How automation shapes Kendall Howard’s fabrication business model

Editor's note: In partnership with Salvagnini America, FMA has launched Automation Talk, a new video podcast series. Sign up to receive notifications about new episodes. Watch the first episode here.

The answer is yes. What’s the problem? That statement has guided Kendall Howard since Randy Herreid founded the organization in 2000. You could call the Chisago City, Minn., company a manufacturer of server racks and other IT infrastructure and furniture products, with a growing custom fabrication division, KH Custom Solutions Group—but that really doesn’t describe the place. A “product company” might be the best way to describe it. If someone has an idea for a product, Kendall Howard makes it a reality.

The company not only offers product development and manufacturing, it also has a marketing department to create videos, literature, and all the material to help customers sell and grow their products.

“All the services we do for ourselves, we can offer to our customers,” Herreid explained.

KH Custom Solutions became a natural extension of Kendall Howard’s catalog business. For the catalog business, engineers and sales work to develop new products; they do the same for the KH Custom Solutions. They work on a first-run and tweak manufacturing parameters to perfect the production process, both for catalog products and custom work. The same goes for marketing strategies as well as digital and print marketing support, complete with high-end digital rendering and professional videography.

Years ago, fabricators used to avoid hybrid business models, mainly because shop managers found themselves endlessly competing for resources. Sure, product lines could give custom operations an opportunity to level demand. If custom work slowed, they’d simply fabricate a few catalog products to stock. But demand trends rarely followed what was convenient for the shop floor. Too often, though, a certain custom job or perhaps an in-demand catalog product ate more capacity than expected, and people competed for resources. At the worst of it, everything—custom work and catalog products—ended up shipping late.

Kendall Howard’s business shows how this can become a non-issue, and it has to do with what has become a cornerstone to the company’s growth: automation.

Broadly speaking, precision sheet metal automation comes in three levels. The first level involves full process automation, where work is placed into a machine or system, and a processed part (or other kind of work) comes out the other side. The concept applies to both “hard” automation—that is, machinery—and software automation like programming and scheduling. A manually fed panel bender is a prime example; someone loads a part, the machine takes over to form it, and the operator grasps a formed workpiece on the other side. Within software automation, a bend programmer might load a part file into an offline bend simulation program, then send the completed program to the floor. The second level adds material handling to the mix—specifically, automated loading and unloading. Picture towers and offload tables for laser cutting or punching, or a robot loading and unloading a panel bender. Within software, this might equate to a package that performs several functions without human intervention, like nesting and scheduling.

The third level represents system-wide automation, with multiple machines communicating and automation (think conveyors or automated guided vehicles) transporting jobs between workstations. This can include integrated software that automates order processing and scheduling.

Consider these levels as “ingredients” of automation that companies combine in different ways to gain a competitive edge. In Kendall Howard’s case, the shop employs various levels. You can see Level 1 automaton at its Salvagnini panel bender, where operators feed blanks and retrieve formed parts. You can see Level 2 automation in its Salvagnini blanking systems, where material handling automation move material in and out of a process. And you can see elements of Level 3 automation in its connected front-office systems, which bring orders through quoting and order processing.

This “automation recipe,” of sorts, has allowed Kendall Howard to pursue its unique business model, which, by the way, does not involve eliminating jobs with automation. Herreid never dwells on automation’s “labor saving” attributes. He instead dwells on the opportunities that automation provides. Without it, the company’s approach to business simply wouldn’t work.

Automation has become the cornerstone of growth at Kendall Howard, a unique product development and manufacturing company northeast of Minneapolis. Image: Kendall Howard

Because of automation, people aren’t competing for resources. And instead of focusing on the minutiae of quoting or tool selection, more people have time to concentrate on the big picture: product design ideas, strategies for ramping up production, and more. Put another way, the automation let’s more people at Kendall Howard focus on the business’s key selling point: making an idea a reality. Put another way, the answer is yes; what’s the question?