Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Manufacturing Business Progress, Increasing Productivity, Parenting & Entrepreneurship, ERP Systems, & MetalQuest's INDEX MS40-8
248 Plays5 years ago
THE LOONS ARE HOOTIN' AWAY! Grimsmo paints a beautiful picture of his family vacation thus far. A couple of spy-thriller books, canoes, campfires, and marshmallows will take the place of machine hum for now. Just make sure to stay away from "Snake Island!"
BREAK ME OFF A PIECE OF THAT...FOOTBALL CREAM?
Does taking breaks decrease productivity? According to Forbes and many other studies, it has the opposite effect. Working for long stretches without breaks leads to exhaustion and burn out. If that's you, it's time to Kit Kat!
Parenting & Entrepreneurship Kids grow up in the blink of an eye and if you don't want to miss it, don't! Balancing time between being an entrepreneur and a parent can be tricky. Is it more about quality time rather than quantity? Elon Musk, what do you have to say about this?
Admiration for childhood energy, imagination, and carefree attitude stems a tangential but relevant debate topic: Is it better to follow dreams and passions or find a line of work that produces income?
The Depths Grimsmo declares an insightful statement about life and expectations. Are you the person who needs to be away from the computer and phone to recharge or are you the one who would rather not? However you relate, keep Grimsmo's point in mind.
LEX & GERP 3 weeks have passed. LEX (the newest name for the custom-built ERP system thanks to Jonathan George) was born. Saunders shares the progress SMW has made in this short period of time. Bar codes, inventory, emergency inventory, job scheduling, purchase orders, and receiving are all necessary components of a high functioning manufacturing business. GERP, which stands for Grimsmo ERP may have started as a joke but this acronym has staying power! GERP's come a long way in the last few weeks in terms of development with a heavy emphasis on inventory and job scheduling.
New Face and New 5th Axis Project By the time you read or hear this 182th podcast episode, a new intern will have started at SMW! Saunders details an upcoming project that coincides perfectly with phases 3 & 4 of rebuilding the shop.
MetalQuest's INDEX MS40-8 If you haven't heard of MetalQuest, you can watch the tour here. If you're into reducing your machining time by 7/8ths, rigidity, thermal stability, and impeccable surface finishes, this is for you! Scott Harms, President of MetalQuest, and Saunders are working on a remote video collaboration to show this incredible machine and its capabilities.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction & Personal Stories
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the Business of Machining, Episode 182. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmone. This is the podcast where two entrepreneurs talk about the fun journey of starting and growing and building in the weekly progress of their manufacturing businesses. And this week is a little different for me because I've turned my brain off. This is about the first
00:00:24
Speaker
the first time I've opened my computer in the past two, three days. Took my family up north with an RV. And we're sitting here parked at the property that Barry bought and is going to build his dream cottage. And it's just kind of a hole in the ground right now. But yeah, we're enjoying it. Dude, I completely forgot you were on vacation. Good for you. Good for you.
00:00:49
Speaker
Yeah, so it's like, oh man, I got to do the podcast this week. That's right. It's cool. But yeah, it's been nice. It's been relaxing. I've read a spy thriller fiction book, not just business books. And it's been nice. Went canoeing with the kids. You know how like on a lake, sometimes there'll be a tiny little island in the middle.
00:01:10
Speaker
We're like, let's canoe out to the island, sweet. And then it's like rocky, so Leif's got his foot on the shore and just about to get out of the canoe. And then we see like three giant snakes. And we're like, no, no, get back in the canoe. Okay, that is Snake Island. We're never going near that again.
00:01:28
Speaker
That's the thing you always hear from folks that are older or wiser or just have been through experiences that are still we're still in our earlier stages of and I guess our kids aren't you know, our kids are starting to get a little bit older but um, man that contagious energy and excitement and sense of imagination and sense of carefree like
00:01:50
Speaker
I want to make sure I heed the advice, which is people say they grow up so fast. I think it's always hard to process those sorts of feedbacks in real time, but I think that's what they mean. Gosh, when William and Jane, they have their sense of imagination with just anything, a piece of paper, a paper airplane, trucks, cars, like, oh my gosh, you got to
00:02:14
Speaker
It's fun to get lost in that stuff with them. Yeah, you want to be there for that. Meghan and I were talking about this. I love what I do. I love the work and I love the grind, even if it's stressful and aggravating many times. I still greatly enjoy it. I can't live my life
00:02:34
Speaker
up here in the middle of nowhere doing nothing all day. But it's great to be able to escape for small periods of time and just remember the simpler things in life and just be with the family and start a campfire and cook hot dogs and drop marshmallows in the fire and all that stuff that you don't get in a machine shop.
00:02:54
Speaker
And even the teams at home crushing it, I don't have to worry about anything. And Angelo's like, yeah, don't worry about it. Just stop listening to the buzzing and the humming and the end mills cutting and stuff and just enjoy the crickets and the birds and stuff. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, that sounds good.
