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#251 - 3 Things That Changed Our Business This Year
170 Plays3 years ago
TOPCIS:
- Winding down 2021.
- 3 Things that Grimsmo and Saunders that changed their businesses this year.
- Deep dive into ERP systems.
- Grimsmo ran their Kern for 136.5 hours last week!
- What makes us successful?
Recommended
Transcript
Introductions and Business Passion
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the business of the machining episode number 251. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmough.
00:00:08
Speaker
I run Saunders Machine Works, where we make fixture plates and the mod vices. John runs Grimsman Knives, where they make knives and pens, and we love what we do. But even though we love our products, to me, it's also really about the process of building the overall business and just getting... It's a way of justifying what I love, which is embracing technology around subtractive machining. So CAD to CAM to... Yeah, and John and I have talked for years about
00:00:38
Speaker
the successes and the struggles behind that journey. I want to hug you right now. That's exactly it.
Handling Criticism and Goals
00:00:44
Speaker
The business is my outlet to the world to do what I want to do, do what I love to do. It gives me the excuses to spend money and buy cool things and build something very important and hire people and encourage them to grow and learn and make really, really, really cool stuff. Yes, yes, yes.
00:01:05
Speaker
And that's what I have always believed in the campsite rules of try to leave the world a little bit of a better place. And the beauty is it's also a great way of dealing with the naysayers. It's like, I don't care if there's people that don't like my journey or some nugget of it. I know we've been a positive influence on enough people that, darn it, that's a good thing. That's a fun thing. You're never going to please everybody. You're never going to suit everybody. I don't care.
00:01:32
Speaker
I'm doing this the way that I want to do it. And even sometimes you and I don't agree because we're on the same journey, but variations of the same journey. And that's fine. That's great. Yeah, the conversation doesn't really work. I don't even remember what it was like pre-podcast. We talked earlier too. I don't recall it. Well, look, we were both in very different places, for sure. For sure. And I wouldn't say it was, I don't remember it as being
00:01:58
Speaker
any different. I hope we've done a good job of keeping it candid, but if you aren't challenging me and vice versa, then I vote we end the podcast. It has to provide value to both of us as well as the listeners.
00:02:14
Speaker
Yeah. On that note, I'm starting to, it kind of feels weird, but I'm starting to wind down the
Year-End Reflections and Team Motivation
00:02:22
Speaker
year. I do think very much in a calendar year, I start the year with both goals and financials and goals, not like lofty goals that are personal that relate to this, but also like, hey, this is where I want Saunders to be at the end of the year.
00:02:37
Speaker
And one of the mix of both of those personal and business goals has kind of been loving what I do, coming to work, the team that's here, having the team that wants to work here.
ERP Systems and Customer Service Integration
00:02:51
Speaker
And I realize there's three things that we've done this year. I've probably mentioned them, certainly the ERP, which is one of them I've mentioned a lot. But
00:03:01
Speaker
I'm trying to flip around selfishly what I know I like when I tour other shops, when I talk to other entrepreneurs. When I hear things that I realize, oh, that's on the must do list, it helps me a lot. And so when I think it's a little bit, what do you call it, narcissistic, because I'm assuming that what matters to me matters to you. But I think there's some extent that's true.
00:03:21
Speaker
The first thing is fresh desks. We implemented the actually free version of fresh desks for customer service and all customer inbound emails. And it has been a complete game changer because now even though most of us work in this shop, we have Alex tend to work often works from college, but it allows us to collaborate. All the emails come in. They can get automatically assigned. We can track and search like as an example now.
00:03:51
Speaker
When we send freight shipments, which is quite often, we take a quick photo on our phone. That photo gets emailed to an address with the order number, and then anybody has access to the photo record showing the shipment before it left and the weight of the shipment. We take the photo when it's on the weigh scale.
00:04:10
Speaker
And like so many things that happened out of the necessity because we had some issues with our former freight company trying to tell us things were a thousand pounds heavier than they were. Um, but that level of structure and organization and allowing the team to have access to the tools that they need, um, really would encourage it. You know, it's almost like even if you're a one man band, looking at fresh desks as a way to build that org chart where you fill every role, um,
Communication and Team Bonding
00:04:38
Speaker
It doesn't have to be fresh because I'm sure there's alternatives, but it's worked quite well for us. The second one is ERP. I don't even think I have to elaborate on that. I mean, it's the lifeblood of this company at this point for procurement, work orders, QC, maintenance.
00:04:53
Speaker
I'm glad we didn't wait a day longer. I'm right now glad that we're building our own, although I'd love to see the Fusion 360 equivalent of kind of a low barrier entry, easy to use ERP because I do think it's just, I totally get it. Yeah. But now that you've built your own, I mean, I certainly understand how complex it can be and how tailored it could be and how difficult it is to make a generic solution for everybody.
