Hello everyone and welcome to Manufacturing wellness, where we meet challenges holistically, responsibly, and with purpose. My name is Keith Brake. I am your host of the podcast and I am currently the product manager for Sales Area America of Turning Tools. Today, I'm joined by Tom Groot from Cassidy Manufacturing. Tom, how about you tell us a little bit about yourself? Sure, no problem, Keith. Well, I've been in machining for probably around 40 years. I took machine shop as my major in high school, went to a small machine shop where I did my apprenticeship. I moved into a local aerospace company called Standard Aero. I was at Standard Aero for 10 years, working both CNC and conventional machining. I also got into sales at that point. I was in sale for 20 years and I've been with Cassidy Manufacturing as the general manager for eight years. Interesting, the sales background, because that brings a whole new perspective when you come from sales and then go back to the customer side of things. So, you know how you would take care of a customer and you know what you're expecting from a company like Sandvik Cormont. So, you've got a full expectation. It seemed to me when we were kind of going over a little bit of the history of Cassidy and Sandvik Coromant, you guys have a good partnership. You're comfortable with working with one another, a lot of good wins, and it seems like we have developed some kind of holistic manner and partnership moving forward. Am I understanding this correctly? Yes, Sandvik Coromant has been a part of Cassidy Manufacturing for, I would say, for the better part of the existence of Cassidy for, I would say, seven years. We've always gone to Cassidy, or pardon me, we've always gone to Sandvik because of the strength in their partnership and their focus on successful winning for both Sandvik and for us. So, it's been a strong relationship. Yeah, and those relationships with mutual success in mind, that's paramount in everything that we try to do here at Coromant. One thing that we're going to touch on for this podcast, I mean, it's right in the title. We're going to talk about holistic manufacturing and manufacturing wellness. Now, as I understand this, you guys, Cassidy, you've recently taken advantage of our Machining Insights platform. How is that working out for you? Is it what you thought it would be? Well, in my position as a salesperson, I used to work as a distributed salesperson, and I used to go in and do cycle times for my customers. What we used to do, and you're probably familiar with this as well, you stand by the machine with a stopwatch, and you watch the cycle several times just to get a general idea on how the tools and everything's performing. With Insights, what we're able to do is get a much broader perspective on the machining process. We can get the entire, all three shifts. We run three shifts. We work five days, 24 hours. So we're able to capture all the processes in the midnight shift and the evening shift, giving us a much clearer picture as to our manufacturing process. Yeah, that's great. It's good to hear when things work out. The software comes in to elevate what you're doing with the hardware. And that kind of leads us right into what we're talking about here, the holistic perspective. Can you talk a minute about how you decided to take that holistic journey, and then how has it affected or influenced the way that you manufacture and process your parts today? Right. So when we look at our business and what we see our customers expect from us, we felt that looking at things from a more of a holistic point of view, instead of just looking at it as a machining a component and supplying those components, we're able to look at it all the way from what we offer for powder coating, how we do the packaging, invoicing, and that increases our customers' expectations. And it also helps us achieve and enhance our customers' experience. So by including insights, it gives us the ability to look at our entire process, as opposed to just looking at individual tooling. And we can get a far better product out the door than we used to before. Yeah. And the product, to that point, the product is everything, right? It's not just the tools. It's not just the steel. It's what your customer receives in the form of service, in the form of quality, in the form of function. So that holistic perspective, taking that step back, looking from a micro scope instead of the micro, and looking from a macro scope instead of the microscope, I would imagine that insights really is beneficial for doing those sorts of things. So when we take that a step further, how are you using insights to ensure that all the aspects of the business are aligned? Right. So what we're doing with insights, I can give you an example. On our midnight ship, we run a horizontal machine, and we had noticed that we weren't getting the productivity off that machine as we were on the other previous shifts. And we noticed that by graphing some of the information that we get from insights, which tells us our pallet change times. We noticed that on the midnight shift, our pallet change time was much higher. So we went back to the evening shift supervisor, and it turns out that the operator isn't able to keep up with the cycle time. So it was just a simple addition of having a production support helping along with the operator so he can do the deburring and do the measuring, and then we can get the machine back running at the proper parts per ship and getting our deliveries back online. So that was just one small aspect that we've implemented with insights. So it gave us the ability to see where we were losing track. It also makes the job a lot easier for our operators, which