Lean meets the internet of things

You get what you pay for, right? Those working in metal fabrication, or for that matter anywhere else, probably wish it were that simple. In reality, customers want more for a lower price in less time. Modern technology married with continuous improvement aims to satisfy this demand.

The goal is to shorten the time between getting the order and shipping the product using the same resources, increasing a fabricator’s sellable capacity. If a job just sits there, stalled as work-in-process for days or weeks at a time—because a machine is down, an operator takes forever to set up, someone called in sick or just didn’t show up—there’s a problem. In theory, lean and other improvement methods spur people to scrutinize processes (not people—i.e., no finger-pointing), map them, and find ways to make everything flow. No longer should jobs just sit there.

Setup taking forever because you can’t find the tools or materials? Try a little 5S and documenting standard work procedures. Machine’s not cutting material as it should? Better preventive maintenance practices could help or, if it’s a material issue, better purchasing practices.

Problem is, all this seems so out of an individual employee’s reach, and it’s difficult to know where to start. Big inefficiencies sometimes lie hidden, while obvious problems seem as if they’re impossible to change. Ultimately, the status quo stays the status quo.

Industrial Sales & Manufacturing (ISM), an Erie, Pa.-based contract fabrication and machining operation, found a way to overcome this conundrum. First it adopted an improvement method called 2 Second Lean™, which, as the name implies, focuses on small, daily improvements. The method tackles lean manufacturing the same way one would eat an elephant: one bite at a time.

Second, the company is ramping up a machine monitoring initiative, linking machinery and enterprise resource planning. It’s tracking uptime and other characteristics of some of the shop’s most complex processes, with the hope of eventually connecting all 165 machine work centers.

Manufacturing in Erie

Jim Rutkowski Jr. remembers Erie as a manufacturing powerhouse in the 1970s and 1980s. But he also knows that Erie’s manufacturing presence today is nothing to sniff at.

“Manufacturing is 14 percent of our economy [in Erie County],” he said. “Few areas can say that these days.”

Rutkowski’s father started as a draftsman before becoming a manufacturer’s representative. “He couldn’t find shops to make his products, so he started making products out of his garage.”

His father launched ISM 50 years ago in a garage not much larger than a Ford Mustang. That garage shop is now a $18.5 million contract manufacturer employing about 160 people in three facilities totaling 125,000 square feet.

As a beta site for Data Inventions, ISM set up machine monitoring of its CNC machining centers. Photo courtesy of ISM

The company isn’t a custom fabricator with a small machine shop to support the sheet metal work. It instead offers extensive milling and turning services, including some comprehensive machining automation. It also has manual and robotic welding, laser cutting, pipe and tube fabrication, press brake bending, a powder coat line, and more.

“You name it, we do it,” said Rutkowski, now general manager at ISM. “We’re a manufacturer’s buffet.”

Implementing Lean in Seconds

It’s 10 o’clock at ISM, break time. But instead of people heading outside for a smoke or to the break room, groups huddle for 10 minutes. ISM calls it “the scrum.” During this time workers talk about small improvements that could be made.

As a guide, the shop is using 2 Second Lean, a book by Paul Akers, an entrepreneur who runs a woodworking tool company called FastCap (for more, visit https://paulakers.net). It’s a method that Akers recommends his readers ramp up gradually. “Start slow and consistent,” Akers stated in a recent video blog. “If you make it a huge, big fanfare, people will think it’s the flavor of the month.”

He covers the basics of lean manufacturing, including shop floor organization and cleanliness, as well as one-piece flow. He describes value-adding versus non-value-adding activity in human terms, like the “wasted” motion we all do emptying a dishwasher. “Most of us are shocked at the amount of non-value-adding activity (walking, reaching, opening, and closing) compared to the value-adding activity (getting the dishes and silverware in the cabinets and drawers),” he writes. “The actual value-adding time is a millisecond compared to all the waste.”

It’s a helpful analogy, particularly for someone who operates fabrication machinery. Consider this hypothetical example. Two press brake operators, one on a small electric (or hybrid hydraulic-electric) machine and another on an older hydraulic press brake, are bending brackets. The bend sequence they use is identical, difficult to improve upon, and yet the operator on the electric brake continually outpaces the hydraulic brake operator.