00:05:23
Speaker
I have a lot of respect for the ERP companies out there that are trying to make mass market of this, but I'm still doing my own. Yeah. I think if you're a job shop, I think some of the existing solutions are frankly perfect. Fantastic. Yeah. I think if Grimsman Knives, I'll make up a number. If you added another zero to your revenue, then yeah, you probably would want to hire an SAP consultant to come in, which
00:05:52
Speaker
It's funny, you tend to hear more about like if you have a friend who works in the corporate world that does deal with an SAP integration, there's nothing fun about that conversation you're about to hear, I assure you. But nevertheless, it's a good thing. I mean, at that point, I would hire a full-time programmer on staff and just let them go nuts. That's true. I would do that first. I mean, we already have two freelance programmers that are doing exactly this for us. Yeah. And it's great.
00:06:15
Speaker
But I would prob, I don't know what I'm talking about here with experience, but I would think you would be better off leveraging a legitimate program or two.
00:06:26
Speaker
build off of the existing infrastructure of something like SAP One or Business One or whatever it's called or NetSuite or whatever, because those ERPs are
Leadership and Productivity through Meetings
00:06:36
Speaker
world class. I mean, everybody from your major insurance companies to host your system, like this systems are there. It just takes a ton of tweaking. Yeah. I know very little about that tier of product. I haven't done much research. Yeah. And the last thing, our Friday lunch, if there's one area I
00:06:56
Speaker
knew I wanted to try to do better at because I find it's my own. I'm predisposed to just coming to work and keeping my head down and working because I love what I do. And I've got a team that don't micromanage. We all just kind of live in our own worlds here. And I kind of like that. But I wanted to think about trying to make a conscious effort of being a better leader of making sure we collaborate, making sure we communicate
00:07:16
Speaker
and talk. And so partway through the year, I just decided we're going to do a group lunch on Friday. We take turns ordering out from somewhere. Everybody sits down. We used to do it in our conference room, but Johnny Five, his build has taken over the conference room. So we just put up a folding table out in the shop, which part of me thinks it's awesome because it's kind of who we are and scrap it. But then I'm like, I would really like to have a proper lunch area. Right.
00:07:42
Speaker
And we, everyone kind of just goes through their own update debrief catch up. And I love it. I look forward to it. It's great seeing the progress. It's a good read on, you know, we know, and it's like, okay, we had one machine down. We're backward on this. That's going to cause, we need to get that fixed. It's a good climate. And there's days where it's like, Hey, we're talking about what we want in the future, which really tells us.
00:08:05
Speaker
Everything is pretty darn hunky dory right now. Yep. Yeah. It's a good point when you can think about the future and actually discuss it and plan for it, not just be buried in the weeds of today. Yes, exactly. And just not to, um, sometimes it's a simple, if you want something, just do it. I wanted our team to make sure we were communicating and on the same page more. And so just do it, you know,
00:08:30
Speaker
I've thought about adding another meeting, but right now this works once a week and it's as simple as that. Yeah. And that ties perfectly into, uh, I guess two points that I've thought of as like things that have really changed the past year. Um, the first one is communication, just generically. Um, we've done a very good job progressively throughout the year in all different like aspects of the company, like me and Eric as owners, we've been meeting, um,
00:09:00
Speaker
for up to three hours almost daily for most of the year. Sometimes just half an hour or sometimes we skip it, but sometimes we really get into it. We're thinking and communicating and making sure that all the issues are on the table and not just between the two of us, but between
00:09:18
Speaker
you know the other leaders in the company and and the whole staff too i think our communication game has really risen this year and it can still continue to get better but i mean we're at a level that's like ridiculous compared to where we were at a year or two ago um
00:09:33
Speaker
It's good. It's definitely moving in the right direction, and I feel it, and everybody in the company feels it, and it's great. Can you elaborate? You and Eric sitting down as co-owners, I think I can understand that, but what does that mean with Angelo, Pierre, Skye? Are those department meetings, or is it individual one-on-ones? Is it structured? Is it just when you walk over to them, do they walk over to you?
00:09:56
Speaker
So every day we have our noon meeting with everybody. We usually do it outside. Even Eric and I do our meetings outside. So we do the team meeting outside. We discuss little issues for the day, things that are coming in, people that are visiting.
00:10:13
Speaker
problems that we're having so we can all discuss it, all be aware of the challenges that everybody faces because it's very easy to like, you know, just assume, oh, he's just, his job is easy. But then you start to learn like, oh, wow, there's a lot of intricacies that I didn't even know because I've never done that job. Maybe I can help you with this, you know, and we get some excellent feedback back and forth, especially the exposure to certain things that, you know, people don't want to bring up. And I'm like, guys, no, like,
00:10:40
Speaker
Like, this is the moment to shine. If you're dealing with an issue, let's bring it up. Maybe we can fix it. I want your work to be as smooth as possible so that we can go faster. Right. So that's been very good. And I see everybody on the team kind of opening up a little bit more and sharing and willing to say, I screwed up or I need to buy this thing or whatever. I like those open conversations.
