Adaptive Over Aggressive: Redefining Lights-Out Manufacturing with Camoren Schley, Ep #25

[0:00] Camoren Schley: To the core. You’d be lying if you say he didn’t like money. Right. Everybody likes to get paid for something that they provide. Yeah. But to the core, it bothers me when somebody buys something and they don’t use it, whether they pay their bill or not, let’s say they do. That’s great. It just, it bothers me.

[0:20] But why did you buy this? Like, I don’t feel good about that. Like, I want you to use it. I want your business to improve from it. Yeah, absolutely.

[0:30] Mike Payne: All right. Shop owners, listen up here. I think all of us know we are in one of the most in capital intensive businesses. There is, and margins are tight and we’re, we’re always fighting issues. And then when we make money, what do we do with it? Stock market’s up and down all over the place. Well, I get asked a lot about where can I invest my money?

[0:50] I’m a firm believer as business owners, you’ve gotta invest in yourself first. You need to reinvest capital into yourself. So the number one thing that I’ve done in this industry in investing was ProShop, ERP. We’ve been using ProShop since 2018, and my payback literally was within weeks with their per user-based pricing.

[1:10] I knew when I made the decision, I only needed to save my workers. Roughly one hour per month. We saw within the first week we were saving multiple hours per day. That type of ROI just doesn’t come along very often. Outside of that, the real value has been able to quickly implement best practices across my entire shop from the time we get an order to the time we ship.

[1:30] Scaling my business with confidence, being able to go out and know that I can deliver on my promise to deliver quality parts to my customer, and then gaining insights into every job, employee machine, and every process in our business to really drive efficiency and look for opportunities for improvement.

[1:50] That’s where the real value in your business drives. So visit ProShop erp.com, book a demo and start realizing ROI today. That’s ProShop erp.com.

[2:00] Narrator: Talent is scarce experience, even more so driving a cost in sleepless nights. You may even think to yourself, can I do this? But this new era brings new technology and a different perspective on your operations.

[2:20] What you will hear will turn on a light bulb in your mind, so you can turn out the lights in your shop, get ready to. Sleep soundly while your shop never stops. Get ready for making chips. Lights out with your hosts, Nick Goner, Caleb Merck and David Buick.

[2:50] Nick Goellner: All right, we are recording. We are recording in person. And the funniest part of recording lights out in person is that we’re all trying to log into Riverside, which is the app we use to record digitally. And I’m reminding these gentlemen with me that there was a day when making chips was only. Ever in person making chips was like, you can’t have great conversations when you’re doing a Zoom call or when you’re doing a teams.

[3:20] And now that’s what we do most of the time because, uh, my two partners live in basically Canada, in Bellingham where Paul lives, and, uh, Mike lives in Tulsa. So, but the lights out team is a lot. Closer, kinda. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Ish. No, not really. Dave’s in Canada. It’s a short 700 kilometer drive. Yeah.

[3:40] Eric’s an hour and a half away. Hour something. Absolutely. Yeah. And then you live in Denver. Our guest today lives in Denver, but because I know the most about our guest. I’m not going to introduce him. I’m gonna let Dave or Eric do it. Which one do you, should we flip a coin?

[3:50] David Vuyk: I’m gonna let you go for it.

You’re, you’re really spontaneous with this kind of stuff. Well,

Speaker 6: I appreciate

David Vuyk: that. So our guest today

[4:00] Speaker 6: is one of the smartest men I’ve met in my entire life, and also happens to own a set of the world’s most pinchable cheeks, honest face. I’d like to, on his Curtis, is establishing that. On the 14-year-old face, I would say the best way I could introduce this guest, Cameron sle, innovator, entrepreneur, designer of some really cool, what we believe will be industry changing.

Software. David, what do you wanna add to that?

David Vuyk: I

Speaker 6: don’t know.

[4:30] Nick Goellner: Like you introduced David at front of Cameron, you said it all and you go, David,

David Vuyk: I was gonna comments on the Pinchable cheeks, but you kind of stole that one from,

[4:40] Speaker 6: sorry, I did get access to your notes before this. Dave

Nick Goellner: Reeds aloud establish him as an authority in machining.

[4:50] David Vuyk: Cam is just an overall wealth of knowledge in the machine tool industry, and he’s pioneered some pretty incredible technology, which is what we’re gonna try to get to the bottom of in this episode. But yeah.

[5:00] Nick Goellner: Yeah, we’re excited to have you here, brother. I would say welcome. If I could add, I would say I’ve always joked, like everyone around me is always way smarter than me and my whole like career is just collecting smart people.

[5:10] And I’ve got like three of them in the room here that it’s just like, get Eric on the team, get Dave on the team, get cam on the team. Yeah. So Cam like. Since we met, we’ve acquired one of your businesses and then now just recently, like we’re partnered in another. Yeah. Thanks for being a, a brother to me, a friend to me, and making our company advanced again.

[5:30] Camoren Schley: No, I really appreciate that. Um, love you guys. Yeah, and I do disagree though about the smart factor, I think. Really, you guys fooled. Well, let’s let the

[5:40] Speaker 6: audience be the judge of that at the end of this episode. Yeah, and just to

Nick Goellner: be clear, this episode is now the second part of a new series we’re doing.

[5:50] That’s all based on a talk I gave at the Automated CHOP conference. So we talked about these mindset shifts, you know, and the first one we did was about on going from a mix. A fixed mindset to a mixed mindset and going from an operated mindset to an automated mindset. Today we’ll get into being adaptive, over being aggressive, and then being predictive over being reactive.

Fricking cool, huh?

[6:10] Eric Nekich: I love it. Yeah. No,

[6:20] Nick Goellner: but like Cam, like tell his origin story a little bit. You can start all the way at the moment where you were conceived. I don’t remember that exactly

[6:30] Camoren Schley: was a hot winter. No, no. Appreciate it. Appreciate being here. Just. I dunno, starting it back to the basics. Um, been involved in manufacturing my whole life whether I wanted to or not.

[6:40] Great-grandpa on my mom’s side started Alfred Manufacturing in like the 1940s, early forties in Denver. Every time

Nick Goellner: you say that, I picture, is it Alfred? Is that like Batman’s butler? Yeah, it is. I just picture that guy running a machine.

