does reveal the common misperception that these people just can’t be expected to contribute like sighted people can. If the leaders at Beyond Vision followed this line of thinking, it probably would have closed its doors a long time ago.

“We’re not-for-profit, but we’re not for loss either,” Kerlin explained. “We have a little saying around here: no margin, no mission. Ninety-nine percent of funding comes from work we do for other companies.”

Sources mentioned two standout facts about the shop. One regards safety. “Our safety record is incredible,” Kerlin said. “In the eight years I’ve been here, we’ve had two lost-time accidents in the machine shop, and both of them involved sighted people.”

“When it comes to safeguarding standards, we go beyond them,” said Ron Wink, machining coordinator. “Certain areas on machines that have guarding, we guard even more to eliminate any pinch point or other hazard.”

Walter Coats receives training on Beyond Vision’s press brake. To cycle the press, Coats must press a dual palm button control before pushing the foot pedal and actuating the ram.

Although sighted people move material from one process to the next, people who can’t see still need to find their way through the shop and know where to find pieces that need to be processed. For this reason, parts handling carts are standardized, with incoming parts on the left, outgoing on the right. Walkways are clear and have aluminum strips on either side so that personnel with canes can tap to sense the edge of the path.

The second standout point regards the shop’s quality and delivery metrics. So far this year the shop has had a near-perfect on-time delivery rate (99.99 percent) and perfect quality record.

“It’s been that way for multiple years,” Kerlin said. “To get there, we put a lot of effort into processes, training, and poka-yoke. We take poka-yoke to the next level, because we assume the operator has little or no sight. Our goal is to make every process just as efficient whether a person has full sight, some sight, or no sight. We put thought into the fixtures and tools we develop, and as a result we end up with world-class quality and delivery.”

Kerlin added that all this process planning and errorproofing have allowed the shop to base its machine rates on the speed at which some of its best sighted operators can finish the job. “Even though we have a mission [to employ the visually impaired], nobody will give us work unless we’re competitive.”

Over the past four years the shop’s customer base has grown to include some big names, including Briggs & Stratton, Harley Davidson, Pentair, Caterpillar, Joy Global, and Oshkosh Truck. Volumes range from one-offs to thousands. Big customers have visited the facility and have audited shop processes, just as they would for any other shop.

Providing Value

Since Howski came onboard in 2010, he has seen just how valuable people who are blind or visually impaired can be in a career path so associated with sight—reading a blueprint, looking at a caliper or micrometer, observing the part being made. How can a sightless person possibly be expected to perform as a person who can see?

As sources explained, they perform quite well, and the shop’s quality rates are proof of that. Operators who are blind or visually impaired tend to move deliberately, and they’re gentle with the workpieces they handle. Moreover, the unique fixtures the shop has developed, both for machining and now for fabrication, have helped errorproof production. In fact, some of these ideas may apply to the conventional fab shop. After all, any shop with a 100 percent quality rate is obviously doing something right.

The shop employs sighted personnel to aid in programming and machine setup. But blind or visually impaired operators aren’t just button-pushers. They run machines with the help of JAWS^®, or Job Access With Speech, software that reads work instructions, job details, and other information displayed on the machine control.

They check their own work with calipers and micrometers, both of which are hooked with a data cable to a voice box. A sighted setup person will enter the dimension and the high and low limits of the tolerance. When blind operators measure a part after machining, they push a button on the caliper or micrometer; a voice then tells the dimension as well as whether it is in or out of tolerance. They also use drop-in gauges, snap gauges, and go/no-go fixtures; if the part fits, it’s good; if it doesn’t fit, something’s awry.

After machining and fabrication, some jobs are sent to Beyond Vision’s assembly department, where workers assemble parts into complete units. Other parts are packaged and sent directly to customers.

Walter Coats retrieves a part during training. The light curtains are set at a safe working distance from the tooling.

Expanding to Fabrication

The press brake was brought in to fabricate one large job for a solar equipment manufacturer. This brake operated along a precision miter saw. The extrusion (which would become part of the solar panel frame) was cut on the saw and then flowed to the nearby press brake, which was set up with custom punch tooling. Wink, a tool and die veteran, designed tooling with pins and thumb stops to ensure operators located the blanks accurately. Unfortunately, the solar company went bankrupt, and the equipment sat idle for months.

Eventually Howski followed some leads through some of his industry connections and landed several steady fabricating jobs. These include bending work for GenMet, a custom fabricator in Mequon, north of Milwaukee. GenMet’s president, Eric Isbister, also sits on Beyond Vision’s board of directors (see Two CEOs Walk Into a Bar sidebar).

As Isbister recalled, “I’d go to Beyond Vision for board meetings, and I would see this brand-new press brake with plastic over it, because it wasn’t being used. So I asked a bunch of questions, and kept pushing [for fabrication]. There are indeed some things that can be done [at the press brake] by a blind person, if you have adequate safety checks and have proper training.”

To get that training, the organization’s sighted personnel have sought outside training. Wink, for instance, recently attended a press brake seminar taught by Steve Benson (a columnist for this magazine) and hosted by the Fabricators & Manufacturers Association International^®.