00:11:09
Speaker
we'll continue to get better at that too. And then on top of that, um,
ERP Customization Challenges
00:11:13
Speaker
for the whole year and maybe a little bit more than that, we've been every Monday after the team meeting, our, um, kind of the leadership team, it was Angelo, me and Eric and Barry would do our kind of, we call it a production meeting where we'd go over more of the stats, more of the numbers, the big purchases that are coming up. Um,
00:11:32
Speaker
Things that, you know, issues that we're having, like bigger things that are not necessarily for everybody to know or worry about more specifically. And those have been good too because then we can plan both financially and also people wise, like manpower, how to do it. So every Monday we've been doing that and then every Wednesday after the team meeting, Fraser holds a little marketing meeting.
00:11:57
Speaker
Oh, it gives the presentation of what's, what's coming, what's in the pipeline, you know, how orders are going. Um, and that's been good too. That's usually 10 minutes, 20 minutes. And that's just for you, Eric and Mary and as well. Yeah. Yes. Got it. Okay. Yeah. I like that. Yeah. We, we have not, um, we have not done true, like chunked out
00:12:26
Speaker
performance report. We're way behind you. We don't track daily output or orders shipped or even like, hey, I would. Actually, I would like to track order mistakes because I want to track it. What gets measured gets managed. Thank you. Yes. Thank you. I knew that quote, but I'm glad you said that. We need to remind it weekly.
00:12:47
Speaker
Well, and so, but I want to elaborate on why we're not. It's not that I don't want to. And again, to go back to, if you want to do something, you just need to do it, not just talk about it, but we really are wrapping up this year, finishing the input side of all those systems. Yep. Fresh desks is now done for all intents and purposes. It works. And Lex, Alex is actually back at the shop now on break, finishing up the kind of overhaul of the work order section, which we build it wrong the first time. No big deal. We're fixing it. Yeah.
00:13:17
Speaker
And the big change was it used to be that we had way too much noise around every product having every option. So any product could go to any vendor or any service or any QC or whatever. And now what we're doing, it's actually really elegant, I think overhaul.
Data Management and Operational Efficiency
00:13:35
Speaker
We have all of those options still in place.
00:13:39
Speaker
In theory, you could send a steel faster that we buy from MSC. We could get it and send it to anodizing. That's still an option in the background, but what we're doing is we're building pre-established default workflows for everything. When you create a work order,
00:13:57
Speaker
for say like a mod vice sells, it hits a trigger point, we're low on stock, that triggers a reorder assembly, that triggers maybe we need more material, that triggers we need to make more of them. Once any of those events happen, there's a normal course of events that should happen after that, and those are the path of least resistance options that's given in Lex, because it's assuming that's what's gonna, when you're done with a mod vice, the next thing you're gonna do is take it over for a batch QC, and then it's gonna get assembled. You don't need to,
00:14:25
Speaker
be re-selecting those options each time. But that's important because without that, our whole inventory system doesn't work because when we create, when we trigger that we need one more mod vice base, well, it's going to trigger us to make 50. And when you make those 50, they need to get added into the sub-assembly inventory.
00:14:47
Speaker
when those sub-assemblies are sampled by an intern probably, they need to get added to shippable inventory. So we have to have that working for the elegance. And I bring all this up because once we finish that, we can serve, make that inflection point where now we're leveraging these tools and systems to give us the data, give us the input, tell us what we need to make. We all then work for Lex right now. Lex works for us. Like we're like, we're building it still. Right, right. Makes sense. Yep, absolutely.
00:15:17
Speaker
Yeah, I feel you. Absolutely. And that's where our inventory system is, is hoping to get early next year, like very early next year. We're building it right now. It's a, I saw a demo last week and I'm like, Oh yeah, this is, this is going in the right direction. Keep it up. Um, so Fraser's been running that project with his, uh, two programmers, freelancers and, uh,
00:15:39
Speaker
Yeah, and then I want to work for the system. Yes. I want to work for GURP.
Future of ERP and Data Tracking
00:15:45
Speaker
It'll run the show. It'll know everything. I actually want to start tracking absolutely everything. I want a page for each machine so I know what coolant is in each machine and which hotend is installed in which 3D printer. I want it all because otherwise you forget. I need a place to put all of that information. Yeah, I want to push back though, John. For what?
00:16:11
Speaker
There are lots of ERPs or other systems that end up with too much information. They're not maintained. They become stale. And the key is that nobody builds it with that intent.