Camoren Schley: You know, either that or Alfred Packer.

[6:50] Nick Goellner: So, yeah. But it, it was pretty legendary company, right?

[7:00] Camoren Schley: Yeah, they, yeah, around for a long time. Third generation now. And, uh, injection molding, stamping, machining, pretty much everything around manufacturing. My grandpa took it over, obviously. Uh, just an expert in tool and dye, you know, designing dyes for stamping and all kinds of stuff like that. Um, that’s how my parents met.

[7:10] Actually, uh, my dad’s an independent service tech, so repairing, troubleshooting, CNCS in the Denver area. My mom was working there one day and basically asked her to, he asked her, he called the office after he left and asked her to meet him in the alleyway.

Nick Goellner: Hey, the maintenance guy wants to meet the daughter of the

Camoren Schley: owner.

[7:30] So many human resources, water bells going off right now. Long story short, I don’t know what happened exactly after that to get me here, but if something happened in the alley,

[7:40] Nick Goellner: yeah. That’s not where you were conceived as far as you know. Yeah.

[7:50] Camoren Schley: But it’s all good nonetheless, out after hours. Yeah. But yeah, I always grew up around manufacturing at my grandpa’s shop or working in the garage with my dad, right?

[8:00] So he’s a little bit unique in the way that he troubleshoots machines. He takes components out, brings ’em back to his home shop, and then repairs ’em down to like the chip level or like uns, soldering things, soldering it back on, repairs, spindles, you know, whatever, all kinds of stuff. Mechanical, electrical.

[8:10] So grew up just super fascinated with all of that, but more so on the repair side, right? Like how things work. I was always like just super interested in how everything works. Long story short, tried to go to school, college. I did go to high school. Good job. And I did graduate.

[8:30] Nick Goellner: I’m proud of that. I told you guys, he was smart.

[8:40] Camoren Schley: Uh, tried to go to CSU for mechanical engineering and just got like wildly bored after about the first semester. So I started working with my dad doing troubleshooting and repair type stuff. And then I just got fascinated with originally like high pressure coolant systems and all of the peripheral things around issues.

Yeah. Go

[8:50] Nick Goellner: back to like what fascinated you about it the first, ’cause you just, for those that don’t know, you created an entire line of high pressure coolant systems and. We’ve now acquired that as Henna. ’cause we didn’t have those. We had everything else except for the high pressure system and the mist collection system.

[9:10] And that was on our roadmap. And someone introduced us to you and one thing led to another and we got there a lot quicker than we thought because of you and what you built. But like what started it in the first place

Camoren Schley: and the first, so we, my dad, I were tasked to repair a high pressure cooling system.

[9:20] Just after taking it apart and looking at it, it’s like, man, this thing’s like crazy complicated like. Super expensive. That was the main driving factor. So expensive at the time. Yeah, I thought that was crazy money. Right? And it still is. Anyways, it just got really interesting. I’m like, we could literally just build this and sell them a new version for basically the same cost it would take to repair this.

[9:40] And so that’s kind of how the whole thing started. Just building ’em outta my dad’s garage and selling them to my dad’s customers, which are kind of friends and stuff. Right. So. Yeah. And I just grew from there and started. You

[9:50] Speaker 9: were like, we could just do this better, simpler. Yeah. More cost effectively. And you were like six years old at this point.

Nick Goellner: I don’t like Legos. What? I don’t think that was enough. Christmas

David Vuyk: jam

Nick Goellner: pressure. More pressure. Yeah.

[10:00] David Vuyk: Shelby, seriously, you were, you were like a younger guy that, yeah.

Camoren Schley: Not old enough to drink legally. Okay. Um, so. Yeah, whatever that means. Well, we have to get all

Nick Goellner: the innovation in now before we can start drinking.

[10:10] Yeah.

Camoren Schley: So,

Speaker 9: okay.

[10:20] Camoren Schley: Nonetheless. Started with that, sold that to a shop in Denver called Ponderosa. Just always looked up to the owner of that company and he was a huge help getting that off the ground, right? Yeah. For buying the first unit basically. And then one thing led to another and I was just obsessed with like trying to build things and mm-hmm.

[10:30] Little hobby projects and whatever. And they had looked into a machine monitoring company. This must have been in like 2013 ish. So not new, but also not mainstream at all at the time. And the solution they were looking at was just really expensive and really complicated. They were just a job shop. Mm-hmm.

For the most part.

Nick Goellner: And they wanted to monitor their machines. For what? Just to like simple, the other performing and over just simple,

[10:50] Camoren Schley: simple spindle utilization. Okay. How many hours outta the day or the shift or whatever it was. Um, is the spindle on, and I can’t remember the price, but it was a lot for them and it didn’t make sense.

[11:00] Like they could tell you everything, right? Your spindle speed, your feed rate override, and really cool stuff, no doubt. But, uh, unless you’re like General Motors with process engineers on staff to utilize that data, it just didn’t make sense for a kind of a smaller job shop. So the first version I built in like 2013 roughly, and it was literally just.

[11:20] Yeah, just tracking on time and then logging that data to an SD card that you’d have to go pull out of a little box and put into your computer into a spreadsheet, basically

Nick Goellner: like the simplest form, the most simple way you could ever get. So it’s like the Endon light on top of your machine, like how many hours a day?

[11:30] Was it green to an SD card? To an A?

Camoren Schley: Yeah, yeah,

Speaker 6: into a spreadsheet.

[11:40] Camoren Schley: Funny story on that actually. Um, so we got it. I got it done. We went to install it and I can’t remember what this whole story was, but basically it wasn’t. Functioning all the way yet. We had to come back the next day. I had to come back the next day and finish it, but just because it was on top of the machine and like visible and the next day turned into like next week or something like that.

[12:00] But they were trying to set their baseline. What they realized is just because that was sitting on the machine and it looked like this scary like monitoring device, that particular operator on that machine got like 25% more efficient. And I don’t like to say this, but he thought he was being watched in so many words.

[12:10] Right. So that was fascinating alone, but nonetheless, it just kind of grew from there. Yeah.

