Over two days recently, more than 70 leaders in the metal building industry gathered in Peachtree City, Ga., to observe-in operation-the trim factory of the future.
The 2013 event was hosted by MetalForming Inc. to preview two software solutions that already are beginning to revolutionize the metal construction industry.
“How do you grab a customer and keep them forever?” asked MetalForming CEO Geoff Stone, setting the stage for the day’s events. “By providing services that your competitors can’t or won’t.
“We have developed a completely new way to automate trim production to bring it up to modern manufacturing standards. That’s what you are going to see today.”
In organizing the previews for a discerning audience of metal construction entrepreneurs, the MetalForming team decided it wouldn’t be enough to simply talk through what their automation software would do, or show a video. It was critical to see it in operation, to actually make parts. So, six metal fabrication machines were arranged and networked at the headquarters building to demonstrate live how the CIRM (Computer Integrated Roof Manufacture) and TrimSpec software solutions could save customers time and money. An actual day’s worth production orders was supplied by a current MetalForming customer, and it was used to drive various production paths, not just once but over and over.
The CIRM solution was developed by a MetalForming team led by COO Bill Wilkins. His group worked on the project in concert with a team from Georgia Tech University.
Before cranking up the demonstrations, Stone recounted how that partnership evolved.
“A consortium of the world’s largest chip manufacturers came to Tech with this problem and the problem was that they had all these various machines on their factory floor from all these different manufacturers that had all these proprietary controls,” Stone said, “and they couldn’t communicate between machines. They asked the guys from Georgia Tech to solve the problem for them. And they did.”
As the Metalforming team got to know Andy Dugenske, the manager of research services at Tech’s Factory Information Systems Group, they approached them with their challenge, similar in some ways, but perhaps even more daunting.
“We have one of the world’s most backwards industries,” said Stone. “People in our industry typically send work to the floor with pieces of paper, with hand sketches.”
A collaborative agreement with Tech to co-develop automation solutions followed, he said, and at the same time, “We got together with our machine manufacturers-Schlebach, Schechtl, Jorns, Krasser-and we said to them, ‘Look, we’re going to develop this software to make it easier for our customers to run their factory floors, but we need all of you guys to adapt your software architecture to meet that need.”
The machine manufacturers all got on board. Arrayed at the Metalforming demo were an SMT Schectl Shear, Schechtl’s Max folder, a Jorns Twinmatic folder, a Schlebach Quadro Cinco rollformer, a Jorns Norma-Line long folder and Krasser’s Centurio automated coil processing, slitting and warehousing system.
CIRM software coordinated the communications between all of the machines and tracked the production. Stone detailed some of the industry challenges that could be solved by integrating CIRM.
“This is a major, major change in the development technology for trim production,” he said. “You have guys in your shops who spend hours each day trying to figure out how they can shear or slit properly to reduce waste. These are guys who are expensive, and it’s dangerous to your productivity if they’re out sick or for some reason don’t show up for work.
“Many of you still change coils every day with human beings, and every day you do that you waste an enormous amount of steel and you kill throughput. You spend a huge amount of time every day setting up slitting knives to cut the right sizes. The people on your folding machines spend an enormous amount of time screwing around with the control, programming it or finding the part, instead of running the part. All of this stuff really reduces the amount of throughput in your factories, and it’s old fashioned.
“These types of problems have been solved by other industries for 40 years in North America, and it’s time that they are solved for the metal components industry. CIRM does that.”
He then described to those in attendance what was about to happen.
“We take a day’s worth of production and dump it into the software,” he said. “The software will run through optimization algorithms to figure out how to set up slitting knives for a minimum of waste. You will see us push a ‘go’ button. Within 90 seconds, coils will have been changed, knives will have been changed, parts will have been slit, all with no people. You will see the parts go to various other downstream stations, folders, shears and so on. You will see those parts jobs being automatically downloaded into folders via bar code scanner. Or some of the machines don’t even need bar code scanners. We’ve got them directly communicating with CIRM. And all of them will do that within the next several months.