00:16:23
Speaker
It's like 10 years ago when you started a blog, you're like, this is going to be awesome. Then six months in, you're like, oh, I haven't done a post in two months. But there's too many examples of me forgetting the tribal knowledge, the information. And if I just had a centralized place to put it,
00:16:41
Speaker
I put a date next to each little thing even if i just had a huge text box for each. Tool or machine or item or whatever and i just add to it whenever i want it just it gives me a centralized place that anybody can access that like has the information.
00:16:57
Speaker
I love the dump idea. That's what fresh desks is. We actually still use Asana. When we have shared logins that anyone needs access to, that can go into Asana. It's wonderfully searchable as is fresh desks. That's the key. That way, you don't have to worry about where it is. Literally, you could just Google or search Prusa and it'll tell you where we have Prusa info.
00:17:18
Speaker
I would encourage you to build that system from the bottom up, not the top down, meaning start with the systems and processes that are critical and that you need and let them prove themselves and then scale and go versus top down where it's like, I'm building everything I need and then we're going to start populating it because
00:17:40
Speaker
you are going to find that someone changed at the hot end from a 0.6 to 0.8. Nobody updated it. And then GURP is now stale and you don't even care. I'm very sensitive to bad data. And there's short-term data, like the nozzle change takes one minute and people might do it more often. But there's like which extruder is on the machine or is that a, like I'm upgrading one of my machines from a 12 volt to a 24 volt. I need to put that information in there. What's that amount?
00:18:10
Speaker
More power? Yeah. The power supply that is on my oldest Prusa is just a computer. It's a bad power supply. It's not good.
00:18:22
Speaker
So Buddy sent the 24-volt hot plate and power supply and heater cartridge and other stuff. And at home, I'm just doing that little switch over right now. But so now I've got two pruses that have different configurations, different firmwares, different details. And even I'm forgetting what's what. So little things like that. And you're absolutely right. I'm focusing for GURP and the direction of the programmers and stuff. Inventory management is currently number one.
00:18:50
Speaker
getting buyers and makers choice functional within GURP and improving is also number one. That's like Fraser's number one, inventory is my number one. And all the other stuff is just sort of vision. You know, it's like, this is what I want it to be within a year. You know, I want a dump, I want a repository, I want everything. And as it is needed, then I already have the vision and the direction like in my head, like, okay, now's the time. Let's do this. I already know what I want.
00:19:20
Speaker
When next Wednesday, the 22nd, I think we'll be releasing a shop tour of third gen machine shop. Watch it, John. Yeah.
00:19:30
Speaker
They're building their own ERP. They're a pretty legit shop. I mean, I don't think seven or eight horizontals, all DMG worry. They're cranking and they're building their own ERP. Lots of stuff that you're going to click with, but I guarantee you're going to watch that video and be like, uh-huh. And one of the things I like is there's things that they're choosing not to put in their ERP. They're leaving them con bond or they're leaving them
00:19:51
Speaker
visceral and touchable. And it's actually funny you talk about what you're talking about because last night Ed was like, Hey, John, will you make a side note? I love this dialogue where I work for Ed like it's like, Hey, will you do this for me? Yes. I love stepping into that role. I love it. Ed has the confidence to say we could use this. I know it's going to be good. And I'm going to take it. I'm going to add my own twist or flavor. I think I can't.
00:20:15
Speaker
the little sheets in front of each of our machines that have basic stats about them. About the machine? Yeah. Because, and this is super funny, but some of our Haas machines have different max feed rate, like G0 feed rate. Some of them have, what are the XY travels? What's the serial number and date? That way they happen to be on the phone with service. It's right there. We have the same coolant,
Tool Management and Machine Efficiency
00:20:39
Speaker
and so I'm not putting coolant on there because a list that has noise is not treated as valuable.
00:20:45
Speaker
But if we were to ever change cooling up, it would go on there as well. And some service quirky notes. We have one machine where we know there's a regulator that can be a little bit fussy on it. Just to kind of make a note of that. And we'll see. I'm suspecting this thing will grow. But it reminds me of your 3D printer thing where it's like print a little Prusa info sheet and then have a magnet on it where there's four different nozzle options. And you just put the magnet over the current nozzle. OK.
00:21:14
Speaker
That will not get stale. Exactly. That's live. That's on the machine where you need it, when you need it. An easy 0.5 of a second to change that properly. That's establishing a good system. I like that. Yeah.
00:21:29
Speaker
We do it for our SD20Y. We have aluminum and steel magnets, like they're just magnets that say aluminum and steel, because we mostly do steel work on it. But if we switch over to aluminum, we just move aluminum inserts into the steel holders. And I don't want to go cut a steel part if I didn't realize aluminum stuff's in there. So we just have a magnet in the drawer, and you just put the magnets out.