[12:20] Nick Goellner: That’s awesome. Yeah. That’s so good. So. High pressure miss collectors. And then like, it’s funny ’cause when we were in the process of acquiring what was formerly known as ICS mm-hmm. Industrial Co Systems, what are you gonna do after this?

[12:30] Like, you’re still consulting with us mm-hmm. And supporting the project and everything, but you’re like, oh, I get to focus on my real job. Like my mate. You, you could tell like you had to one that was much more passionate. Yeah. Yeah. And what’s the name of uh, the other business? Sly Tech. ’cause your name is Sly.

[12:40] Yeah. Yeah. No one knows how to say your last name. Yeah. Like it’s not Vu. Or I’ve let that one go. Yeah, it’s

David Vuyk: Buick. Like a Buick. It’s not harsh. Okay.

[12:50] Nick Goellner: And then it’s not Meter. Paul Van, me or No Mer? It’s not Mer. It is Meter and Sle. SLE. S-C-H-L-E-Y. Sly. Sly. Yep. He’s Sly guy. SLE Tech.

Camoren Schley: Sle.

[13:00] David Vuyk: Yeah. So

Nick Goellner: Sly Tech is

David Vuyk: your solution.

[13:10] And so, I mean there’s a lot of things we could talk about when it comes to the SLI tech offering, but like one of the ones that is really interesting. Are the tool optimization and adaptive controls, right? Mm-hmm. And where I think that’s really important to talk about is so often, especially in cases where you know you’re trying to run lights out or just have like really long run times, what are the reasons that that doesn’t work?

[13:30] One of those might be like premature tool wear in breakage. TOS can kind of help solve that problem, but also try to like squeeze out. You know, efficiency and cycle times by, you know, the adaptive controls. So these are some of like the classic problems that people have been chasing for a long time, but now technology has been able to kind of provide a solution and, and you’ve built that into the product.

So I’d, I’d love to hear a little bit about that. Problem in particular and, and kind of where that started for you with Sly Tech?

[14:00] Camoren Schley: Yeah. So first of all, I’d like to say that it’s not on big picture, it’s not revolutionary. The technology’s not anything like crazy special, per se. Right? It’s actually been around for quite a while.

So Fanook fan, however you wanna say it. Whatever. Float. Shabo.

Nick Goellner: Yeah. How do Canadians say it? It’s a big phonetics

Camoren Schley: episode. Yeah. I’m starting to really

David Vuyk: pick, how do

[14:20] Nick Goellner: Canadians say it? I would say fan, but even there, everyone’s a little confused and

David Vuyk: not completely, I would think Canadians

Nick Goellner: would say Fanook and we would say fan.

Yeah. All we know

David Vuyk: is that it’s said process. Right. That’s all that you just did it it.

[14:30] Nick Goellner: He did a great job. It’s not a process.

He’s only been here for like a day.

He just, his ball.

[14:40] Yeah. No, but back to your point, KEF, so it’s been around the, the adaptive controls technology has been around for a while.

Camoren Schley: Yeah.

[14:50] The idea of the technology, it’s been patented in different ways, you know, numerous times like dating back to the. Seventies, I wanna say maybe early eighties, something like that. Nonetheless, it’s not, historically speaking, it hasn’t been that easy to use. Right. Or that accessible. Sure, sure. It’s accessible.

Right. It’s an option you can buy, but, but

[15:00] Nick Goellner: the adoption’s been really like LA adoption’s

Camoren Schley: been pretty, yeah, pretty lame.

Nick Goellner: Yeah.

[15:10] Camoren Schley: Some of the bigger players I’m sure utilize it. Um, but yeah, for small to mid-size shops and even big shops, a lot of big shops just don’t even know. They don’t even know it exists.

[15:20] Right. Mm-hmm. That’s always fascinating to me. Still to this day, you go and talk about it. And a lot of people are like, I, I had no idea that was a thing. Wow. Yeah. So my point is that, you know, it’s not earth breaking technology. I mean Sure, sure. But the goal really is to try and make it more accessible, both price wise and marketing wise.

[15:30] Make sure it’s make. Out there. Understood.

Nick Goellner: It’s not like some weird magic technology that only the most advanced machine shop can

[15:40] Camoren Schley: utilize. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And then secondly, to make it easy to use, right? Mm-hmm. Try to make this feel like an iPhone app that anybody can pick up. Like anybody from whatever generation picks up an app and they’re all relatively similar.

Like you can, you know? Yeah. And do you think that’s been,

[15:50] David Vuyk: like the barrier to adoption has been not like. Set aside the awareness problem, but like mm-hmm. It’s been too complicated

Camoren Schley: for people to use

David Vuyk: easily.

[16:00] Camoren Schley: Yeah, I think so. I think that, yeah, traditionally speaking, like the talent that you need to utilize that properly is hard to find, right?

Mm-hmm. Obviously, that’s everybody’s biggest problem right now, is finding good talent.

[16:10] Nick Goellner: Yeah. Let’s, for, for the audience, like this is new to a lot of people, like, I’ll be like, have you ever utilized adaptive controls? And they’ll be like. Why, what is that like? What is Yeah, and why? Right, right, right. No, I got these new cutting tools with this kind of coating and it’s kicking butt and it’s like, that’s awesome.

That’s not what I’m talking about. So go down to like the nuts and bolts of what adaptive controls even are.

[16:30] Camoren Schley: Yeah, so basically adaptive control. It’s measuring the load on your spindle, which is not, again, revolutionary. Everybody has a a spindle load readout on their machine on the on the’s. What?

Nick Goellner: Bolts and amps basically?

Or,

[16:40] Camoren Schley: yeah, basically. Right. So we utilize sensors that measure that way more accurately. Then, you know, some type of a processor, basically a PLC. Mm-hmm. Um, with a user interface that you can change values and set parameters and stuff. And it’s basically looking at the spend a load in real time. Right. Okay.

And then it’s adjusting how the machine, how fast the machine’s running feed rate.

[17:00] Nick Goellner: So one, one way you’ve described it to me that I think is great, like you’ve got your feed rate knob mm-hmm. On your control and you’ve got your great machinist who’s been there for so long, you back to the talent required for it.

