Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Unblocking efficiency by tackling feed mill bottlenecks
9 Plays6 months ago
In this episode of the Feed & Grain Podcast, host Steven Kilger, managing editor of Feed & Grain Magazine, talks with Brady Gaalswyk, co-president and 2nd generation owner of Easy Automation. This episode dives into the practical challenges and solutions surrounding bottlenecks in feed facilities—a key issue that can lead to significant downtime and inefficiency.
Podcast sponsored by Pneumat Systems.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Sponsorship
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi everyone, my name is Stephen Kilgore. I'm the managing editor at Feeding Grain magazine and the host of the Feeding Grain podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today as we dive deep into the issues affecting the feed manufacturing, grain handling, and allied industries. Today's episode is brought to you by the Binwip from New Man Systems. The powerful dual impact Binwip removes the toughest buildup in blockages and industrial storage silos without hazardous silo entry. Learn more today at binwip.com.
Guest Introduction
00:00:27
Speaker
In today's episode, my guest is Brady Galswith, co-president and owner of Easy Automation Inc. We're talking about bottlenecks in feed facilities and how discovering and fixing them can save hundreds of down hours at your mill. We talk about common bottlenecks, how to fix them once you do, and what they can cost a mill if left unchecked.
00:00:48
Speaker
If you want to help out with the podcast and are listening to this in a podcasting app, please rate us and subscribe. If you're listening online, sign up for the feeding grain newsletter industry watch to see the latest podcasts and stay up to date with all the news from
About Easy Automation
00:01:01
Speaker
around the industry. Now onto the show. Hey Brady, thanks for talking to me today. Yeah. Appreciate the opportunity to be here, Steven.
00:01:08
Speaker
For anyone on this call, which you are a frequent guest of the Feeding Grain podcast, and we thank you for that. You're one of our favorite guests. For anyone who doesn't know, can you tell me a little bit more about yourself and your involvement in the feed manufacturing industry? You bet. So my name is Brady Galswick, co-president and part of the second generation at Easy Automation, originally started by my father. We focus on automation in both the feed grain, as well as agronomy areas, as well as providing software and equipment specifically to that feed mill sector.
00:01:38
Speaker
Yeah, a family company, which is always nice to see. There aren't enough of them out there anymore. So it's nice to hear you second
Common Bottlenecks in Feed Mills
00:01:45
Speaker
generation. We're here today to talk a bit about Feedmail bottlenecks. You guys had a really nice blog post on your website, which everyone should visit. I'll have a link to it in the description below where you talk a little bit about Feedmail bottlenecks and how
00:01:59
Speaker
females can go about diagnosing them and addressing them. Tell me some about the bottlenecks that you see that typically affect the efficiency and productivity in feedmills and preferably ones that can be overcome.
00:02:11
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. When you're looking at bottlenecks, and so sometimes bottlenecks are very obvious. We're talking about the operator. They would likely know that, yep, this is what I'm waiting on all the time, or I don't have enough load up in, or I'm always waiting on this, or I'm always waiting on that. Sometimes they can provide some real insight of their mill and their system. Other times though, and some of them easiest to fix, are those small things.
00:02:37
Speaker
that is just very common to overlook when you're staring at your same meal day in, day after day. A lot of times it's actually those 30 seconds, 20 seconds, two minute delays between things or delays or issues or problems that it's not significant enough for somebody that's living in it to think it's making a big deal. It's just kind of, yeah, this is how we do it.
00:03:02
Speaker
but those actually add up with so many different batches going through a meal. 10 seconds on batch, 30 seconds a batch truly can add up to hours per day and ultimately days and days of unnecessary amount of production or overtime just because of those small little bottlenecks that are kind of flying to the radar.
00:03:21
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. Especially because, well, everyone notices when your meal shuts down for two hours, right? Everyone knows that problem. But, uh, those day-to-day processes that you're just so used to doing every day, you don't even consider them. Do you have any examples of these? What are some of the common ones you might see out there at a feed mill? Yeah. So some of the most common ones, I'll use Marcel's word examples that I've seen out there that might not seem like a big deal, but actually add up.
00:03:48
Speaker
So one was simply where, instead of stacking the orders, one on top of each other for the automation to just simply go on to the next one. The operator felt more of a comfort in just releasing one order at a time and then coming back and releasing the next order because he wanted just to have that control. Well, through our reporting capabilities, we actually reported the amount of time between orders and then total amount of time waiting. And while it was only, you know, a lot of times
00:04:13
Speaker
three to five minutes per order. I think that was just like four minutes and 15 seconds between orders. It ended up that that meal was waiting about two hours per day.
00:04:21
Speaker
because it was waiting on not knowing what the next order it was supposed to make. So just that small thing, you know, they got busy up. I want to finish loading this truck before I start the next order where it ended up being, you know, a significant amount of time. Another was when you look at ingredient way up times and how can I speed up my mail and how can I, how can I make things faster? A specific example, right? Customer was waiting on the way up.