00:21:51
Speaker
I don't want that in an ERP. You're right. That would be too complicated, like too hidden behind barriers. Yeah. Unless it's like the future of ERPs where we can have Amazon dash buttons where you just, like it would be cool to have it in the ERP if it could connect to a little thing that doesn't have any power requirements because it stays, the battery lasts for 10 years and it's a digital device, IoT. I'd be on board with that, but I haven't seen anything that works like that yet.
00:22:25
Speaker
cool. Well, speaking of data, over the past few weeks, I've been
00:22:30
Speaker
going deep on the Kern trying to extract the data that I want, that I wish I had on hand. So I'm tracking program runtime in a table file, like a spreadsheet on the Kern. So after every cycle, it checks the program runtime and it calculates it and it adds it. And then I've got it broken down hourly and also weekly, although the weekly is not fully working yet. But the logic is there to do it.
00:22:58
Speaker
Actually, I want to do daily and weekly because at the end of the day, I want to know how much is that machine running and how much is it not running? There's even a variable in there to track M0s because sometimes we'll program, like with the palette change, you just program an M0 program between stuff you just needed to wait or needed to do something or when we put in the detent balls.
00:23:22
Speaker
It's a manual operation. There's M0. The machine's waiting for you. If that happens during our meeting, it could be an hour of waiting. It's a manual operation for now. Yeah, exactly.
00:23:36
Speaker
Yeah, we had it the other day because I'm tracking it now, the machine M0'd for an hour and a half because we got deep into a meeting and nobody was there to put the ball in. I mean, that's fine, but now we know and it shouldn't happen. Obviously, an automated solution, the detent ball dropper, I'm slowly working on that, but it's really cool to see. I'll give you two numbers.
00:24:00
Speaker
168 hours in complete possible week, like seven to seven days to seven days. There's 168 hours. You can't run any more than that. How much do you think I got last week on the current? Oh, a program runtime. I'm actually removing the M zero time automatically. Wait. So out of 168 hours, how many did you run? Yeah.
00:24:23
Speaker
I'm going to say, I mean, 18 hours, seven days of the week, which is crazy because that Saturday and Sunday would be 126. I'm going to go north of 120. 136.5. No kidding. John, good for you. It finished. We loaded everything in the palette changer, every palette we've ever made on Friday night.
00:24:44
Speaker
And it finished Sunday at 4 AM, successfully finished. And then I didn't want to go in on Sunday and reload everything. So it sat from Sunday to Monday, basically.
00:24:56
Speaker
Good parts. All good parts. Oh my goodness. Good for you. I think throughout the week, we stopped it for two hours to film a video late one night, but otherwise there was like two or three hours throughout the entire working week to Sunday morning that it was problems or M0s or little weird little things. That's fantastic.
00:25:21
Speaker
I'm so happy with that. Yeah. So I'm going to track that week by week and, uh, give us benchmarks. You know, this was a push last week, but very possible. Just, um, if I were, uh, outside looking in the runtime is great, but the cynically you can add
00:25:41
Speaker
you can add to Uptime by increasing your surfacing toolpaths without actually increasing output, if you will, or profitability. Make sure there's also a metric of that. Well, what I'm realizing, I'm definitely measuring part output as well and realizing if I'm running the machine
00:25:57
Speaker
almost as much as humanly possible. And the part output is still not enough, which it's not. I need either another machine or I need to reduce cycle times, which I'm going to start digging into the cycle times hard. That's the free one. One of those is a lot cheaper. Yeah, exactly. But I mean, there's a lot of surfacing, there's a lot of grinding. The parts are coming off great. So there's going to be a balance of how much time I can take off without suffering quality.
00:26:24
Speaker
I guarantee you there's fruit on the tree there. But I don't think there's 40 hours a week of fruit to take off. Well, it's funny too, because we're getting the Okuma up and running, which is awesome.
00:26:37
Speaker
when we were running plates on the Haas, a combination of just getting really good at making fixture plates, which also includes drilling a lot of holes. We've gotten really good at drilling holes and understanding what wears out drills, because the drills are very expensive. And our drill life went from, you know, in units from one unit to four units to seven units. Like we're getting, well, one unit meant we did something wrong really, but like we've gone,
00:27:05
Speaker
hugely up in that. And now that we've built that process and we understand it, literally yesterday I was like, well, Ed, we should look at trying higher service footage or higher feed rates because I don't need a drill in the last seven units. I'm fine with it being done at four, especially if going back from seven to four means we increase the drilling time. But drilling a plate might be 45 minutes or an hour.
00:27:28
Speaker
And if we can shave 10 minutes off of that for the equivalent of $4 or something. You get a whole nother plate a day. Easy. Yeah. Yeah. It's a huge balance. Time available versus output versus productivity and scheduling. Because you can make the part as fast as you want. But if you don't have the manpower or the inventory or the need to keep throwing parts at it, take your time. Right.