[17:10] Right. And they can hear. Like, okay. Yeah. It’s, it’s struggling through this, so like maybe I’ll back it off a little bit or I can speed it up now. Mm-hmm. And I think that this will resonate with a lot of folks who have like, oh, we just gotta get this job out. So you’re like, really that really important job?

[17:30] You got somebody who’s doing that. Mm-hmm. Manually. Yep. You know, but this is doing, is happening with science in real time. Every millisecond, yeah, every couple milliseconds basically. Yeah. Yep. That’s

Camoren Schley: awesome.

Nick Goellner: Mm-hmm.

[17:40] Camoren Schley: So is it changing the program? It does not alter the program. So that’s a common question that we get, especially for aerospace and defense.

[17:50] Right? There’s a lot of things that go into the rule. I don’t wanna call ’em rules, but the rules that you should and have to follow, it does not alter the program. It’s not a program enhancement, it’s a machine enhancement.

[18:00] Nick Goellner: Okay. You know, I’ve done my cam, I’ve got all my toolpaths. I know exactly like how to machine the part, give me how it’s gonna work without adaptive control and how it would work with adaptive control.

Then it’s not changing the program at all. Yeah. Okay.

[18:10] Camoren Schley: Yeah, not changing the program at all. So to break it down to like the nuts and bolts of, you know, the workflow on a machine. Sure. You post your program outright, um, you’re moving 10 inches in the X axis. Right? Okay. At a feed rate of a hundred inches per minute, whatever, it’s, that’s a function of the machine.

[18:30] So it’s a GO one, you know, X 10, blah, blah, blah, f whatever. It’s a function of the machine. It will run at a hundred inches per minute for 10 inches straight. And it’s one block of code in the program, in the G code. Right. That’s just how the machine operates. There’s no way in the cams soft. Well, there is a way to break that down into like that 10 inches.

[18:40] You could break that down to 1 million. It’s clunky. Yeah, it’s clunky. It’s clunky. You could break it down into a million or a hundred thousand individual movements and change your feed rate throughout that. The difference is this is looking at the actual feedback loop from the machine. Right. So that could be tooling, sharpness, material changes, whatever it is, and all of those things will affect

Speaker 9: the load.

[19:00] Camoren Schley: Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. Mm-hmm. So, yeah, it’s a closed loop system. Yeah. Got it. In the process, not before. It’s not predictive. It’s not, you know, taking all these assumptions on material and tooling and blah, blah, blah.

[19:10] Nick Goellner: Yeah. There’s other solutions that try to do this predictively, like Uhhuh in the simulation before you’re on the machine.

On the software side. On the software side. Got it.

Camoren Schley: And those solutions work well? Yeah, for sure. It’s just on, they’re predictive.

Nick Goellner: Okay. Yeah.

[19:20] Camoren Schley: React. And this is react. So there’s react, there’s limitation on that in terms of what it can do. Yeah. As your tooling starts to wear, it becomes dull, right? Yeah. Um, requires more power to cut through the material.

[19:30] You have variances in material hardness, you know, from heat treating, which the

Nick Goellner: program would never know exactly.

Speaker 6: Yeah. It’s just, yeah, there’s even certain. Geometries, right? Mm-hmm. Certain tool paths that are more prone to, yeah.

[19:40] Nick Goellner: So like a radius, for example. Mm-hmm. You’re gonna, you’re gonna whip around the outside the outer radius.

[19:50] Yep. Because you have less of the cutting tool and gauge Exactly. Genetically. Yep. And on the inside you might slow it down a little bit.

David Vuyk: Exactly. Okay. And does this apply like just to the roughing strategy or like finishing to class as well?

Camoren Schley: It’s an interesting question. It really depends on the application.

[20:00] It can apply to both. Sometimes you might not want to use it on finishing because you’re trying to hold a certain surface finish. Right. And changing the feed or speed, obviously changing surface finish, but it has a lot of, yeah, pros and it has a lot of pros to both sides. Mm-hmm. It just kind of depends on the application.

[20:20] Um, it shines, it works really well, I should say in roughing. Right. Bigger loads on the tool are easier to measure. Mm-hmm. And easier to alter basically.

Nick Goellner: Yeah. Yeah. That’s awesome. Okay, so if we think of like the problem mindset though, like let’s just push it harder. We’ll do it the same way we’ve always done it and we’ll just push it harder.

[20:30] The aggressive mindset,

Eric Nekich: big old. Hog outs, chew some material, big old hog out. I

[20:40] Nick Goellner: can hear Titan being like murdering material, murdering material, but like, yeah, that’s like, okay, well we, we have a great program. It can’t get any better. We still wanna get more output, so we’ll just get the best possible cutting tools and push it as hard as we possibly can.

[21:00] That would be like the aggressive mindset. Mm-hmm. And then what we’re describing is like, let’s use this. Adapted, let’s have more of an adaptive mindset. And you had a customer, I want to have you tell that story. You had a customer who had like all sorts of tool breakage issues. Mm-hmm. And they’re one of the reasons that you were brought in.

Camoren Schley: Yeah.

[21:10] Nick Goellner: So maybe describe that a bit.

[21:20] Camoren Schley: Yeah. They had four horizontals doing a aerospace job. The material was varying drastically from heat treat. You know, heat treat says it’s whatever, blah, blah, blah, spec. Not the case at all. Mm-hmm. Just huge variances in the, by

Nick Goellner: the way, shout out to Phoenix, heat Treat, great sponsor of ours.

[21:30] And they’re, they’re the ones who are like, connect with whoever’s machining the part and talk about it and make sure you’re on the same page. ’cause Yeah, if you don’t, you end up with what you just described,

[21:40] Camoren Schley: right? Yeah. I think they got the job because they bid it very fair, right? Mm-hmm. Gave a good price.

[21:50] Um, huge opportunity, right? Like 24 7 is what they needed to run unattended. Lights out. But they were breaking tools left and right, like they had to babysit the machines and then stop it and go get, you know, change tools. No, you are no longer

Nick Goellner: unattended. A hundred percent.

