Cheese, metal fabrication, and the future skilled worker

A 640-pound block of cheese emerges from complex machinery churning away at one of many creameries throughout the U.S. Why is the block of cheese 640 lbs.? It’s because that dimensional size happens to be optimal for cutting and slicing into various packages. The manufacturer that made this web of stainless steel and PLCs is Millerbernd Systems, a company that for more than 50 years has been supplying equipment and systems for the cheese and dairy industry.

Today Millerbernd is much more. It’s still a process and control integrator for highly automated cheese, dairy, coffee, beverage, ice cream, and other food processing operations, but it also fabricates and assembles internal components for wind towers and produces light fixtures as well as custom parts and assemblies for a variety of OEMs (see Figure 1).

The company has evolved into a complex entity, yet still one that effectively takes a big block of cheese (carbon steel and stainless sheet) and decides how to slice and assemble it best (fabricated systems and components). The goal is the same; the methods are just more varied. If you left Millerbernd 20 years ago, you wouldn’t recognize the place today. It’s little wonder that, on Millerbernd’s website, Spencer Johnson’s allegorical tale Who Moved My Cheese? An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life is listed as recommended reading.

Machines, Controls, and Ice Cream Bars

Millerbernd Systems now is divided into four divisions. Millerbernd Process Systems builds custom food processing equipment and works closely with another division, Millerbernd Automation. In this division, control engineers integrate and program the numerous PLCs that tie all the processing equipment together.

Cheese, dairy, and other food processors usually don’t upgrade an entire plant all at once. The nature of the business usually doesn’t make this feasible. Dairy farms produce milk continuously, and there have to be plants in place to process that supply immediately. This means the processing plants can’t close for significant periods of time, so new equipment must fit like a puzzle piece with a processing plant’s existing machinery.

The company designs machines that help food processors’ efficiency. For instance, a maker of ice cream bars approached Millerbernd about making better use of the waste from the production process. Some frozen novelties do not pass quality control, primarily due to a packaging problem. These items need to be disposed of, and hauling it all to the landfill is costly. The reality is that the edible component needs to be separated from the packaging materials, including the wooden sticks, plastic, paper, and cardboard.

The company asked Millerbernd to design a machine that would allow the packaging materials to be separated from the frozen novelty. The resulting slurry of product could then be sold as animal feed, and the packaging materials would become suitable for recycling.

“We designed a machine for six months, and the customer sent us a whole truckload of chocolate bars to destroy and test,” Farid Currimbhoy, senior vice president, said. During testing, part of the shop smelled like chocolate ice cream—not a bad thing.

Expanding Fabrication Capabilities

As technology in fabrication equipment changed, Millerbernd could see the advantages that would come with implementing new equipment on the fabrication floor. “Plasma cutting, lasers, and CNC brake presses all would have a dramatic impact on the type of parts that could be created in the design department,” said Brad Millerbernd, company president. “This allowed us to design and fabricate more complex machinery.”

Millerbernd made machinery investments over several years, each new work center leading to the next. It was apparent that the new manufacturing technology exceeded the capacity necessary to supply their current needs, so Millerbernd began to fill the excess capacity by supporting other OEMs in the state. In the late 1990s it added staff to support this growing line of business. This OEM work eventually led to Millerbernd Laser, the company’s custom fabrication division that Currimbhoy heads.

The company’s lasers—one of which is 6 kW with a 20-ft.-long., 7-ft.-wide table—can handle everything from gauge material to greater than 1-in. plate (depending on the material type). It also has a 50-ft.-long cutting table with a high-density plasma system and secondary beveling head and pipe cutter. The operation obviously can handle some big workpieces.

“We do a lot of work for various industries, but our main focus over the past five years has been the wind energy business,” Currimbhoy said. “We’ve fabricated a lot of the internal components of the wind towers: the brackets, the ladders, and all the weldments and platforms that go inside the tower doors.”

By its nature, dairy, cheese, coffee, and related food processing requires expertise in stainless steel. So when a manufacturer closed its custom lighting fixture division in Winsted, Minn., about 10 years ago, managers saw an opportunity to serve a new niche, hired the local talent recently made available due to the plant closure, and launched Millerbernd Lighting.

“We were in the stainless steel business, and that niche market needed stainless steel lighting,” Currimbhoy said. “That’s how the lighting division was born. And now the lighting division and laser division work hand-in-hand, because they’re related in terms of the equipment base and what customers require.”