“You’ll see all those parts being run, and we’ll watch on the screen at the same time as the machines are reporting back what they are doing, how much of the order is completed.”
And that’s what happened. In the first demo, sales orders released by an ERP system were ingested by CIRM. Machines hummed, multi-ton coils were moved, knives were set, metal was slit, moved to other machines and sheared, shaped and folded. Parts were made. And projected on a wall, a computer screen image enabled the audience to see in real time where each machine was in the order process.
Wilkins explained some of the key advantages of the software. “We can get you to a measure of throughput per bend in the factory,” he said. “One of the key things in the factory is you are converting coils or flat sheets to completed parts. So that’s where you are adding value to the metal. So normally in a factory, you’re cutting, you’re folding, you’re curving, you’re hemming, whatever you are doing to add value to that metal, you can eventually break that down to measure your manpower costs to make that part. So in real time, with CIRM, you can start tracking value in your factory, and how much value you are adding. If you can do that, obviously that helps you when you are estimating jobs.”
Wilkins noted that the more jobs you loaded into CIRM, in essence the more variables you gave it to sort, the better the results and savings were likely to be. “The more parts you feed to the optimizer, the less scrap you will have, he said.”
He also noted that good factory automation benefited from the discipline of optimizing the number of production routes, from machine to machine, that took the metal from coil to finished part. CIRM helps to define and enforce that discipline, he said. It also has the flexibility, through different modules, to tie together an entire factory operation, including transportation, billing and accounting.
CIRM’s Transportation features can be huge efficiency drivers for truck loading and delivery routing, he said. The software can dramatically cut the amount of time spent trying to make sure a truck’s load is balanced properly and that the parts are loaded in a way that makes it easy to get the right pieces off the truck at each stop.
Some of CIRM’s strongest advocates in attendance were MetalForming customers who are already aggressively moving to implement it. Rayome’ Soupiset, COO of Mueller Inc., a direct to the public fabricator of metal buildings and components based in Ballinger, Texas, is one of them. He said it can have a big impact not just on throughput in his factories but also on whom he is able to hire.
“Because of the software, you can have a less experienced workforce,” Soupiset said, “meaning you can hire someone who has less experience and education working with machinery. With the kind of turnover we have in this part of Texas, the more universal the machine is, and the easier it is to work with, the larger the pool of potential employees you can look at.
“With CIRM, we should be able to increase the overall manpower optimization. The software controller will train the people, not the other way around.”
The second demo used sales orders created in TrimSpec, which is being developed by MetalForming in collaboration with its suppliers. The mobile application is not available to the market yet, Stone said, but it will be soon.
TrimSpec takes particular advantage of the pioneering touch screen drawing engine from the Schechtl iFold and makes it available for use on mobile tablets as well as laptop and desktop environments.
“With TrimSpec,” said Stone, “you or your salesman or your order desk – or your customer – can take parts out of your parts catalog, input information about color, quantities, type, where needed and delivery. You can custom draw a part with your finger on the screen using Ifold. You can email it back to the factory, dump it into CIRM and make the part without doing anything else.”
Stone is a big advocate of buying the app and giving it away to customers to cement their relationship to their parts supplier.
“Think about giving your customer a mobile app that empowers him to draw his own profiles exactly the way he wants them, to easily enter all the information from the field, or from anywhere, and then emailing it back to the office and it’s done, the part gets made. How much work would that eliminate for you every single day at your factory?” Stone asked. “How much more throughput would you get if you could do that? And how much customer loyalty would that build?”
With that, fingers were used to draw parts on a screen, orders were sent, machines cranked up and parts were made.
At the end of the session, the attendees were energized, armed with a host of new possibilities for moving their operations forward.
Said one, “It’s a lot to take in, but it’s wonderful to feel like we have a partner to help us deal with these real world production issues.”
Another, who made the trip to MetalForming from the northwest, added an exclamation mark to the day’s discussions, “You guys look for a need and you fill it.”