00:04:43
Speaker
and wanted it to be faster. I was watching it and saw that the bottleneck was that it was waiting on the microsystem. So we looked into it a little bit further. And what had happened is that customer had replaced the variable frequency drive, a VFD, on the system. And it's important to, after you do that, to then consult with automation on what the settings were to have it run the most optimal so that it starts out at really, really fast, high Hertz. And then as it gets closer, it slows down and stops. It's going very slow at the very end to be accurate. Well, they hadn't called in
00:05:13
Speaker
to tell us that they got a new VFD. So it was at the factory settings. The factory settings were on the very slowest amounts, very slowest speed. So therefore the mill was wasting again, like two to three hours per day, simply because the VFD settings were not set properly. Wow.
Improving Efficiency with Automation
00:05:31
Speaker
And those are both such small things. Like, you wouldn't think about it. You're like, oh, I'll just, you know, I'll start the new order for the batch. You know, not stacking them. That's just a human thing. Or like, oh, this is easier for me. How much time could it cost?
00:05:43
Speaker
But breaking it down like that and realizing how much it is, and especially since those are both such easy things to fix, which I think a lot of people, when they think of bottlenecks, they think of kind of infrastructure layout or something along those lines, big projects that are going to take a lot to improve. So it's really, I don't want to say good to hear, but nice to hear that some of these can be fixed without big investments in equipment and things like that.
00:06:11
Speaker
You touched on Steven and just the importance of ensuring that your meal is running at its peak efficiency. All the bottlenecks or all the little variations are fully evaluated and trying to improve because if there's that opportunity to gain 10%, 20%, 30% efficiency, well, you know, that could be significant dollars compared to creating a 30% bigger meal or having to build another meal or capital expenditures, but also as it relates to over time and just the amount of efficiency run.
00:06:38
Speaker
All those motors are probably running during all those hours that it didn't need to in just how much cost is getting. It's like a well-tuned machine, right? It's important to focus on it instead of just getting bigger and better is what I have being fully optimized. Yeah. And well, that's a good, the costs is a good thing to bring up too. Cause you know, you think about it as, oh, I'm just not producing as much feed.
00:06:58
Speaker
as i could be but in reality you're running all those all that equipment you're losing money from the energy expenditure alone not to mention you know the lost man hours and all those other things so that's really good point. Absolutely and like i said go back to that just to kind of walk through example of that thirty seconds is lost per batch let's say right in this even multiplies if you run for twenty four hour period.
00:07:21
Speaker
That can be like two hours per day. Well, okay. That's a lot, but think about it. That's, if you run 24 seven, that's 730 hours per year. Just because of those 30 seconds, it just keeps piling on itself.
00:07:34
Speaker
That's insane. Are there any like warning signs that you see in a feed mails that you visit that maybe an operator should be looking for that, you know, kind of indicate that things aren't going as efficiently as they should be? Yeah. So, um, you know, at a high level, you know, make sure you, you're utilizing the reporting capabilities of your meal and your automation for us. For example, we have this, what we call daily performance report where prints out and shows what the productivity of the mill throughout the day, as well as.
00:08:04
Speaker
creates a graph showing what errors that the mill had, what events or problems that the mill had, and then lists those in the area of most common to least common, or how many times they happened. Because again, it can be so common for managers, especially managers that have multiple mills, they get an operator sitting there and they're clearing through the event and they're just kind of going to the next one and they're not quite sure. They just think that's the way it is. That's just how we make feed and how we get through the day.
00:08:31
Speaker
But having that visibility allows the manager to then drive in and say, okay, this isn't an issue. Also the chart to show the efficiency throughout the day, you can have those conversations and see, okay, I see at 10 o'clock it dipped. Why is it dipper? I see every day at 10 o'clock it dips. Why is there productivity dipping?
00:08:49
Speaker
Well, there's a lot of different reasons where it could be a problem or maybe we're waiting on a truck to unload or all our loadout bins are full. Okay, well, maybe that means we need to look closer at the schedule of our drivers and how we plan that out because the mill can only control so much. And sometimes it's the trucks and the incoming trucks and the deliveries all have to dance together, truly optimized efficiency.
00:09:11
Speaker
And you touch on one of the key parts of all this, which is automation, right? Automation can help reduce all of these bottlenecks. I mean, automation is really the key to efficiency in the future for feed mills. Can you give some examples of maybe some of these bottlenecks that automation can fix commonly find in feed mills? The biggest one in fair efficiency of the bottleneck is the ingredient way of time.