Philosophy of Work and Passion
00:03:11
Speaker
Are you then, are you off email and WhatsApp and texting and so forth? I check it like twice a day. And, uh, I did a quick little like 20 minute blitz yesterday and just got quickly caught up on things. Um, but for the most part, Fraser is at home at the shop watching my emails. I don't have to worry about anything. Um, yeah, so it's, it's nice. Yeah, dude, good for you. Like good for you.
00:03:38
Speaker
There's something to be said. You say you love what you do. If there's one thing that I wish I had an answer for in life, it's the kind of debate between follow your passion, follow your dreams, do something that you love and enjoy and so forth as kind of the left shoulder and the right shoulder being much more of the kind of
00:04:02
Speaker
Tougher, you know, Mike Rowe, I think probably says it best, which is kind of the whole like, and I may exaggerate a little bit, you know, to heck with what you think you love, find something that's going to pay the bills and be a rewarding career doesn't necessarily, it's not always going to be perfect that it overlaps with, you know, what you find your, your true love and passion to be and I think a lot of folks don't really know.
00:04:24
Speaker
Heck, even I will never forget. I take it for granted, but I'll never forget how freaking amazing when I first saw a machine do a tool change and use a piece of steel or carbide to cut a piece of steel. I'm like, wait, what? Well, hold on. I hit the pause button. This is possible. And then you can do this with computer software. I'm a hands-on person. I love using hand tools, but computers are my jam.
00:04:53
Speaker
And so that's all awesome. And it's kind of similar to the whole my grandfather's generation. Heck, even my parents and a lot of people I look up to where they're just like grind, grind, grind. You hear about Elon Musk in the news lately because of the return, successful return of the Dragon
Balancing Work and Family
00:05:11
Speaker
capsule. And that's awesome. And Elon is this kind of guy who has no concept of work-life balance and no tolerance for anyone around him who seems to have any interest in balance.
00:05:21
Speaker
And I very much relate to that. On the flip side, what's sustainable in life for both you and the team you're building?
00:05:30
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And it's going to be different for everybody and that's okay. And it's going to be different for everybody on my team. And that's okay too. Like I go home for the weekends and I'm home, but I'm also still on and I'm still thinking. I spent time with the family and I turned my brain off for periods of time, but I'm still, I got a lot of work done on the weekends and I love that. And my family seems to be fine with that. Whereas the other guys on the team, they get to go home and
00:05:57
Speaker
not work. Yeah, right. That's great. That's fine. I don't expect that from anybody else on the team. But I'm okay with me being like that, you know, and that's, that's what does it for me. And at the end of the day, it's like, you know, Megan and I were talking around the campfire yesterday and we're like,
00:06:14
Speaker
do what makes you happy. As long as it makes everybody around you happy, then just do it. You don't have to live up to everybody's expectations or everybody's preconceived notions of what they think life should be for you. That's actually a pretty deep point. Yeah.
00:06:35
Speaker
Well, it's not black and white either. It's one thing if you say, hey, it's a weekend or it's night. And instead of being present with the family, I'm going to go grind for three hours. Look, I still do that once in a while. That's one thing. It's a different thing if you say, hey, I'm going to spend 10 minutes answering emails that are going to help other people in the team or other people that are stakeholders in Grimsman Ives or Saunders Machine Works, vendors, et cetera, go carry on with their work.
00:07:05
Speaker
That's one reason why I don't believe in the whole, I'm turning off my phone for a day or a week thing because we're not set up for it. It's not a goal to be set up for it right now. It is a goal to be set up for it later, I think, or do I deal with the goal for sure? Right.
00:07:20
Speaker
But it doesn't help me to say, oh, it's almost like somebody else's society's expectation that you need to be able to shut off your phone for 48 hours. Dude, no. If I can answer a couple emails that help move things along, that's great. And of course, you can take it to the second level and say, well, why are those questions coming to you? Why aren't they being answered by the person? And OK, I get it. And look, we are a totally different company today than we were three weeks ago, John. Yeah.
00:07:48
Speaker
Lex, by far, by far the biggest failure of our ERP system is the naming it.
ERP System Development
00:07:57
Speaker
Lex was a user submission. Shout out to Mr. Jonathan George, which I like. Yeah. Well, and so it also because it stands for light ERP and then X as a placeholder for whatever, which I love because that's what Lex is. It'll do what we need it to do. Yeah. I like that a lot. Yeah. But Lex issued its first PO yesterday.
00:08:18
Speaker
So on August 4th, by the way, this is Wednesday, so three days ago for listeners, it was born. It was amazing. Now it's still a little manual because we're not scanning and having things automatically emailed, but nevertheless, all that happened was Julie handed me a Kanban card, which will again be later replaced by a, or supplemented with a barcode.
00:08:39
Speaker
Julia handed me a Kanban card. It had a number. I typed that number in. It batched it into an order queue. I pushed that order queue to a PO. The PO was generated into a PDF with all the information. It was sent to a vendor, and then it's now showing on our receiving table TV screen that's being powered by an Intel compute stick with as the current, I forget what it's called, current outstanding orders. Yeah, exactly.