enhances their job as well. Yeah. And that's an important aspect of this because people are a resource. And I think the further we move into the future of manufacturing, I think it becomes more and more obvious that people not only just a resource, they're one of the most important resources that we have. Yeah. So part of manufacturing wellness is embracing new technology. You know, Cassidy has embraced Machining Insights. Obviously, you're on board for embracing the new technology. Are there any other technologies that you've adapted or taken under your wing or employed at Cassidy that are helping you in a positive way impact your current operations? Yes, we have. We do a lot of time studies here because, as you know, manufacturing time is money. So we want to make sure that we're getting the most productivity out of our machines. One machine that we did do a time study on, we got the cutting time and we have the parts for shift. And we've seen that there's a large imbalance between the two. So we went back and we looked at all our inspections. So now we do all our inspections, all our frequencies digitally. So we were able to plot our inspections on a SPC chart. And we did notice that we had a lot of fluctuations in the size. One of the issues that we had was we needed to add in a semi-finish operation. So once we added that operation in, the sizes were a lot easier to maintain. We could stretch out our measurement frequencies from every 12 to every 50. Again, making it easier for the operator. He doesn't have to measure his parts as often. Makes it better for us. We can get the parts out more accurately and more consistently as well. So by realizing that we had an imbalance between what our cutting time was and what our productivity was, we started to track our measurements digitally. Yeah, that's very interesting because you actually became more productive by adding an operation, which would be counterintuitive except for you have the machining insights, right? So you have this ability to look in. And that you kind of answered the next question in a very beautiful, organic way. I was going to ask you to provide an example of how you've used this technology to overcome, but you wrapped it all up into one answer. So it's perfect. Insights is obviously taking the star of the stage here, and we want to stay on that. But I think also, it's safe to say if you're a Sambic Cormont champion, you're probably adhering or adapting to some of our newer technologies as they come to you, the new tool families and things of that nature, the new grade chains, just to kind of stay on top of the evolution and the speed of manufacturing. Yes. Yes. When we're looking at a process, we look at it more from a value-added. We look at it as non-value-added, and we look at non-value-added, but business necessary. The business necessary part are things that we can't do a lot about, but we can certainly influence. An example would be tool change times. If you don't position your tools properly in a large machining carousel, you could waste time waiting for a tool. Now, you still have to do tool changes, but you can optimize that as well. Non-value-added would be like the example I had said, I had stated, we just simply don't need to wait for parts to be burnt, or we don't wait for parts to be inspected. So those are the two areas that we tend to focus on the most because our spindles aren't spinning at that point. But you're right. When we do have an opportunity, we'll look at the value-added, which is the actual cutting process. And that's where I feel that Sandic really shines, is that you're very good at detecting what we need with your new products. There's a very good bridging between what you're introducing to the market and how it applies to our manufacturing process. I got to tell you, as a product manager, that makes me smile. So I don't know if you meant to give the compliment, but I will certainly take it. So I'm happy to hear. Absolutely. You know, all those ways that you are evaluating your processes and you're using insights to evaluate in a way that I think it's safe to say, Tom, that you were not capable of doing before you had insights. I feel like that's a safe statement. We can wrap all of these things up. And this also helps Cassidy go down the road of manufacturing and help eliminate waste as you go. Is that true as well? Yes. Any time that any waste takes multiple shapes and forms. And for us, wasting time is, is something that, well, we just simply don't like to do. We have to keep machines productive. We have to keep our operators engaged. And, um, if we can eliminate waste as far as, as time, um, regarding measurements that, that don't have to be done regarding operators doing too many tasks and not being able to fill their primary tasks, that's a waste. So yeah, it is a very big part of our, um, of our culture to try and eliminate waste as we see it. Yeah. And it seems like when you're with the, as we talk here, it, it seems like I'm picking up on something and I, perhaps I could be incorrect, but you are using the data from insights to then automate actions to make your employees more efficient. Is that, is that safe to say that's a strategy for eliminating waste such as wasted time? That's exactly right. Yeah, absolutely. So it does a very good job of tracking when the machine is not running and when the machine is running. So we can always take a quick view to see what operations are, are in need of, of, of a little bit of, um, TLC. Yeah. And what would you say if you, if you had to put your finger on one standout, um, improvement that was made in the realm of reducing waste or eliminating waste, what was the biggest impact, um, improvement