00:27:59
Speaker
But that's a good place to be in. I mean, I like it. Oh, for sure. Governor that way. And look, it's my favorite thing in Fusion is, especially on parts like yours where there's surfacing or longer adaptives, go add the preview option for, not preview, but the preferences to show cycle time for each toolpath. Some people don't like that. And I'm like, I love that. Yeah, why would you not want that? I don't know. I love it. Because I'm going to spend a lot more time on the 40-minute toolpath and not the three-minute toolpath.
00:28:28
Speaker
Yeah, it's low hanging fruit, right? Yeah. So I mean, I have... I mean, in that big run for the weekend, it probably ran 20 different pallet programs. I have a lot of code to go through to find the low hanging fruit, but it'll be worth it.
00:28:47
Speaker
But take the longest program, that should be easy to find. And then in the longest program, take the longest cam operation. For sure. Which is making a rask and either grinding the blades or surfacing the outside of the handles. Got it. On surfacing, have you looked at larger diameter tools so that you increase
00:29:05
Speaker
decrease your scalloping per larger step overs. I looked at the barrel cutters and talking with Lockwood and just thinking about it a lot. There's a limit where visual surface finish starts to suffer. Okay. Your RA might be low, but you'll have a crappy visual surface finish and our product is so visceral. I'm using a quarter inch ball. I haven't really put a lot of thought into going up to a three eights ball.
00:29:34
Speaker
Do that online google like cusp calculator or something? Yeah, and there's a website that shows you really? Yeah, I just draw sketches and takes me too long Yeah, look up that and that that's an easy It should be I don't know what the mathematical form it's not exponential logarithmic, but it's a lot you gain a lot more. Yeah you know, it's like a three tools like twice the
00:29:57
Speaker
volume of a quarter store or something. Right.
Shop Tours and Industry Insights
00:30:00
Speaker
Right. So you might cut your cycle time in half or something like significant. Okay. I'll look at that this weekend because I'm, that's been one I've been ignoring. Um, I think it takes for 45 minutes to surface a smooth set of rasp candles or something like that. I forget. I'd be going to like,
00:30:22
Speaker
three eights, seven flutors or nine flutors if they make them because the current can do it. That's true. Yeah. I'm using a four flute. So, okay. No, that's really good thought. It's been one of those things. Like it works. I've got other things to worry about. Let me focus on reliability and, you know, no tool breakage and things like that. I'll get to that when I need to, I'm there. I want to be on the other line of that. Call it like the board tool. And they're like, Hey, we got them a lot guy in the line who wants a three eights ball with nine flutes. Yeah.
00:30:51
Speaker
Let's do it. Right. Yeah. That's fun. So what else? Good. Did I tell you that I toured the board tool like a week or two ago? Did you tell me again, Angelo and I went there and got a full like two, three hour tour of their place. Amazing operation. You know, they've got something like 20 and mill grinders, all Walters. Um,
00:31:16
Speaker
really, really cool shop, 50 employees. Wow. Yep. Super local to us and they make really, really good stuff. That's awesome. 50 employees, that seems like a lot for what should be an automated tool grinding with Walters is not, I mean, I'm sure they all have FANUC arms on them. Yeah, most of them do. Big engineering staff, small office staff, but a lot of production staff and they do a lot of custom tools.
00:31:44
Speaker
Oh, got it. Got it. So they got, you know, some good experts on there. Um, that was a great eye opening. You know, they're, they're doing their own ERP. They're, they've got freelance programmers on retainer, basically doing all kinds of crazy stuff for them. And, uh, and yeah, it was, it was fun. I love doing shop tours like that. I, uh, if there's ever a chance in life, I could redo something.
00:32:08
Speaker
Man. I actually know I've mentioned this before, but it was a great experience. In 2003, I was studying abroad in college. My roommate was from Austria. He had a connection. Long story short, we ended up getting a tour, which we were very fortunate to get a connection. We got a tour of the Fairloch Austria Glock factory.
00:32:30
Speaker
It's not the Glock headquarters. That's in Nova near Vienna. In that other factory, they do the injection molding, final assembly. This was the machine shop for Glock. Every single Glock frame until they opened, I think the Glock component before they opened the US facility was machined here. Now, this has three. I didn't know an Enville from a lathe.
00:32:51
Speaker
I was really, that's why I wish I could redo it because I didn't know what we were looking at. I don't know the brands and machines. Your recollection of the events are muddled because you didn't know. Yeah. The guy, he spoke English, but my roommate was with me who was Austrian. They spoke a lot in Austrian and Ernst would translate for me on the go, but it was broken at best.