00:09:04
Speaker
Oh man. That's like phase one of the dream is right there. Yeah. That was an MSC purchase order. The second one was issued as well, but not finished in Lex, which was an RFQ to a sub material supplier where the pricing changes every time depending on material pricing, but then also what the order size is.
00:09:28
Speaker
The way that works is I issued the RFQ through Lex, pushed it to the supplier, and then he or she will respond with the details, including pricing. What we then do in Lex is push an RFQ to a PO. When you do that, you input the pricing, which creates the pricing log so that we can see. Because I need to know how pricing changes over time, but then I also need to know sometimes
00:09:52
Speaker
Let's say a part that we normally buy for $26 a piece, let's say the vendor comes back at $30 a piece. Well, the reason is that because when we bought it at $26 a piece, we were also buying a thousand pounds of other aluminum. Oh, yeah. And so it's not fair to tell that vendor to sharpen their pencil because we're just not buying enough in this order.
00:10:15
Speaker
Makes sense. How much shopping around do you do when it comes to things like that? So not as much as I might. I have three vendors. I'll shop it every once in a while. And usually I have not found that to be as time worthy as needed in terms of
00:10:41
Speaker
We're not looking to beat up or save that last nickel. We almost always do saw cuts, which is higher margin to the supplier and thus usually result in a more consistent pricing, if that makes sense. And we know what we pay, and so I'm OK with it for now. Going forward, maybe we will do more of that. How do I say this? It's important, but it's also not the key to our business today. Correct.
00:11:06
Speaker
Yeah, I remember Pearson saying that he goes through so much aluminum for the fixture plates and everything, just like bulk steel, aluminum stuff. And he's got three vendors that he basically, I think he shoots, does he automatically shoot a video or a request to all three of them and then just picks the best one? Like on a per order basis, I don't know exactly, but something like that.
00:11:31
Speaker
And I think what he said on a video tour or like an Insta story or something, I think he said he kind of sat down and did sort of pre-negotiated pricing for certain products with his vendors. And that's something I actually already started that conversation with two of them, sort of saying like, hey, over the next 12 months, I'm expecting to buy this much of this size and material. And I've heard about this before.
00:11:56
Speaker
where you issue a blanket PO and you take it down in monthly chunks. That gives them some expectation to book business. It can lock in pricing, whether it's fixed pricing or whether it's margin pricing, current metals plus X or whatever.
00:12:14
Speaker
Yeah, we've done a bit of that with our vendors because some of the, you know, steel titanium purchases, we do three to four times a year. But we know we're coming back and we know we're going to use them. And like we have a supply chain built in. So we're not we're not really shopping around too hard for different suppliers, because we're happy with the ones that we have. Because they can provide, you know, either the exact right kind of thing or the right service, water jet, whatever.
00:12:42
Speaker
It's kind of a system that works and you get to build relationships and keep everybody happy. And Barry's definitely been on the phone with these people to just look ahead and be like, look, we're going to be coming back. What kind of pricing can we do? Because we're going to be a steady customer for you. Right. The only thing that I learned that really surprised me lately was one of our strong vendors was under
00:13:07
Speaker
pretty good, like, I don't know, seven to 10% cheaper on an order. And it was alarming to me. And you know, there's kind of like, do you just shut up and order it? And I was like, No, I want to know. And it's kind of a funny example where it almost did them a disservice in a weird way, because
00:13:26
Speaker
their response was actually, hey, it just happens to really fit well with either some plate size that they had, or maybe they had extra of that size or something. And they were like, hey, it really works. What you're ordering and the way you're cutting it is a great fit for us right now.
00:13:41
Speaker
So totally get that, but it's one of those, again, weird things where you've now told me it's possible to get it cheaper and you've let me peg a price in there that may not be achievable again. Right. But yeah, they've already locked into it. So at that point, do you show your cards and say, wow, that is a really good price. Why? Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. That's cool.
00:14:10
Speaker
But yeah, otherwise, Alex is finishing up some housekeeping stuff on the current state of Lex. And then we're trying to figure out how to print the barcodes, what size, what information, drawing off of the FastCap video, which is spot on and mind blowing. Barcode
Efficiency in Manufacturing Processes
00:14:33
Speaker
is just a font.
00:14:34
Speaker
I realized that a few months ago. Oh, that was the FastCap barcode video you're talking about? Yeah. I'll put a note to add that. We'll put it in the description for anybody that wants to watch. And look, that's my piece of advice is if you have any thought of adding systems in place, even if you're a solopreneur, I would highly encourage it. I would also add it probably doesn't make sense
00:14:59
Speaker
to roll out a custom solution like we are if you're smaller. There's some decent freeware or inexpensive ware that would let you handle some things. The point is handle the things. Get it out of your head into a system. Totally agree. Yeah, my dad's actually been making awesome progress on our ERP system, which about almost a year ago, we decided to call it Grimsmo ERP for GURP. GURP. So internally, it's been called GURP. That's kind of a joke, but now I'm really starting to like it.