00:09:32
Speaker
if you are manually weighing up ingredients or even if it's electric, pushing buttons and watching a scale and weighing up ingredients, an automation system can do it so much faster, even a single scale, not to mention the fact that automation can be weighing multiple scales, five, six, seven, eight, nine plus scales up at a time, whereas a best case scenario is for an operator to do one at a time. So that's a huge one right there in just the feed. Now I also even say,
00:09:59
Speaker
On top of that, there's the move from manual to automated. But I will also want to say that as it relates to automation, now that automation has been around for quite some time, can be older systems and older softwares that are not as fast as upgraded versions. So simply upgrading the software, making sure your automation is up to date can have a significant aspect on ingredient way of times.
00:10:21
Speaker
Another area that I see automation really helping is through the control of rolling and grinding systems. So it can be a common practice to have, you know, your rolling and grinding maybe is not the first thing you automate in an existing feed mill, but by doing things such as automatic bin keep full, where the automation is looking at your
Collaboration and Training for Efficiency
00:10:40
Speaker
ground bins, making sure they're full. If they're not full, starting the system up to roll.
00:10:46
Speaker
They're graying in and fill them all up, shut it off, shut things off in the proper order, and then watch again, see if the bins get empty to refill again. While this can seem like not a big deal, a lot of times a mill's production and mill's rolling or grinding capacity are pretty tight neck and neck, where if operator isn't watching and keeping their bins ground ahead of times, all of a sudden the entire mill can be waiting on that rolling system to catch up.
00:11:12
Speaker
So there's the aspect of during the day, just kind of making sure your bins are full, making sure it's being optimized. And then even more so at night, let's say you are getting a low, instead of having the operator have to sit there for multiple hours at night, even after he's done batching feed, then needs to just roll the grind, grind the grain, the automation can be put in place to grind those bins full and then shut off in the proper order. And during the time of operation, doing so in a matter that's safe, their equipment, safe for the
00:11:38
Speaker
facility where if there was any problems or any issues with the hazard monitoring, it would start off in the proper order. So again, just those little things that might not seem like a big thing, keeping the bins full, right? Pretty self-explanatory, but just get busy. It can be easy to get distracted and not stand top. Yeah, very easy. I mean, that's what happens to all of us. Well, you made a really good point about when I think of, you know, going to automation, sometimes I think going from a turnkey facility
00:12:06
Speaker
the one that's automated, but you're right, automation's now been around in the industry for decades. So for many people, you might have an automation system, but it now might be kind of outdated or not do what it can do. How should Feedmills kind of plan and execute transitions for more automated processes? Where do they find that kind of information? How do they know what's out there? Is there a good place to stay up to date? In a lot of ways, it is working with your automation provider.
00:12:35
Speaker
and ask the question, hey, we want to automate more. What options are out there? I do feel like trying to do a good job of educating their customers on what there is available. But at the same time, each of these mills are different. Each of them are customized to their own specific scenario. And maybe you're starting off at a different point of how automated they are, and maybe have a different end goal of how automated they want to get to in varying budgets. So your automation provider can help work with what you have now, what they have available,
00:13:04
Speaker
what makes the most sense or bang for their buck and how they can add that on. A lot of times, systems that may be putting only batching automation 20 years ago, we're adding more and more receiving automation, rolling and grinding automation, automation of loadout processes. Another big area that we're automating more and more is pellomills. And pellomill automation can be an area that starts off manual from a legacy system, but they want to add in over time. And a lot of these things can be added on relatively easy.
00:13:34
Speaker
to your existing automation platform, you will. It's not like you're having to start from scratch because it's just adding more and more on pretty customizable. Yeah. And it gives you all those benefits and not only more efficient processing, but also that data reporting you mentioned at the beginning, which is so key to finding the efficiencies in your plant. Just you would never gather as much data as a machine. Absolutely. The other thing I want to touch on as well, it's the both bottlenecks as well as efficiency and automation is with the
00:14:00
Speaker
new generation of operators come in or the new generation of workforce, if you will, while maybe if you have an operator that's been around the system for 30 years, 40 years, you know, knows a system like the back of their hand. They are very good and very efficient when they don't have bottlenecks because they know that system like the back of their hand. However, now you get next generation and their younger generation. They're used to running computer systems. They're used to playing video games.
00:14:29
Speaker
This concept of utilizing automation not only have them sit in the seat with a little training being very efficient use of the system right off the bat, but also just a more enjoyable work environment type of work that they want to do. There is any turnover easier to train that next person in versus just relying on that individual's knowledge of the scenarios in their head and how to operate that system best. You're able to boil down all that information and knowledge into that automation.
00:14:58
Speaker
Yeah. And the old age of, you know, the veteran knowing every single sound that a feed mill makes to make, make feed and have to go through and, you know, manually hit the pellet mill right here. So it works right. I mean, those, those days are gone and for the better, I think, because by utilizing these systems, not only can you train people faster, you can also like move them around to your various facilities when you have shortages and all these other things.