Camoren Schley: Yeah.

Nick Goellner: Because

Camoren Schley: what

Nick Goellner: happens when you break

Camoren Schley: a tool?

Yeah. You gotta stop and Yeah. Right.

[22:00] Nick Goellner: Well, if nobody’s there, if nobody’s there, it just sits.

Camoren Schley: Yeah. Break a tool or it keeps running and then it breaks the next tool. And the next tool and the next tool, and you scrap the part. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So why were you brought in? How do you solve that problem?

[22:10] Because there had to be, in their mind, there had to be a way to solve this. Right? Yeah. It shouldn’t be that complicated. And there was some stuff built into modern controls where you can do this. Yeah. It’s just, again, not super user friendly, not easy to understand, not quite as accurate as what we can provide just because we have external sensors.

Right. Okay. So that’s a

[22:30] Nick Goellner: really good point to press on for a second. Modern controls. I know some brands who offer adaptive control. Mm-hmm. And they say, oh, we have, that’s standard on our machines. Is it standard or is it Yeah. Uh,

Camoren Schley: yeah, some. Some of the, yeah.

[22:40] Nick Goellner: Yeah. So it’s standard on our machines and then the, even those users of those machines are coming to you and being like, I want to use the slide tech system.

Yeah. So why, if it’s standard on their machine, why would they switch?

[22:50] Camoren Schley: Two reasons. Mostly the accuracy and then the ease of use. Right. The user interface. I would say it gives you a really good visual of what’s actually going on at the cutting tool. Mm-hmm. You know, graphically. And that’s a huge benefit, the accuracy.

[23:00] And so what makes it more accurate? The sensor we use is just, it’s designed more for like laboratory work, I would say.

Speaker 9: Okay.

[23:10] Camoren Schley: Kind of hard to explain in a simple way, but what you can get out of the machine typically is, yeah. Just less accurate.

Nick Goellner: Yeah. Okay. So it’s like a high fidelity sensor. Yeah.

[23:20] Specifically for the load, instead of trying to go through like the. Spindle driver. Yeah, exactly. It’s not made for that. Yep. Okay. Got it. Awesome. Really good. So, okay, so what’s the result? They were like, there’s gotta be a better

[23:30] Camoren Schley: way and then Yeah, what happens? Yeah, so we implemented on all four of them and immediately quit, well, not immediately, right.

[23:40] There’s a teach mode and we’ll get into that in a little bit of how the, how it operates. Once we got it dialed in, we weren’t running adaptive to start, we were just focusing on not breaking tools. Right. So how that works is there’s different limits. A wear limit and a high limit. Basically the wear limit recognizes the tool is wearing of course.

[24:00] Right? Mm-hmm. Which means the load’s increasing. That’s what we’re picking up in the data. And then it would flag it being slidex, TOS would flag the control and say that tool number three, whatever shouldn’t be used on the next cycle. So it’ll still finish whatever cycle it’s on, or toolpath or whatever.

’cause this

Nick Goellner: tool’s putting such a load on it. ’cause it’s dull.

[24:10] Camoren Schley: Yeah. ’cause it’s getting dull. Yeah, exactly. Got it. And then at the high limit. That’s when it would actually stop the cutting process. And we use a function in the control called macro interrupt. So we trigger a macro interrupt, we provide the macros to the customer, and that basically retracts whatever axis you know, on this machine is the axis, and then makes a tool change to a backup tool or a sister tool, and then continues machining.

[24:30] So it jumps back into the main program all unattended, and then picks up where it left off either positionally. On a line base or beginning of a tool path, whatever it is. Mm-hmm. You can set it up different ways and it would continue machining unattended.

Nick Goellner: Okay. So prior to that macro interrupt solution, if you were stuck halfway through a cycle like.

They would just sit. Yeah. Yeah. So there goes your lights out

Camoren Schley: hours.

[24:50] Nick Goellner: Mm-hmm.

[25:00] Camoren Schley: Yeah. And so we started with that customer with just the basic machine monitoring because they did have somebody that would, was crazy enough to get a text message at 2:00 AM and drive down there in the middle of the night to go reload the machine with a new tool and continue machining.

[25:10] Nick Goellner: So he’s like a, the equivalent of the like a machine shop ER doctor, basically. Oh, yeah. Like you’re always on call. Yeah. You can never really fully fall asleep. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And

[25:20] Camoren Schley: so then, yeah, so take us all the way through. So. So, okay, let me back up a little bit actually. So the way they solved the problem before the TOS is they programmed everything to the worst case scenario, right?

[25:30] So they just backed the feed rate way down, right? So if they, I don’t know, I don’t know the numbers, but if they’re gonna run at 60 inches per minute in a normal setting, but the. Hardness was changing in the material. They would back that. They back that down to like, I don’t know what it was. Call it 30.

[25:40] Right? They cut it in half. Let’s just play it super safe. Even though it’s a longer cycle time, it’s still better to run overnight than it is to have it sell. Yeah, I think

Nick Goellner: that’s fair. Like that’s at the time, without this technology, that’s the best decision to make. Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Shutting it down and shutting it down.

[25:50] Like at least you’re still getting some output. Still getting some output. Yeah. Yeah. But there was a, there you didn’t have that paradigm that catch 22, you know, where it’s this or that and it

Camoren Schley: worked, obviously. Mm-hmm. But you’re just leaving a ton of cycle time on the table.

Nick Goellner: Yeah.

[26:00] Camoren Schley: Okay, cool. Yeah. That’s the performance component of your OEE.

[26:10] Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That’s awesome. So now they. Don’t babysit tools. I mean, so they don’t babysit tools anymore. During the day shift, first shift, whatever it was, they’d come in, load up like 5, 6, 7 sister tools, backup tools for the rougher, make sure everything’s all set, go home for the night machine would run change tools.

They’d come in the next morning, dump the chips out, basically reload the roughing tools.

[26:30] Nick Goellner: Wow. So Dave, I’m gonna ask you a question. Are you ready for this? Hit me. So like prior to joining the slide tech team, you were working in on like kind of the Toolpath side of this in a way for a company called Cloud NC and focusing on generating the program, you know, and then like as, so you were solving a different part of the overall workflow you’re jumping into here like.