00:15:30
Speaker
Yeah. So he's coming to visit the shop right now. Him and Angelo are going to sit down for a couple hours. Angelo's worked with systems like Job Boss and some other stuff before. So he's got some wants and needs. So there's no use me developing it completely on my own. Like, oh, this is what I want. Definitely need to get him on board.
00:15:50
Speaker
Yeah. So like my dad and I have set up the framework. And then from there, we can get, especially Angelo, but everybody else on the team on board with like, well, what are we going to use? How are we actually going to use this system in a way that's going to be productive for us? Things like issuing POs is probably lower on our personal priority list, but it will be very cool. Inventory management is going to be one of our biggest concerns right now, because we've run into some issues with that.
00:16:19
Speaker
It's hard for us to schedule jobs and everything without proper inventory management. It's like you need your base, your root source of information. It has to be accurate and you have to live and die by it before you can really roll out these other systems down the road. And yeah, Angela and I have talked a lot about that lately, which has been good.
00:16:42
Speaker
Well, we need to keep this conversation going as you develop it. Because we, in some respects, are actually very similar. Inventory management was the name of the game. But that directly then leads to both job scheduling, but then also POs because you need to know talent grips. Those are ordered. They're relatively expensive. They're usually in stock. But we need to know
00:17:11
Speaker
From an inventory management standpoint, if we're low, Julie may see that we're low on a Tuesday morning. Ed may see Tuesday afternoon that we're low. He needs to be able to see and realize that somebody else has already acknowledged that we're low and they're on order. There's lots of ways to do that with physical flags, with the receiving video screen, with the location of a Kanban card.
00:17:30
Speaker
I'm not challenging you. I'm just asking. I don't know how you could do that without you also having the ability to tie into what's outstanding or POs. No, you're right. And maybe I haven't just connected the dots in my brain yet. To me, inventory is a problem. We need to manage the inventory. But then you're right. The very next step will be like, oh, we're out of bar material, quarter inch titanium bar. How do we deal with that? Right.
00:17:55
Speaker
So yeah, you're right. PO will probably be soon, if not next, on the list. But it's like you tick them off. You manage one, and then the next, and then the next, and then job scheduling, and then vendor management, order history, order detail. How the heck do you order 17.4 pH stainless at age 900? Right now, it's in my head. I know you go to this website. You do this. You type in this. These are the ones we get. We get this much.
00:18:21
Speaker
Here's the spreadsheet where we calculate how much we need to buy at a time. I've got a little spreadsheet that calculates the remnant length, the park length, the cutoff width, so I know how many parts I can get, and then I'm across all the 20 components that we make on a lathe.
00:18:38
Speaker
I'm like, okay, let's make 1,200 saga pens, type it in, and it tells me how much bar to buy. Either that goes into the ERP system, into GURP, or we still reference that spreadsheet as a reference. No, dude, GURP. Yeah, for sure. It's been great because I have a hodgepodge of Excel sheets and Google sheets and some hand notes and things like that with
00:19:00
Speaker
It's really important. I think we talked about it last week. When I order the raw material, I want to know the correct stock size, the correct saw cut tolerances, and so forth. You need to know. Right. You want that consistency for optimizing your toolpaths, your cams, your fixturing. We've made some changes. We've gotten better. If it's a 12-inch plate, like our Saunders or Pearson tops, 8 by 12 inches,
00:19:25
Speaker
We used to order 8.2 by 12.2 inches, so 100 thou extra on all the sides. But the saw cut tolerance was plus 1, plus 0.1 minus 0. And so they almost always gave us 8.3. Basically, they take up all the saw cut tolerance. And you can't really blame them. But we've ordered enough to see that that's consistent, very consistent. So we've backed it down to 8.1 by 12.1.
00:19:52
Speaker
And that's worked great. And having the ability to have a central location in Lex to know where that location is and the correct and latest sizing and notes is oxygen. It's amazing. Oxygen. That's a good way to put it. Yeah, it will be oxygen.
00:20:13
Speaker
And then you can rely on that in your cam. I don't work with a lot of clockette materials, but now on the current, I've been working with more and more because I'm building little fixtures and all kinds of stuff. And when the part is 0.1 inch longer than you think it is, the end mill complains. So you've got to know what the stock size is. You've got to give them stock tolerances. You've got to make sure the dealer and the vendor can do what you ask for. But you have to ask for it.
00:20:44
Speaker
What is your ERP being written in? GURP. I think it's .NET. Cool. I love that you don't know. That actually is awesome. Yeah. I know my dad's told me, but I'm not intimately involved with it. Totally fine. Just take care of it. We might hit some roadblocks and we'll figure it out.
00:21:09
Speaker
barcodes have their limit. Basically a barcode is just a fast way to type. So to type you have to be on an input.