that you guys have made in that area? Oh boy, that's a really good question. There's several savings that we had done. I would have to say the biggest improvement that we had is just the visibility. Um, we have the operators are able to send us notes when we're having an issue with a part. We don't wait for supervisors, um, to go around to each machine. We can, we have a direct contact with the, uh, with the operators. Um, so it's definitely helped us as far as, as being able to be a lot more responsive, um, as the parts are coming along instead of waiting once the job is finished and realizing that, wow, this job took a lot longer than it was supposed to, right? Now we can see that as a job is running. So I think that may, that's made the biggest impact for us. Yeah. So it's not necessarily one specific project. It's just the ability to track what you're actually doing in real time to ensure that you are being as productive and as sufficient as you need to be. That is correct. Yeah. That, that's a, that's, that's a massive positive impact for any company. I would think because you can't be everywhere all the time, but that software is right. Absolutely. It's, it's, it's, uh, I don't want to use the word watching because that, that would come across maybe a little negative to, to some people who would be operators, but monitoring, collecting data, helping us be more efficient and, uh, eliminate wasted motion, which I think is, is a fairly amazing thing and, uh, not something we always had the capability of doing. Um, yeah, yeah, it's, it's great to hear that, that you guys were able to take that software, put it to the intended use and see such, such positive outcomes. Um, are there any things that you have unlocked that were unexpected from the software? I mean, obviously you had your points and reasons why you wanted to buy machining insights and use it. Is there anything that has come to you unplanned or secondarily that you're like, Oh, wow, we can, we can do that too. And it's making a large impact. Well, it was one of the, um, when we first started getting, uh, insights, uh, installed and we were working with your technical team, Ian and Corey, uh, they had generated a report that shows us the, uh, the time during our shift changes. And we did notice a, uh, a fairly significant drop in and spindle time between the three phases of our shift change from evenings to nights, nights to days, and back to evenings. Um, we seen that we had a decrease in probably about 20% in productivity, which was a major shock to us. So we were able to go back to the supervisors and we managed to plan and we had a, um, a meeting and we had a brainstorm on how we can integrate the shift changeover without losing too much spindle time. So we managed to incorporate his supervisors. We incorporated all the operators. We've asked them all for their own advice. So we gave them all the input and we made them feel like they were part of the solution that they weren't the problem. It was our problem, not theirs. And we just went to them to see how we could find it. And that really did a, uh, a very nice job of blending. I would say the gap between management and the shop floor when we started working together in that fashion. So that was an unexpected bonus that I felt we, uh, that we benefited from. Yeah. And you touched upon something there, Tom, that I think is often overlooked. Um, it's, it's so easy for companies to just simply go out and maybe pound a fist and say, we're losing 20% here and what's the problem and how do we did we need to fix it. But you combine the data with the holistic team approach, you come together, everyone, and come up with something that worked for everyone. Everyone's part of the solution. And at the end of the day, companies who approach things where everyone is part of the solution, they always are better off than people who point fingers. So I think it's a fantastic point that you raised there. Right. Um, you've kind of touched upon the next couple of topics that, that I have on the table, but I'm going to go ahead and run by them anyway, because there's just the specific question may support a new thought that you haven't had yet. Um, you guys are using this data in every single way that, that you can, um, do you want to just kind of hit the highlights as a summary maybe of, of where you're putting this data to the most use on a daily base? We, when we quote jobs, we typically get a ballpark idea as to what the speeds and feeds are, and then how we think they're going to perform on the, on the machine. So what we end up doing is we'll quote the job, we'll run it on the machine and we'll say, well, we're, we're really not that great. Our quote was way off what we thought we would get for a cycle time compared to what we're really getting for a cycle time. We, we do this now using insights on the first few parts that we run, whether it's a PPAP part or whether it's just looking for a first article inspection part. And we were able to sort of reverse engineer our coding process. So it gives us a, a better idea as to how to implement our coding tools to what we actually see on the machine, whether it's rapid times, whether it's going to be our tool change times, whether it's going to be the, the time it takes to, to switch pallets around or even move parts around. We do primarily cast iron. So it's not just a matter of, of chucking it and hitting the door and letting a rip. You have to sometimes have to find high spots in those spots. So that had helped us get a finer idea as to how to pull parts in general. So I think that was, that that's one way that, uh, that it's helped us out quite a bit. And again, in the matter that we hadn't seen, um, it