00:33:14
Speaker
What I do remember, and this was mind-blowing to me at the time, was of that size factory, like half of it was just dedicated to their own internal sharpening and grinding. It's now actually quite basic, but I thought this was mind-blowing where if an end mill or tool got sharpened, it got barcoded, and they had a centralized tool database so that when that end mill got reloaded, the updated diameter and gauge length was pushed into the machine tool.
00:33:38
Speaker
And maybe in 2003, that was a lot more cutting edge today. Like we could do that here at Saunders. But I would love to go back and see what brand of those was machining. What was the fixturing? And if anybody's listening has been through or worked at that Glock Fairlock factory, I would love to hear kind of what's happened in the last 18 years there.
00:33:58
Speaker
They keep a pretty tight ship though, so I don't know. They wouldn't even hire people that were interested in shooting sports. It was very interesting corporate culture. You had an ID badge that stopped you from going between rooms or areas of factory. It was pretty locked down.
Strategies for Business Success
00:34:14
Speaker
Anyway, I wanted to ask you, continuing off that theme, is there stuff that
00:34:24
Speaker
Especially stuff that we haven't talked on as friends and on the podcast, like what is making Crimson knives sing? You know, it's not just the current and the Wilhelmin or no, but like from a business side or what have you changed or done? Yeah.
00:34:42
Speaker
I think we're trying to be very aware of every aspect from the employee health and happiness to every little detail of which insert is being used on the Swiss to optimize tool life and things like that and communicating that effectively. I'm hyper obsessive about everything.
00:35:07
Speaker
Thankfully, I found an outlet to make that be a good thing and not just a destructive thing. But I want to give people on the team power to observe and make decisions as well, but I want to know about it so that I can help weigh in or plus one or minus one their ideas kind of thing. Yeah, yeah.
00:35:29
Speaker
But yeah, I think that's been huge. Obviously financial planning with Barry. We have a lot of conversations about that so that we can borrow properly and safely and keep all of our lenders very happy and keep our business bottom line very happy. And we've done very well. I mean, biggest sales year by far this year. We're doing really good and still not happy because we know we can do much better.
00:35:53
Speaker
Got it. With what you have. Yes. Yeah. Optimizing. And things like tracking, I mean, look at measured gets managed. Tracking the cycle time on the current was hugely eye-opening because we had a huge week last week. But before that, it was like, yeah, we run it hard. We're busy. Hey, isn't that funny? It's dumb to say, but that's the mentality we all have. Like, yeah, I'm machining all the time. But no, there's like an hour and a half of M0 right there.
00:36:20
Speaker
just because nobody was around to push a button. Like we can fix this. That's fine. It's not a complaint. It's not a problem. It's just this is an easily low hanging fruit. Let's fix that. So I'm looking for all of that stuff.
00:36:33
Speaker
I was, uh, Grant made a bunch of mod vice washers. We make them on the lathe. And then we were talking about imagery levels and I don't know, I jumped in or somebody, but it was like, Oh man, we just made a bunch of them. And Julie was like, we sold 150% of that amount just last month. I'm like, Oh, so we're not like, right. You know what I mean? Like we are starting to use data and it's, Oh, wonderful. And that's the beautiful communication that needs to grow within the company. Um, because Grant doesn't know that number.
00:37:02
Speaker
Julie knows that number, but if she doesn't tell anybody, then you're just making parts, you feel busy, you feel productive, things are selling, everything's good. It's the same thing if we overproduce on the 440 screws that we make for the knives. If he runs another batch and there's 10,000 on the shelf in the front,
00:37:21
Speaker
No, we have other stuff to make. I know. Right. Um, and, and getting deeper into scheduling both parts on the current, we've got a really good schedule for that now, but, uh, the two leads are busy all day, every day now. And it's, it's getting critical. Like which part runs next? Are we doing pen parts? Are we doing knife parts? What do we have? What's got a problem? Um, you know, that's a day set up at least to do that on the Swiss and get it all done. Perfect. And yep.
00:37:51
Speaker
That's what I'm thinking about is how do we, it's kind of a pullback from where I was six months ago. We wanted to have a lot of inventory and it's been a point of pride. We're now shipping a lot of fixture plates and other orders same day or next day with less stress, with less QC issues, with less hassle. It's a wonderful move and I'm glad that we've gotten there. But I'm also not realizing I don't want to overproduce
00:38:18
Speaker
anything and it's actually expensive to store inventory. I know this sounds really cliche because everyone's heard it when you've listened to anything lean related. When you're breathing it and living it, it is different where I'd rather keep a relatively limited amount of time but have the ability to
00:38:34
Speaker
you know, hit the print button and have more of those parts when and if you need them. And that print button is a form of leaving machines that are dedicated for setups, or that's where a lot of where the desire for us to move are at a horizontal with pallets and tombstones.