00:21:18
Speaker
field, if you will. The cursor has to be in a box. And so if you see how the FastCap video does it, they are able to... Like when they process an inbound palette of stuff they're going to sell, they scan the location on the rack and then they scan the palette. So that tells their system, hey, I just processed in this many of this item and it happens to be in this rack location. Well, their software
00:21:46
Speaker
is custom written from scratch and is able to do that more so than our current, we basically have a web front end to ours. And I think we'll still be able to make it work, but one of the things I want to be able to do is have laminated kind of cheat sheets so that like, let's say I would have a cheat sheet that I could keep nearby that would let me immediately scan and look at the maintenance log or look at past due receivables. And you could do this with web interface too, but
00:22:14
Speaker
When Jared does certain tool life things that we don't want to track in the host control, we want to be able to scan a barcode and that ticks up.
00:22:23
Speaker
For example, we replace our certain soft bodies every X number of insert changes, and this will be a way to keep track of that as well. Absolutely. Yeah, my dad has... He's implemented... He actually built a big ERP system for a manufacturing company in New York State. They have a few hundred employees, and he said they take millions of records a month with the barcode scanner.
00:22:47
Speaker
And it's it's awesome. And it's it's like, Barry Picker manufacturing, you know, like a tractor kind of thing. Oh, they build these machines. So they have tons of components and they in source and outsource and all this stuff. So he's actually kind of the perfect man for the job, which is sweet. But so he's implementing our barcode system.
00:23:08
Speaker
And he said what they do there is you scan the item and then you have a plus one minus one or manual entry field as far as picking, you know, removing items. You scan the item and then you scan the minus one and we're done. That's all there is to it.
00:23:23
Speaker
Oh, that's to like take an individual item out. Okay. Or you can go and type in minus 20 or plus 200 or something as well. But that's how we're going to start it. He's got a barcode scanner or printer and it prints out like one inch tall labels, one point one inch tall. And I'm like, Can you make the smaller because I want to put them on a little printed shallower bin.
00:23:42
Speaker
And he's like, I don't know how small I can go. And I'm like, smaller, smaller. And then eventually he came up with a sweet thing, you know, pretty small, I think 0.5 inches tall or something. And I'm like, and can you put a quick description underneath it? Just so I know, like, yeah, just not just not a barcode. I want to know that that's a quarter inch end mill from Lake Shore or something, just basic information, like maybe limited to 26 characters or something, whatever. And yeah, and he showed me the the sample of it.
00:24:08
Speaker
just last week before our trip and I was like, yes, all this is going to be so good. That's awesome.
00:24:15
Speaker
Yeah, totally agree. The barcode, having a text description, I think is important. And some of the things we're going to do, we're going to actually go put like shadow box, the physical part, like for something that's a certain size. Obviously, you're not going to do it with a fixture plate, nor are you going to do it with a, you know, thinking nail size screw, but it is helpful when you're, I think that'll be helpful for certain things.
00:24:42
Speaker
In fact, I just ordered off, I can't remember if it was Uliner or Amazon, but some different window holders for the barcodes, because we're going to print them on the same stickers that sounds like you're using, but I actually don't want to sticker them onto everything. I'm going to put them into windows that lets us remove them or change them more easily.
00:25:03
Speaker
they'll get stuck onto some stuff. But we're also not doing, right now there's no intention of doing barcodes on specific, like every piece of material, nor are we going to do quantities. We're going to let a kind of traditional Kanban thing trigger reorders rather than trying to worry about
00:25:21
Speaker
having an ERP system that almost on day one or two will be wrong because somebody will somehow forget to correctly scan ways you take the part out. It's not data we necessarily need to track.
00:25:35
Speaker
Okay. I was wondering about that. If you trust the system a million percent, and then if something goes wrong, do you have monthly inventory tally days where you confirm all the inventory? It seems like a waste of time. Dude, lots of companies do that. I know. I know. It just seems gross.
00:25:55
Speaker
But it might be necessary. I don't know. We'll kind of play it by ear, right? Right. Look, we don't have the right to be blunt. We don't have the right team and culture in place to do that. Again, nor are we labeling it. Again, I think back to the exact opposite scenario, which was the helical Harvey fulfillment where
00:26:14
Speaker
totally awesome, but it's also different because they're picking these plastic tools, cutting tools in plastic sleeves, I should say, and they have dedicated people who are trained on that. It's too strange of a workflow right now to say, hey, every time somebody wants to pull off a piece of steel that happens to be the size of a playing card, two by four by one, you got to scan it out. I don't like that right now.
00:26:43
Speaker
I could see it if it were easy. If there was a scanner right at the material rack and you're like, grab the scanner, boom, boom, boom, grab the material, go. You're out in four seconds. That's my dream. And then I want to make every station that easy so that it's just, it's doable. Like nobody can complain about it because I won't even complain about it. I'll just be like, wow, this is easy. This is fun. That's just part of the workflow of grabbing anything.
00:27:07
Speaker
It's not a complaint thing or the intent of anybody. It's that it's not normal and you think, well, shoot, did I scan it? Did I rescan it? If I forget whether I touched the tool off, I just touched it off again. I don't really care.