[27:00] What attracted you to that? What, what’s interesting about it and do you see the dots kind of connecting between the those two solutions in any way?

[27:10] David Vuyk: Well, I mean, what we haven’t talked about is like all the other things that fly tech can do. You know, we’re talking about one aspect of it with TOS. What I think is kind of cool about TOS is its place in that greater context of.

[27:20] Monitoring the whole process and the peripherals, right? Mm-hmm. So you’re, you’re cool And concentration, not the ity, the centricity

Camoren Schley: not the constant, no. It’s, we rehearsed that in advance.

[27:30] David Vuyk: It will always be concentrated. Yeah. You in level and everything else, right? So. And I mean, not to get like too far ahead into like the predictive versus reactive Yeah.

[27:40] Outline that we’re gonna talk about today. But that all works together there to give you just a more efficient, a more effective process overall as opposed to, you know, just solving a, a specific problem, let’s say in the CAM workflow. So that’s what I’m really excited about is kind of being able to approach the, the entire process more of a, like an end-to-end.

It’s a more holistic kind of approach to improving. That’s a business as a whole. Really?

[28:00] Nick Goellner: Yeah. Okay. So quick centricity story. Okay. Because it’s so funny. And then I think may, I mean, maybe that’s a segue. Should

[28:10] David Vuyk: we like educate the listeners on what cooling centricity is? Because if you don’t have centricity in your cooling.

Yeah. Yeah. Lemme just. Tell

[28:20] Speaker 6: me I’m in manufacturing without telling me I’m in manufacturing. You guys want to hear a cool centricity story? Yeah,

[28:30] Nick Goellner: so just like Nick gets invited to a lot of parties, centricity is a geometry thing and coolant concentration is a. Chemistry thing and Exactly. And everyone mixes those words up, including the founder of slot tech on camera multiple times.

[28:40] And he is like, I don’t know why I say that. I’m like, ’cause you’re a machining guy. But it’s just very funny ’cause it’s like, oh yeah, we can measure the coolant centricity like. No. And then so Dave made a joke. He’s like, yeah, we’re the only company in the world who could do that. This is

Camoren Schley: why I’m not smart, because even after you guys called me out, I literally went and did research on Google to make sure that you couldn’t use it in that.

Yeah, I didn’t believe

[29:00] Nick Goellner: you. You’re like, I wanna be right. Like, yeah. Yeah.

Camoren Schley: The

Speaker 6: Let’s Out Podcast brought to you by Hooked on Phonics.

[29:10] Nick Goellner: Yeah. So good. But, okay, let’s talk about that too, cam. ’cause like I’m with Dave. I think what’s so interesting about Sly Tech is you, okay, we talked about machine monitoring.

[29:20] Mm-hmm. We’ve talked a bit about like the tooling optimization, like that company brought you in to solve a tooling problem. Mm-hmm. But we’ve also talked about like adaptive controls, like where it can accelerate or back off and improve your overall tool life and your overall cycle time. And now we’re talking about concentration and or concentration of your coolant.

So like what does slide tech have anything to do with that and why?

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[30:20] Camoren Schley: So that’s another interesting part of the story, and I think some of this is because I’m like a distracted dog.

[30:30] Squirrel runs by, I’m like, oh, we could go do that. Squirrel. Squirrel. Yeah, you build a rocket. I’m like, yeah. I think, I don’t know, probably. Sure. Yeah. Anyways, how much time, how much money? Yeah,

Speaker 6: we start working on it right away though. Yeah, exactly.

Camoren Schley: So the process monitoring or process monitoring. Mm-hmm.

[30:40] Depends on which side of the border you’re on. Yeah. Appreciate the shadow. Thank you. Yeah. That came through this weird random opportunity that turned into a huge project for us. Graphite electrode manufacturer in Asia, kind of through a friend in the industry, whatever. Long story short, started helping them out with process monitoring.

[31:00] So they make graphite electrodes for electric arc furnaces, which. For those that don’t know, an EAF, an electric arc furnace melts, scrap steel. So it’s a steel mill basically. Okay. Um,

Nick Goellner: melts it down and then it sends it out to like steel service centers and they cut it to size and sell it to the machine shops or something?

Exactly, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Wow.

[31:10] Camoren Schley: Yep. They’ll throw like a hundred tons of scrap in there and they can melt it in, like it depends on the furnace and whatever, but 48 minutes they can melt like a hundred tons of scrap steel. Wow. It’s like crazy.

Nick Goellner: Wow.

Camoren Schley: Yeah.

[31:20] Nick Goellner: Just with tons of electricity. Mm-hmm. Wow.

Camoren Schley: Yeah. So the graphite electrodes not to, not to rabbit hole here, but you know, the average.

[31:30] There’s a lot of different sizes, but the main electrodes, there’s three of ’em in a furnace, and there’s three columns in a furnace, and three electrodes in a column basically, you know, 22 inch in diameter by about 120 inches long. Oh man. So huge. Huge. And they run just an enormous amount of electricity ac through those, and that arcing off of the steel melts it.

It’s like lightning bolts basically.

Nick Goellner: So it has to be Ferris material for it to work.

Camoren Schley: Yeah.

Nick Goellner: Yeah. Like

[31:50] Camoren Schley: you, right, right, right. Yeah. You couldn’t do like aluminum in there, right? It has to be conductive. There is, yeah. There are aluminum, electric, electric arc furnaces as well. It’s just kind of a, it’s like weird.

Different, yeah. Anyways, so I’m not smart

[32:00] Nick Goellner: enough. I’m not smart enough to explain it way too smart for me. Yeah. So like what was slide text? So anyways, with that, back

Camoren Schley: to the story. Yeah. Um, so we went over there. They were having huge problems with, uh, quality control, blah, blah, blah. It’s a really lengthy process.

[32:10] You know, there’s five or six different process steps. Extrusion baking, LWG, which is a form of a furnace, machining, impregnation, blah, blah, blah. Just a lot of room for error. Very expensive, especially in about 2018. Extremely expensive per metric tongue. Um, and it’s really easy to scrap parts. So, anyways, went over there.