00:38:52
Speaker
Yeah, so that we keep 10 pick a product like our pallet blanks. We keep 10 in inventory. Well, that might be only two weeks of sales, but when we need more, it's literally, it might be 10 minutes to start going from none to them being chips being cut on them. You don't need two months of inventory just because you can. You have other stuff to do. Absolutely. We're working on that too where Barry's got his finger right on the pulse of our raw material inventory.
00:39:18
Speaker
And we will overbuy raw material inventory because we cannot be without. Like you said, at the Glock factory, we've got two years of inventory because I control the inventory. And our inventory doesn't really change. We always need it. We know what we need. Some of it's custom stuff that takes weeks or months to get here. So yeah, we need at least six months, if not a year of inventory. And that's lean-ish for us. But as far as finished goods, we run a pretty tight turnover.
00:39:50
Speaker
but you still, what's this? Yeah. So different, it's a different model. We talked about this before. Like you just don't have, you don't have like an open retail website to just buy at any point.
Reflecting on Achievements and Gratitude
00:40:00
Speaker
Right. Yeah. Do you want to get that to that point with like with the saga or even nice? I don't know if we will. I don't know if we could, if we wanted to, which is wonderful, but it, it puts us, I don't know, we're always behind or, or we're fully in control. I'm not sure, you know,
00:40:16
Speaker
We can, for the most part, sell everything we make. We've had limits. Some months, sales are a bit slower and we're sitting on parts for a little bit longer than we wish we were. But that's okay. The system turns and things move eventually. That puts an eyeball on the marketing side of things. Because if we're not doing much, then of course, why would people think to buy much?
00:40:45
Speaker
that helps us see, okay, maybe we need to put out some more videos. Maybe we need to put out some more content on educating the customer on, you know, the quality and the coolness of what we make. And maybe that will drive them more sales and it ties all together, right?
00:40:58
Speaker
Yeah. Coming full circle back, you know, to the intro of this podcast, you know, ultimately fixture plates are a way for me to justify running a machine shop. Like I love that part of it. Um, and I, I mean, I bought a fixture plate for my first tag. I had my tour model. Like I believe in them.
00:41:16
Speaker
Yes, and like all the customers many times we talked to customers I talked to somebody last night who was like I can't believe how much this helps me but I John Saunders the leader of this company and ultimately the person that's responsible for the marketing I don't profess that enough because To be blunt. I don't care about it because as long as the sales are there I just want to keep running this business but I for next year I need to be more overt about Showing why my product
00:41:41
Speaker
can really help you as a machine shop and doing this so unapologetically, but also not pushing that line of just like, we're here as a, I think about our, what we're here for overall, like what is my purpose doing this for the last 10 years and the next 10 years in it. Um, the substantial portion is by for sure, Saunders machine works and the manufacturing process, but with the YouTube, with the training, with the online content, it's about
00:42:06
Speaker
promoting manufacturing entrepreneurship and helping people be enabled to do what they wanna do around that stuff. And that ties in Provencut and again, the online content, but I lost my train of thought. But ultimately I want to also unapologetically grow a real legitimate manufacturing business because that's also I think what legitimizes the other stuff we do is we're not just in a space to run our mouth and talk about stuff. We're living and breathing this for real.
00:42:34
Speaker
You're also not just here to make a buck, you're here to make an impact, you're here to build a strong company, take care of your staff and make raving fan customers basically. Yes. The product is so innovative and so cool and so helpful.
00:42:49
Speaker
that people can't stop thinking about it. Your plates are very visual. Every time somebody stands in front of their machine, they're using it. It's not something that gets hidden in the back cabinet that you forget about. It solves the problem. Same with our knives. Hopefully, it kicks all the other knives in your collection out of your pocket and this is the one you carry. That's probably true 70 percent of the time. I hear that a lot from customers.
00:43:14
Speaker
and then they always have it, they're always thinking about us, they're always enjoying the product and the product has to be so freaking good that it lives up to that expectation. That every time they touch it, they're like, man, I really like this. Every time they write with a saga or sign their mortgage or whatever, it's like, this makes me really happy.
00:43:34
Speaker
You nailed it. I've seen that on social now. More people signing papers at the saga. That was genius. Yeah. I'm happy to repost all of those because it's important to me. It's really, really cool. That's really cool. But that's kind of what's funny is there's a part of me, I don't care about picture plates. I mean, I do. Don't get me wrong. I do. And I do because they're a great tool, but it's more about the process around it. Anyway, Phil's probably running low on gas.
00:44:04
Speaker
But thank you. It's been a great year. Great year. Good. I will ask you what you're up to the rest of the day next week. I got to run. Okay. I'll see you, bud. Sounds good, man. Take care. Bye.