Walk into the facility today and you’ll see a visually impaired operator slide a steel part against a magnetic backgauge. For some parts, operators slide the blank not only against the backgauge, but also over a series of locating pins that align with laser-cut holes in the blank.

Some part location fixtures need to be adjustable to match various part geometries, while others are dedicated to certain jobs. Regardless, all are staged directly adjacent to the brake for quick retrieval during setup.

With the part located, the operator removes his hands and presses the dual palm buttons as well as a foot pedal. If the operator’s hands aren’t pressing both buttons, the brake ram doesn’t move when he steps on the pedal.

“We design all of our tooling so our guys can feel where [the blank] needs to go,” Wink said. “We use a lot of magnetics, both on the side and in the back, so that it will pull [the workpiece] to the right corner. The guys are unbelievably talented at picking the process up, especially considering their sense of touch. They don’t slam work into place. They slide the work in gently.”

To ensure quality, Wink has developed template fixtures to check angles and ensure outside flange dimensions are within tolerance. “It’s an efficient process,” Wink said. “After he bends the part, he just slides it through the fixture, and it should mate right to the bend. If it doesn’t, he stops right there, and [a sighted person] will be there to make any adjustments.”

Workers usually form single-bend parts. But at this writing, shop personnel are developing ways to bring in multibend forming work, using special holding fixtures during the forming cycle that, again, can double as an errorproofing device.

(Note: The multibend piece in the photos is part of a training exercise.) “Right now we’re looking at the machines and determining what we can and can’t do,” Howski said.

The punch press also has a two-hand palm-button control. For one job, the operator slides the blank into a custom die with a backstop that locates the part in the correct position for the machine cycle.

And like on the press brake, on the punch press the operator must press a two-button control to cycle the machine.

“After a while our team really gets so good at this,” Howski said. “You watch them, and you wouldn’t even know they’re blind.”

Delivering on Time, All the Time

When Howski arrived in 2010 he did what any shop manager would do: He focused on on-time delivery and quality. He made sure workers were stacking finished parts neatly in bins and running parts within an even tighter tolerance window than the customer specified.

And just because operators are blind doesn’t mean they need more time to complete the work. For one mining customer, Beyond Vision offers quick-turn machining service for a special pin that needs to be shipped down to Brazil. “Usually we can make it the same day or next day and get it out the door,” Howski said.

Today sighted personnel set up machines, sign off on job travelers, and perform final part inspections; visually impaired employees handle everything in between. But it wasn’t always like this. For instance, when Howski arrived, operators did not check their own work at the machine.

“We’ve now invested a lot in the training of the operators, and we teach the message that quality is everything,” Howski said. “If you want to stay in business, and you want to have a good customer base, that’s what they expect. And everybody bought into it, and here we are.”

In recent years the organization also built a quality lab, complete with a coordinate measurement machine (CMM) and other tools. “If we were going to get more business,” Howski said, “especially with some of these big-name customers, we had to have these tools in place.”

Moving forward, managers have plans to expand the operators’ roles even more. On the machining side, for instance, Howski recently invested in a single-piece collet system that shortens collet changeovers to less than 10 seconds. “This will allow our visually impaired operators to help my setup people perform the initial setups on the machines.”

Most first-article production, inspection, and adjustments will still be done with the aid of a sighted setup person; for one customer, this includes a Level III part production approval process (PPAP). But as Howski sees it, there’s no reason why the visually impaired couldn’t help install some of the workholding devices.

This fulfills Beyond Vision’s mission—to give the visually impaired more opportunities to add value—but Howski also sees this from a business perspective: It will free up sighted setup people and better utilize the labor he has.

A Unique Work Culture

Howski talks as if he’s running any metal manufacturing job shop that’s trying to be the best it can be. The only difference, perhaps, is that any money made is invested back into the business so that the shop can grow, hire more, and put a dent in the 70 percent unemployment rate of the visually impaired.

“It would be great within the next five years if we could double in sales and hire more people,” Howski said. “We have a great customer base that has been very supportive of what we do, and I think we’ve earned their business with our quality and on-time delivery.”

This isn’t a conventional job shop, of course. Managers approach many aspects of the business differently. For instance, employing the visually impaired, Beyond Vision must invest significantly in training. It’s hard to find a blind person with machining or fabrication experience.

But as sources explained, employees also truly appreciate their jobs. One older worker, blind since birth, takes a 40-minute ride on a regional bus, and then transfers to a city bus to get to work. He does this without any assistance.

“This guy never misses a day of work. I don’t care if there’s a snowstorm,” Howski said. “He’s here every single day. And really, that’s how our entire work-force is. The atmosphere is great. You don’t have it in all companies, but we do have it here.”

Wink actually was blind himself at one point in his life, after an accident in a tool and die shop, and he still can’t see out of one eye. “I thought my job was done, and I wasn’t going to be doing what I did anymore, even when I regained vision in one eye. I didn’t have the depth perception. But I got better over the years.

“But then we have people here being so productive, with no vision in either eye. They’re just amazing to see.”

Photos courtesy of Beyond Vision, 414-778-5800, www.beyondvision.com.