00:27:22
Speaker
One of the things I was thinking about is, do we go through a somewhat laborious process when we receive material? Because when we bring it in, sometimes it comes in on different size pallets that are in different condition, stacked differently. What we could do, and this has some benefits, would be, let's take our mod vice top jaw material. That's the playing card size piece of material. If we order 200 of them,
00:27:48
Speaker
When it's processed in, we could have somebody restack all that into our own custom bin or just bin that we own. And that would let us separate the quantities, which would be what helps trigger the reorder. And then you could even create batches so that like, let's say you put 30 per Uline or not Uline.
00:28:11
Speaker
acromills or stacker style plastic bin, then if you're going to go run a batch of 30, you just scan the 30 bin that takes 30 out. You take those over to the machine and those get run. That makes more sense. It does make more sense. And we've come that way too, where we're, we're sorting quantities in like in batches of, you know, 50, 100, three, whatever. So that a bin, a certain quantity is, you know, you don't have to count every single screw. There's a bag of 500 screws. Um,
00:28:42
Speaker
It could be kind of annoying if you order 200 mod vice blanks and you got to go through, you got to clean them all, you got to sort them all into packs of 25 or whatever, but it might just be the process. Now that I'm thinking about it, that would take like five minutes. It's not as bad as you think. No. Over time, if that just becomes the default process, then it just does. And then everybody's going to love the bins of 30.
00:29:06
Speaker
because if you have a box of steel, you're like, well, what is it? And how much is in there? Nobody knows. And you want it to be easy. So if you have it in the orange stacker bin, and you know, there's always 30 in each stacker bin, and there's a big label at the front says mod vice bodies, like, and we have six of them, oh, and then we have, you know, six times 30, we have that many, right? So here's a debate.
00:29:31
Speaker
Again, picking on the mod vices as a good example. Mod vices consist of A, Bs, Cs and Ss. A is a screw that we buy as an example. B is a machined part, so something we've taken and machined into something. C is a sub-assembly, so like a pack of screws that gets shipped out four at a time or whatever. Then S is the customer facing product. Maybe that made it sound complicated. It's actually very simple.
00:29:58
Speaker
So the debate though is, you know, so at S the mod vice, half inch mod vice kit as it ships is an S number. And we've got, you know, like, I think we finished up 10 of them this morning for inventory. The debate is how many of those do we keep versus the bees? Because the bees are what take time, you know, going from, from bar stock to the machined parts is the real risk that when you run out and you get behind. So the thought is,
00:30:28
Speaker
The thought is we'll have based on sales a certain number will always keep 10 or 20 or 50 s numbers But no really no more than that because you don't want to overproduce and it's okay to leave stuff in the B state because Assembling it together get to go from a B or C to an S is like not a big deal, you know But then what we're thinking is
00:30:52
Speaker
do we keep some emergency inventory? I have very mixed feelings about this. I love it and then I don't like it. But the idea is similar to how we keep, we've actually expanded our emergency tools. Our emergency tools is now a drill index.
00:31:08
Speaker
Are college for your college kids and pull starts that way we always have a completely on. Compromise set of all those things for when you need it i'm thinking about an emergency inventory and here's why we are.
Handling Inventory Challenges
00:31:25
Speaker
We shouldn't need it. Like Jay Pearson would tell me, John, why would you need emergency inventory? You're going to have, you know, you're going to, Paul Acres, FastCap, Kaizen, Lean, your whole inventory system, so you're never out. Well, look, the reality is, you know, we're going to hit a system that's going to start generating work orders and what order do the work orders go in? Do you get behind? Does a machine break? And thus, you know, you, you deplete it. So the other thing that's happened is,
00:31:51
Speaker
We'll have an order come in for a good mix of products, fixture plate accessories and so forth. And the only reason we can't ship that order is one small thing.
00:32:01
Speaker
And so the thought is with emergency inventory, so you got to think about the criteria that you're going to allow it to get dipped into. But the two things that jumped out to mind are one is when you've got a $50 product holding up a $3,000 order. The second thing is we do get orders from customers that are saying, hey, urgent emergency budget, urgent project, I need this shipped tomorrow. Is that something you could handle? And usually, I'd be willing to dip into it for that.
00:32:28
Speaker
Now, are you talking an S assembly, like a complete finished, say, mod vice, for example, like box up ready to go? You have five of them, 10 of them in emergency inventory? Probably. Because you could always, again, if it's a true emergency, you could always break that down if needed to extract and build it into like we have dual kits or individual replacement parts.
00:32:48
Speaker
Or would you just hold an emergency inventory of your B machine components so that you could assemble on demand? Because I'm trying to think of the lean way to do it, not creating waste before it's necessary. But the machine time is hard, unless you have this idyllic situation where one machine for each component and setup is two seconds.
00:33:13
Speaker
etc. But we're getting good at that, by the way. Yeah, yeah. But if you had machine components in stock, even in emergency inventory, so you have 20 in stock, but you have like 10 in a box, you never touch. They could be assembled at a moment's notice. And then they could be shipped out to match any need. The only thing is I worry about them getting stale, meaning that's your vision change or rusty or whatever.
00:33:39
Speaker
We have a process with various rust inhibitors, VCI paper, WD-40 packaging that handles the rust. Getting stale from a design standpoint is pretty legit.