If the operators weren’t thinking about improvements, even just a 2-second improvement here or there, they’d throw up their hands and think that, well, of course the electric brake operator has greater throughput, considering the machine he’s working on.

But what if the hydraulic brake operator thought of a new way to stage blanks, so he wouldn’t have to move as far to retrieve them? That’s like thinking of a new way to transport the dishes between the dishwasher and cabinet. That’s one 2-second improvement that operators could implement immediately.

Sure, some improvements require a little investment in tooling or other equipment, perhaps broad coordination between departments or the entire company, and Aker’s method doesn’t ignore these big changes. He also doesn’t ignore the importance of reading books about improvement, visiting plants, attending seminars, and continually learning.

But to get people to buy in to lean concepts and to foster the “lean culture,” he focuses first on those small changes—little improvements that occur every day—that can be made immediately. People meet in the morning, talk about ideas, and make them happen.

ISM makes significant use of robotic welding, and it’s one of the first processes the company chose to monitor. Photo courtesy of ISM.

“In two years we’ve made over 3,000 improvements in the plant,” ISM’s Rutkowski said. “The faster you get a job done, the faster we ship, the more money we make. The slower you go, the less stuff we get out, and the less money we make. It’s a good way to utilize the data we have.”

Getting the Data

The data Rutkowski referred to includes direct monitoring of their machining centers and robotic welding. ISM served as a pilot program for a company called Data Inventions, which has offices near ISM in Erie as well as in Norwood, Ohio.

Duane Clement, Data Inventions’ CEO, knew Rutkowski through a few local economic development councils. That relationship eventually led to ISM becoming a beta test site for Data Inventions’ cloud-based software. Today ISM collects certain machining centers automatically, and plans are to expand to robotic welding soon.

In front of the machining center, the operator views his iPad® to see scheduled jobs, performance targets, clock-in/clock-out activities. According to Clement, within weeks of implementation, operator efficiency improved 40 percent while average uptime increased by 10 percent.

Clement explained that, generally speaking (and not specific to the ISM application), the cloud-based Data Inventions system can connect to machines via standard interfaces like OPC and MTConnect. It also uses special adapters, like those available through eNETDNC (www.enetdnc.com), which help draw data out of certain, usually older machines.

“We really started by walking around ISM’s shop floor. We saw everything: high-end lasers, press brakes, CNC machining centers,” Clement recalled. “The shop is running all different kinds of equipment, different jobs. This was the type of manufacturer we wanted to build our company around.”

The goal was to overcome connectivity issues—that is, connect shop floor data such as uptime and part count data with the ERP system—ultimately to link machine performance data with a specific job. That link, Clement explained, allows for apples-to-apples comparisons and benchmarking. After all, a machine’s performance can vary depending on the job it’s processing.

“The system synchronizes job-specific information and targets from Epicor with real-time machine performance, quality, labor, and part counts from the shop floor,” Clement said.

Because the shop collects, interprets, and shares data in real-time, people no longer need to wait until the next production meeting to find out what went right and what went wrong (at least for those machines that are connected). They can instead take corrective action immediately. The data is also available to draw upon for future quoting activity.

Keeping It Simple

ISM is in the early phases of this project, but Rutkowski said that eventually the company hopes to connect all 165 machines on the floor.

“All the information is out on the floor in pockets,” Clement explained, adding that this is why open architecture in software is becoming more important. “[Internet of things] systems are specifically designed to gather data from various platforms, including different sensor platforms. The system brings in all the data from different places, normalizes it, and then starts to do analytics.”

Are ISM managers worried about front-line employees thinking Big Brother is looking over their shoulder? Not really, Rutkowski said, adding that it goes back to culture. “It’s real simple. Customers are only going to give us X amount to do a job.” If the company doesn’t measure, doesn’t scrutinize, doesn’t improve, it will fall behind and eventually fail.

In this sense, connecting machines and the company’s 2 second approach to lean go hand in hand. The morning scrums get people thinking about how to make their days easier. At the same time, as more machines and operations become connected, people can track their progress and, perhaps in some cases, open their eyes to waste they didn’t even know was there.