00:15:27
Speaker
So for those new people and even old employees, which just because you're operating a machine and you don't notice bottlenecks does not mean that you're doing it the most efficient way possible. Those are, can be contrary ideas. What kind of training programs would you recommend for employees in automated females, both learning the software and then more important than I think a lot of people think, re-familiarizing yourself with the software out there once in a while, you know, learning features that you don't use and all those kinds of things. What kind of programs would you recommend for that?
00:15:57
Speaker
A lot of these facilities are so specific to their layout and specific to their facility that a lot of times it is working with the automation provider for that training program. I mean, I know us here use automation. It's pretty easy where we can either come on site to help with any training or any refreshers or have the people come to our facility to get a full demonstration mode and walk through things. However, it's also very easy to provide our service and support. We're able to
00:16:25
Speaker
directly log into your system, see your screen, see exactly what you're seeing, and walk you through on the phone of how you are running your system, how you flow through things, able to log in, making adjustments to help tweak things. So maybe if you're saying, hey, I feel like this isn't happening as fast as it should, or hey, I feel like this clean out of this conveyor is longer than it should, log in, help work through that.
00:16:49
Speaker
It's really truly a handholding approach because it's so specific to the facility and their application. Yeah. What we do as editors is we always, when we do have meetings, we talk about these things too, right? And we discuss what we're doing versus the other employees. And that's part of it is just sharing ideas amongst themselves. So many people at feedmills never talk to any other shifts or anything like that. Absolutely. I think that's where the, you know, the value of reporting.
00:17:14
Speaker
can come in where, especially if a manager or organization has multiple mills across their operation, by having those data points and kind of creating that baseline, it helps
Data-Driven Process Improvements
00:17:25
Speaker
create those discussions where, you know, maybe one type of mill is making a different type of feed or has a different size or different type of equipment that they'll never make as much feed, but it helped drive those conversations of
00:17:37
Speaker
how one's being more consistent or how one's having less errors or at once having less events helps drive those conversations and help point out those areas of opportunity. I also have seen where sometimes we have customers with multiple mills, you know, jump on a call and kind of talk through things. And it's incredible the amount of information that they share across the organization, where if you don't create those spaces for opportunity, they kind of get stuck in your own little world.
00:18:03
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. And even like you said, I mean, it's being able to see that that four and a half minutes in between each batch at one plant and then seeing that that doesn't happen to the other and being able to ask, why is it happening in this one, but not this one? So stuff like that is really, and that's the kind of thing that you can do with data gathering from automation that you can't really do just looking at stuff. Just standing there and feeling like it takes a long time, doesn't help you gauge one compared to the other knowing that this mill
00:18:32
Speaker
average run time is 40 seconds. And in this mill, the average run time for that same ingredient, that same batch times is 80 seconds. Well, let's look into the why. Is there a setting wrong? Is the auger size wrong? Is the equipment size drawn? That's where that value of that reporting really shows up.
00:18:50
Speaker
Yeah, more data should lead to more communication, not the opposite. Exactly. Let me say that. That's good. How do you see the role of automation evolving in feedmills, particularly in addressing bot next, but just also overall, what's the next
Future of Automation with AI
00:19:05
Speaker
big thing? Everyone's talking about AI. Yeah, absolutely. I've had a lot of data in automation for quite some time, but how to put that data into the users, the operators, the managers hands.
00:19:17
Speaker
in a way that they can actually make decisions off of it and actually change things, actually look into things because of it. That is hard to get to. It doesn't get looked at. There's no decisions made off of it. So a lot of that is in reporting tools and, you know, being able to visually see the data automatically is sent to you and that kind of thing. And then with the next step being AI, so where it can artificial intelligence is able to see some of those bottlenecks, give recommendations, give recommendations on
00:19:45
Speaker
how you're scheduling your loads, how you're scheduling your batches, essentially taking that data and doing a little bit like we've talked about just a little bit ago of how instead of that being conversations between mills, have that artificial intelligence, be having that conversation or looking into it of what is a best practice and how can that be implemented here.
00:20:05
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Brady. I really appreciate it. Always love having you on. Like I said earlier, you have a great blog. You produce a lot of great content on your website and I'm jealous of it sometimes. I look at it and I'm like, oh, okay. They can't just write for Feeding Grain, huh? That's nice.
00:20:24
Speaker
But I would suggest anyone listening go check out some of the information you have on your website. Awesome. I appreciate that. Try to provide different types of insights. Obviously, this is what we focus on and feel like we can provide some value to the discussion. So appreciate the opportunity to be podcast as well as just part of the industry.
00:20:42
Speaker
Yeah, happy to have you on. Always am. We'll have you on again next year. I think that was about roughly the same time we had you on last year. So we'll have you on again. Thank you so much for talking to me today. Everyone have a great rest of your week and stay safe out there. Bye.