00:33:51
Speaker
And the simple answer is, well, do it where you need it, like our little acrylic plate savers. Those are a classic example. They're a little bit quirky to run. It's not like our primary bread and butter product for us to manufacture because it's thin acrylic, not rough machine metal. And fun fact, acrylic's really hard to get right now because of COVID. Sneeze guards are probably a better use than our plate savers. But we still need to make some plate savers.
00:34:19
Speaker
That's one where it's like those are our foam, if you will, John. It's not that much material. It's not that expensive. It's easy to produce them when you're set up. So keep 50 cases in the emergency bin if you need to. Yeah, it's really interesting to think through all these processes. And it's cool that we're both kind of on
00:34:39
Speaker
similar timelines for the ERP systems and we're both kind of the point like screw it, let's do it, let's jump in. We can't afford not to do it right now. We're both probably behind the curve on this, should have done it like years ago, but I think we're at a good time right now to give it the effort it needs, the money it needs, the time it needs.
00:35:02
Speaker
our businesses are both flowing well enough that it very much makes sense. We have a new intern starting Thursday, yesterday. And that's another good McDonald's test of if your average work, what is that stat about McDonald's? The average work tenure at McDonald's is like 42 days. So it's like, hey, how? Ask Lawrence. Yeah, right. I wonder if it's different. I bet it is different in Europe.
00:35:32
Speaker
But, uh, you know, we want to, we want somebody to quickly be like, I shouldn't have to teach you Lex. Um, it should be somewhat self. It should be intuitive, right? Well, that'll be fun. Yeah, that'll be the, that would be the limit. No, we're not there yet. It'll, it'll be some handholding, but that's something they're going to have them help with too.
00:35:54
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I'd ask you what you have to do today, but it's not current and it's not Swiss Lays. Yeah, I'm trying not to spend time thinking about it. I want to clear my brain. I sat by the lake this morning at like seven and it was still and it was quiet and the sun just came out and
00:36:11
Speaker
There's like lunes in the background, hooting away. And I saw some, like, you get to this moment of tranquility when you just calm your brain and you start to actually let nature consume you. And I'm like, whoa, there's two frogs like three feet away from me. And they've been there this whole time. I didn't even notice. Yeah. And you just kind of calm down, which has been very nice. And I'm hoping that I can take this back and
00:36:38
Speaker
come back to the world with some clarity and some creativity that I've been too busy to see. You know what I mean? So it's nice. I'm glad we get to do this. I haven't taken a family vacation in a couple years. I sort of feel bad about it, but we're good. Everybody's
00:37:00
Speaker
Nobody's asking to go on vacation every two weeks. Yeah, live in the present. Don't feel exactly. Yeah, so it's we're good. This is fun. That's awesome. Yeah, I spent I've spent probably
00:37:14
Speaker
I don't know. Six or seven of the last 10 days or two weeks, I've probably been at the shop. I'll go home and do dinner and stuff, but I'll come back and work till 10 o'clock, which I haven't done in over a year or two. I'm okay with it because part of it is catching up on inventory and this transition to Lex, which is totally awesome. Last night,
00:37:31
Speaker
Um, we're doing, we got invited to be part of a project, which, um, if it really pans out, I'm excited to share more on, and it's a quick five axis part. And as part of my phase two or phase three and four of the shop kind of overhaul, it's really spending the time to nail down, uh,
00:37:49
Speaker
some of our lathe and five-axis templates, which is we're taking some of it from the thing that we came up with, some of it's the Lockwood design, some of it's the Tool Library and S-Tool system, and really taking the time to standardize that so that we've got good CAD and CAM templates, import workflows. And I'm using this part as a little bit of an example to now get back into that. And it's super energetic to start doing these things when you've got better
00:38:16
Speaker
When you've got those tools flushed out, you know what the cutting tools are. You know how the CAM works. All of our fifth axis templates are set up. It's super awesome. Yeah, it all comes together. And I like what you said about mixing everybody else's ideal way into what makes sense for you and your shop and your workflow. And even if their way is great, if the Lockwood method is solid for him,
00:38:39
Speaker
I don't know if it's like pride or just different style of working or whatever but you kind of want to put your own little spin on it sometimes and it gives you that ownership that feeling of
00:38:50
Speaker
wanting to do it, not just following somebody else's recipe. Yeah. Rob's stuff is usually pretty darn good. The awesome thing is most of what he showed was in his AU class, which is on our Google NYC CNC AU 2019.
Advanced Manufacturing Technology
00:39:07
Speaker
You can watch his videos awesome. Lauren's video is awesome. Phil's video was awesome. My video, I'd humbly say is pretty good. A lot of good stuff to consume and digest in there.
00:39:19
Speaker
And ours is just tweaking it because Rob does a lot of opt-to stuff. I'm focusing more on one and done or windows and tabbing. In fact, this part I'm going to try to do the same thing where we hot glue it in to do the final zip off of the tab. But yeah. Nice.