Managing Complexity

If you walk through the company’s 105,000-sq.-ft. facility, you won’t see a typical job shop. Yes, the floor has lasers, press brakes, plate rolling, and welding, but the assembly area also has workers installing and wiring control boards and vast processing systems of stainless steel.

Managing work flow through engineering also can be a challenge, Currimbhoy said, considering the level of job complexity in the company’s food processing work. The fabrication area can tackle a portion of a large equipment system in the morning, then fabricate piece parts and lighting products in the afternoon (see Figure 2).

Large food processing systems can have a lead time spanning months, and most of that time is spent working with customers on system design. Meanwhile, an OEM may call the fabricator and request that a nest of parts be laser-cut and delivered within days. Still other customers may require large subassemblies for wind towers and other structures, calling for plasma cutting, bending, and qualified welding.

To manage part flow, the company has expanded its use of enterprise resource planning (ERP). Every batch now has a bar code on it. Software alone doesn’t solve every challenge, of course, but it does give a picture of where work stands. It also helps manage production to ensure no parts are fabricated too early—a temptation for some projects with long lead times. “We can’t do that anymore,” Currimbhoy said.

Technical Education for the Community

The diversification strategy has helped Millerbernd grow from a $2 million equipment fabricator with fewer than a dozen employees 15 years ago to one today with 85 employees and about $16 million in sales across the four divisions. On average, about half of the revenue comes from the laser and lighting divisions, while the other half comes from the process systems and automation divisions.

Still, if the company wants to continue this kind of growth in Winsted, it needs talent in the pipeline. Last year Brad Millerbernd and his cousin Trevor Millerbernd recognized this long-term problem, and they aimed to solve it. Trevor is president and CEO of Millerbernd Mfg., another manufacturer just down the road from Millerbernd Systems (see Winsted Roots sidebar). Both companies had dozens of welding positions open that they couldn’t fill.

Trevor had already contacted Dunwoody College of Technology in Minneapolis about developing a specialized training program for Millerbernd Mfg., but distance (more than 40 miles) was an issue—and he also knew the problem was larger than just his company. The entire community lacked a strong technical training center.

Trevor touched base with more than a dozen other businesses in nearby Delano, Hutchinson, and Litchfield. They met, discussed options, and came up with an unusual solution: Why couldn’t area manufacturers come together and help launch a technical training school?

Last year 14 area manufacturers put in seed money and launched MOVE LLC, or Manufacturing Opportunities for Vocational Employment, for western Minnesota. The organization has partnered with Dunwoody College of Technology out of Minneapolis, which provides educators and curriculum for the 16-week class. The class takes place at a new Corporate & Community Training Center (CCTC), which operates in a 3,000-sq.-ft. facility in Winsted. The first class of nine welders launched in fall 2014, and the second class (with 11 enrolled) is taking place this spring. A CNC machining program is scheduled to begin in October 2015.

“We’re teaching the skills that the businesses need,” said Debra Kerrigan, Dunwoody College’s dean of workforce training. “We’re making sure that the curriculum coincides with the jobs the students will be getting.”

Each business has an ownership stake in the school, and each has committed to employ graduates. While in the program, students visit various companies to get a taste of how they operate. Although financial aid is available for certain displaced workers, most students do need to pay their own way, and a local bank can provide competitive private loans. “The bank is onboard to really help the students who want to go through the training and work in the local community,” Kerrigan said.

The companies also don’t require that students work at one of the companies upon graduation for a certain period.

“We thought about many ways on how to arrange this,” Currimbhoy said. “Each class has room for only 12 students, and we have many more [job] openings. So we ultimately decided that they should be free to go to anybody in the area, to the company that’s the best fit for them.”

Kerrigan added that the overall point is to build a technically educated community. Without local talent, companies that need them eventually leave. Without that community, Millerbernd Systems probably wouldn’t have grown into the company it is today. If it wants to continue growing in Winsted, it needs talent in the pipeline.

“A few local companies, in their five- to seven-year plan, were looking to leave the area,” Kerrigan said. “When you have small communities with 1,000 people, and you have a company that employs 250 people decide to move to an area where it can find qualified workers, that’s a big hit for a community. This kind of program really helps the whole community, not just industry.”

Images provided by Millerbernd Systems