would, uh, roll up when we first started looking at insights. Yeah, that's, that's very interesting because as human beings, we, we, we're pretty certain that we think we know what we know until we are hit right in the face with a, with a report saying, maybe you're not as good as you think you were, or maybe you were not as good as we need to be. Right. So, um, yeah, but the other side of that is kudos to, um, to Cassidy, because you were willing to believe what you saw instead of digging your heels in. So yeah, um, that is great unless you twist it and don't take advantage of it. Right. You have to understand what you're seeing. Um, so kind of before we go into a little bit of a round table and a little bit of a summary, um, I think that was a very unexpected thing that happened to you, what you just described, and maybe that gives you guys more capabilities and helps you expand your business. But are there any other notable ways in which the data and the holistic approach that you're using, is it helping Cassidy expand in any way that was not foreseen, or is it just helping you with your day-to-day activities? It does help us with day-to-day, but it also helps us with our customers. We do occasionally get customers coming in for visits and we always have the, uh, the blackboard or the dashboard up on our, our computer, uh, screen in our, in our, in our, uh, boardroom. So we'll sit there and we'll have our meeting, but they'll look at the board and say, well, what's this all about? What are these, what are these machines telling us? And it gives us the ability to say, well, this is how we increase our process on machines, right? Well, you could see that all the machines are live. Uh, we have the ability to not only fine tune, but to also improve productivity. And that goes a long way with our customers when they see that we're being that interactive with our processes and it's always in our forefront. It's not just, well, the machine's up running, the program's proven. We're going to move on to the next thing. Well, with it's, with us, it's always, um, it's always in the forefront. We can always do something better. Yeah. Yeah. And that's it. That's a good point. That's actually a point that I would never have even considered. It helps you stand out as a supplier to your customers. They come in, they see the quality, they see the commitment, they see you're tracking it in real time. I mean, it's, it has to elevate you in their opinion above maybe some of the competition. Yeah. Um, yeah, that's, that's great. Excellent point. Um, do you have any, any thoughts, uh, outside of this, anything that you want to kind of add as in an open table form? I mean, uh, I've kind of questioned you pretty hard here and quizzed you about, uh, your holistic approach and I appreciate your transparency and honesty and your time, of course, but if, uh, there's something you want to add, Tom, and something you want to say from your perspective that we haven't touched upon, please do so. I would welcome it. Oh, man, you, you've done a good job with the interview. You've covered, uh, you've covered a lot of good points. Um, I guess from a, more from the holistic point of view, uh, we've always thought we've had a good, uh, uh, point of view. Um, but it does help us break down, uh, different means of, of miscommunication, not only inside the shop, but with our customers and looking at things again, from a 30,000 point of view, as opposed to like a 5,000 feet foot point of view, it gives us the ability to look at the customers, not just how we machine the parts, how we quality inspect them, but also how we package them and how we invoice them at the end of the day. But that's all part of the package. Um, something that we didn't really look at prior to that, we thought we were just making parts. So stepping back, looking at things in a more holistic manner is, uh, it's a benefit for us, but we've also noticed it with our customers. Um, we're a lot more accurate with our invoicing. We're packaging things that they want their customers to unpackage. Um, for the most part, our products don't go to the customer where they go to their customer. So that's a reflection on, on them as well, not only on us. Um, so being able to keep those aspects in mind, it has enhanced our, our, um, our vision or our, our perception in our customer's eyes. Yeah. And that's, that's great to hear because that's ultimately what Cormont wants when we say we want the true partnership and the ultimate customer experience. That's, that's what we are shooting for. Um, Tom, I want to thank you for your time. It's been a pleasure talking with you today. Um, it's great for me to hear that our machining insights is helping people ascend to these levels and win new business and be more controllable and learn something about a business that, that you thought perhaps you already knew. Right. So, um, the holistic approach is very important for us at Sandvik Cormont, the manufacturing wellness. And it sounds like, uh, Cassidy is on a firm manufacturing wellness journey. I'm proud to say that Cormont is part of that. And, um, if you don't have any other final thoughts, I'm going to go ahead and wrap this and, uh, you can get back to, uh, looking at those screens and trying to find another 30 seconds. That's perfect. All right. I think that, that kind of covers it for, uh, on my point. Again, I appreciate your time as well. All right. Everybody, thanks for joining this episode of, uh, manufacturing wellness vodcast, where we meet challenges holistically, responsibly, and with purpose. I'm your host, Keith Brick. This has been a conversation with Tom Groot from Cassidy. Thank you everyone. We'll see you next time.