00:39:35
Speaker
Nice. Yeah. The other thing I've got to mention, and I thought I had talked about it, is I was catching up with Scott Harms, who runs Metal Quest. And hearing him talk about what their new, relatively new index machine can do, I think it's called the MS20. But it's one of those crazy eight-spindle lays that has, it looks like no other machine tool, because it looks like
00:40:04
Speaker
It looks like a monster, like a beast, you know? You know what I'm talking about? You know exactly what you're talking about. Because I think, doesn't Tornos make them as well? Tornos does make them. The multi-deco, multi-deco something. And it's like, it's like eight different spindles. And say the part moves from cartridge one and does one tool, one op, and then it rotates to the next tool, and then the next tool, and then it rotates to the next tool. And all the while,
00:40:30
Speaker
every spindle is cutting at the same time. So your actual cycle time is like seconds. Right. It's one divided by eight. Yeah, it's ridiculous. Wait, I didn't understand them at first because I was thinking, so okay, everybody knows what a single
00:40:47
Speaker
Access like a normal lathe looks like heck even a manual lathe right you have a spindle with a part and then a cutting tool Well, that's what this is except there's eight of them around like a Gatling gun but what's crazy and cool and makes so much sense is that
00:41:02
Speaker
The part doesn't move, rather the whole bar feeder rotates, it rotates one position to the right or counter clockwise or clockwise. Yes. So like if you're doing, let's just say you're making a chest pawn. Well, the first operation would rough out the chest pawn and then the whole chest pawn, which is still attached to the eight foot bar or however long it is, rotates to the next station where the finishing tool would do it. And then it would tap it or thread it or machine a flat or whatever it needs to do.
00:41:30
Speaker
which is like, oh my gosh, that solves the whole issue of like, hey, the coordinates are kind of like the sub spindle transfer or complicated because it's still attached to the bar.
00:41:39
Speaker
Well, I'm curious. I haven't figured my head around how they actually sub-spin lit and transfer it and if there are backworking tools and how all that works. I don't know. I don't understand. This is what's awesome is Scott was mentioning how just freaking cool the machine is and what really piqued my curiosity was he was saying that each chuck of the eight chucks has a, and I hope I get this right, a transducer
00:42:05
Speaker
call it pressure sensor so that the Siemens control knows that everything is correct. Like the bar diameter is correct. There isn't a chip in there. There isn't some under or over pressure, which can matter for tolerances. And then he started going on about how tool life is better, finishes are better, thermal stability. And I couldn't help but think back to your
00:42:26
Speaker
Swiss lathe experience where it's just a different style machine in terms of the rigidity, the compactness, the way it thermally expands. And so I pitched Scott, I was like, Hey, I know with COVID, I can't get out to Nebraska, but can we do a remote video where I'm going to do the audio and then you guys are going to kind of match the video footage because this thing can flip, it can flip the part over and it can do backside cutting and it can do some pretty cool stuff. So I'm working with him right now to do a kind of behind the scenes on the index,
00:42:55
Speaker
Yeah, I call them rotary transfer machines. I'm not sure that's correct. That might just be like the hydromat style, but the multi-spindle lathes. Yeah, that's probably an accurate term, multi-spindle lathe. I think I've heard that before. I wonder if you can run multiple part numbers in the same rotation or if you have like one sub-spindle.
00:43:21
Speaker
That's a good question. I don't know. Because anything that catches the part or that transfers it or that backworks it has to work as fast as the other eight spindles. Otherwise. Yeah, so there's definitely an element of balancing the load across all eight because you're limited by your slowest spindle. Yes, that's true. But there's more to learn there. And I mean, high volume, high accuracy, low cycle times.
00:43:48
Speaker
It's amazing for that. That's really cool. It reminds me of the MariTool Instagram story where Frank used to program a Hydra mat and he set up this trick question where the material was 33 cents a piece and he was like, what do you think we sold the part for? And it was a brass fitting for some high volume, 2 million a year.
00:44:12
Speaker
a threaded IDOD, all that. And the $33 percent material product was machined on a probably million dollar plus machine and sold to the customer for like 26 cents a piece. They're losing seven cents per part. But the trick question was that there's a lot of material removal on it. And so they made all their money in the scrap. What? Which I think works on brass a little differently than it does on steel or aluminum.
00:44:41
Speaker
That's ridiculous. Right. I would definitely have lost that bit also that scares the crap out of me. Yes.
00:44:49
Speaker
Well, it's like the current machines and tornos and whatever that cut gold for watches and things like that. They have to recycle all of that gold. And even the factory workers, it might stick to the bottom of their shoes. That has to be recycled. And it's coming back. Those gold dusts are not leaving the factory. Yeah, right. That's funny.
00:45:12
Speaker
We'll have to wait to see when you machine a 24 karat gold Norseman handle. Yeah. No, we are actually going to do a nickel aluminum bronze full display side handle, which is going to look super cool. We've got number 4,000 coming up, so we're going to do something special. Holy cow. That's awesome. Well, next week, when you're not on vacation, I want to hear about rasks, but we're not going to talk about that today because you're on vacation. Sounds good. Awesome. Hey, enjoy, bud. You do. Thanks. Bye.