[32:30] Proposed an idea to have this like monster machine process monitoring system and started implementing that and then realized that, um, there’s just a huge need for process monitoring too. But at the time it’s like, man, now we’re doing machine monitoring, tool optimization, process monitoring, like it’s just a lot or whatever.

[32:50] But what we realized, what I realized is that’s what makes us unique. So in a machine shop setting, milling and turning or whatever. Historically speaking, you would have a machine monitoring solution. You have an ERP solution. You have, and we don’t do ERP, by the way. Mm-hmm. Uh, but you have all these different solutions, right?

[33:00] Tool monitoring, you have process monitoring, whatever. You have like four different vendors, right? Mm-hmm. We believe there’s a lot of power in having all that on one platform.

[33:10] Nick Goellner: Yeah. ’cause like one updates, one of the four updates and all the APIs break or mm-hmm. Or whatever like Yeah. APIs were concern in layman’s terms.

Like stuff stops telling you what you want it to tell you. Yeah.

[33:20] Camoren Schley: And even from like a user perspective, right? So a lot both systems, TOS, machine monitoring and IOT or slash process control, there’s an HMI at each machine, right? A touchscreen. I. You know, whether you have four different screens or not, that might be exaggerating, but you would, at the minimum with four different vendors, you’d have four different apps living on that PC or that mm-hmm.

Touch screen, they have to click back and forth between. Right. Whereas with slide tech, it’s all just in one spot.

[33:40] Nick Goellner: Yeah. You don’t have to like, hope they’re communicating the right way. Yeah. Yeah. It’s awesome. Okay, so like, let’s get into Eric, Dave, you’ve been into a bunch of shops, Dave, you used to run a shop like these, uh, villains of lights out manufacturing are often way beyond the spindle.

[34:00] Way beyond the robot sometimes beyond like what people can control. And so like some of these get addressed through the IO OT solution, the pro monitoring. I am so bad at accents. It’s all right. That is not Canadian Pro. I suddenly, I’ve heard your Yoda accent and this

Speaker 6: was Toyota Yoda is pretty good. His yo is pretty

Nick Goellner: Like what?

What are some of the things that Well, I would tell

[34:20] Speaker 6: you, you know, we had a running belief for many, many years. Just being around automation systems, you know, especially people buying like box solutions, parking ’em next to a machine. You would always see them fail for two reasons. Chip management or uh, tooling and work holding that just didn’t scale.

[34:40] It’s monumentally different. Yeah. To run all weekend unattended. I mean it’s, so therein lies kind of, I mean, I think one of the biggest pitches for what you’ve talked about so far today, cam, and that is measure. You have to be able to measure it before you can manage it, right? And so I think like a product like slide Tech in its simplest form gives you that ability.

[35:00] And then everything else that you’re describing on the same platform is just icing on the cake, being able to pick up like coolant centricity and uh, I think what we’re really talking about. And this ties back to the going from an aggressive to an, to an adaptive mindset is, I mean, this is really corporate culture changing technology.

[35:20] Nick Goellner: Yeah. You know,

[35:30] Speaker 6: it really takes you from, you know, we were joking a big old hog out. Right. But moving you, giving you the tools you need to move into, lights out, high speed manufacturing. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Um.

Nick Goellner: I think we’re gonna get the e rating because of how you say that. We’re gonna get that like explicit content rating because of then

Speaker 6: I will have done my part.

[35:40] Right? Yeah. But that’s where I’m at with it. Yeah. Right. I really feel that it’s, uh, you know, you will see lights out, operations fail for the same reasons. This is a phenomenal tool.

[35:50] David Vuyk: Yeah. Agreed. A hundred percent. And Cam, you were talking about like when it comes to measuring stuff, like there’s a lot you can measure.

Yeah. Spindle vibration. Mm-hmm. Drop, drop, pull force. Pull force.

[36:00] Camoren Schley: Yeah. Even like the low hanging fruit, like cool temperature. Yeah. Right. It’s gonna affect your tolerances. I mean there’s just, there’s a lot of low hanging fruit that isn’t difficult.

[36:10] Nick Goellner: They’re like sort of the funniest ones. Funny because of like a backstory we can’t tell on the podcast, but like Is your chip been bull?

[36:20] Yeah. Like is it overflowing? Mike added his robo job to his bravo jab to his late and the first night he was running all night and then he comes in and like. Chips overflowing everywhere. All over the floor. He is like, mm-hmm. I guess I was gonna be begging a lot more chips than I thought. Well, so we just like you.

[36:30] Yeah. There’s sensors for just about everything. You put a sensor on it, text wants the chips have crossed that mm-hmm. Threshold and it alerts you if the way lube oil runs. I was say that five

David Vuyk: minutes after you leave the shop for the night. Yep. Like there goes a whole night of productivity. Yeah. For way lube.

[36:50] I mean, that’s crazy. And look what fixes that. Like imagine you get a little text message at four 30, like, Hey, way lube is low. It’s like, who? Yeah, I know

[37:00] Speaker 6: of a few scenarios where cooling temperature has gotten to a point and it starts foaming over, and then they come into a lake. Mm-hmm. You know, that Monday morning,

Nick Goellner: so Yeah.

[37:10] But even, even our example of like, Hey, this problem has already happened. I’m gonna try to get this right, Dave. Okay. Like, there’s a series. Okay. So if you, if you can capture data, you can measure it. If you can measure it, you can study it. If you can study it, you can predict it. And if you can predict it, you can prevent it.

[37:20] So well said. Yes, it’s beautiful. You nailed it. But like, so way, Luke like, well this has happened before. Okay, so like it’s not just gonna be like, oh, alert, it’s wrong. Like you could know exactly where you’re at with it. It’s like your car, like my car tells me where I’m at with everything. Like, here’s the exact air pressure in your tires.

[37:40] Here’s how much windshield wiper coolant you have, or windshield wiper fluid. Here’s whatever it is. It’s. Every, it tells me about the entire system. It doesn’t just tell me like the RPMs in your engine, but then you look at like most machine monitoring solutions and they’re about spindle utilization, your spindle and like maybe why the machinist left or the spindle was idle.

[38:00] You can put downtime reasons or whatever. All of that we can do as well, but it’s like, okay, but. The real villains of lights out are like these kind of peripheral things like chip or coolant management. That, that you guys just mentioned that. And like that’s what can kill your lights out hours.

[38:10] Camoren Schley: Ties into your story earlier, Eric, about the low oil light in a car that it should be brighter.

Yeah. Yeah. The old,

Eric Nekich: that

[38:20] Speaker 6: old. Yeah. Tell that the old Tim Allen, uh, comedy Bit, which was his wife’s car, ran out of oil and he asked, didn’t the oil like. Come on. And she said, well, I thought a brighter one would come on when it really needed it.

Camoren Schley: So good. So good. There’s actually some genius in that, right?

[38:30] Yeah. So like for your machine, your oil light is a machine turning off, right? Yeah. Couldn’t there be a notification that, Hey, it’s starting to get low. Why don’t we fix this before it just shuts off

[38:40] Nick Goellner: your two limits on your TOS, right? Yeah. It’s like, mm-hmm. Okay. It’s past this limit, so we’re gonna flag the tool and not use it anymore.

[38:50] Mm-hmm. Or it’s actually like. Broken, and we’re gonna do the macro interrupt. Right. That’s like the brighter light. Mm-hmm. So, yeah, it’s really good. Yeah. So, okay, so someone’s like, all right, this is interesting, you know. What does it cost? And of course the answer is an it depends type thing. And ultimately like how do you get to an ROI like what would you say?

Yeah. It depends on the problem you’re solving.

Camoren Schley: Yeah. It depends on the problem you’re solving. Yeah. Yeah.

[39:10] David Vuyk: I mean, I think the most important thing is to understand what the problem is and what the success criteria is that you’ve know you’ve solved that problem, right? Mm-hmm. In a way that. You know, a, a measurable goal, so you can actually prove the ROI.

[39:20] Mm-hmm. Which is gonna look different. Do you want just to OS right? ’cause you want less tool breakage and more cycle time efficiency. Or do you want to monitor the peripheral equipment around your machine tool? That’s gonna look different? It’s gonna look different based on the parts you run. Sure. So it’s really, I think.

[39:40] Having an understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve. But yeah, I mean, you’ve been through that process cam with not just like machine shops, but all kinds of different manufacturing mm-hmm. Uh, companies. What, what do those conversations

[39:50] Camoren Schley: look like? Yeah, you really have to identify what the, and let’s just talk about TOS, right?

[40:00] So just TOS alone. You really need to focus on what you’re trying to accomplish. Of course. What does the customer wanna gain out of this? Because you can reduce cycle time, you can increase tool life, you can increase machine on time or lights out automation stuff. It just really depends on what they’re trying to accomplish.

[40:10] Some customers don’t care about adaptive, which kind of blows my mind. Yeah, they don’t care. They just don’t want the machine to stop. Right. So they just want to, they want to take tools outta the process before they break. Other customers don’t care about that. They care about cycle time reduction, right?

So it just really depends on what the end goal is.

[40:30] Nick Goellner: I think we, we talked in the Automation Trap series about having really solid KPIs, and the one we talked about the most was O eee. And so like if you’re getting to, well, first off, OE is impossible or. Basically impossible. Very manual and very difficult if you don’t have a machine monitoring solution that connects to an ERP, let’s just say they do and they, and they have an OEE metric.

[40:50] Mm-hmm. Hang on. Every time anyone comes to the door. Hang on. Alright, so we’ll cut that out. So

Eric Nekich: o he’s talking about error.

[41:00] Nick Goellner: Let’s say they do have an ERP, let’s say they do have data they could pull from the ERP. They have a machine monitoring solution, they’ve got a bridge, you know, they’ve got this integration and they’re getting.

[41:10] O, EE. Well, now you can like say, okay, how much is that OEE affected by? Mm-hmm. The downtime or by the tool breakage or by whatever. And then you, well, if we reduce that downtime by 20%, it would affect your OEE by this. Mm-hmm. You can connect that to a business result.

[41:20] Speaker 6: Yeah. Well, and I’d also like to, you know, if you go back to the Automation Trap series, Caleb, who’s not with us today, but he’s still alive.

[41:30] Yeah, he is. Bless his soul. He is back on site this time preparing to film the sequel to the Automation Trap, not the prequel, but that’s a story for a different week. Anyway, Caleb did have a great comment during that series about the, you know, speaking of traps, but maybe you could speak to this cam or even you David, but the trap of just falling into.

[41:50] Basic machine tool monitoring. I mean, people, there’s a lot of pride that comes along with spindle utilization and I mean, Caleb laid out, you could be utilizing your spindle really, really good, but suffering on the manufacturing efficiency side. Right. The OEE side. Yeah. Slide tech obviously is a powerful tool that captures a lot more than spindle utilization.

[42:10] But would either of you, you know, care to comment on the dangers involved with just going in with basic monitoring?

[42:20] Camoren Schley: You know, so quick story on that, right? Like basic monitoring for a small to mid-size shop, right? I mean word for word went to do, you know, a sales presentation or whatever, and the owner kind of got up and got a little bit huffy and he is like, this is ridiculous.

Like he opens up the shades in his office, he’s like, not running, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Just pointing

Nick Goellner: at different machines. Yeah, yeah. Like, I

[42:40] Camoren Schley: don’t need this, I don’t need to spend money on this. Like, I need you to solve why these machines aren’t running. Why aren’t they running? I don’t know. Yeah. You know?

Yeah. So anyways, to your, your point, like Yeah, he literally just made your sales

Speaker 6: pitch for you.

[42:50] Nick Goellner: Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 6: Here’s the quote. No. Yeah. Yeah. I’m not sure if that answers your

[43:00] Nick Goellner: question. Well, I mean, in one way, I mean ’cause because it’s like we talk about it all the time. Every minute you spend capturing data that you’re not gonna use to drive continuous improvement is a minute that you’ve wasted time on the software that captures the data.

[43:10] Mm-hmm. And the reviewing that you’re not doing, or you’re doing in a way where it doesn’t drive improvement. You have to close the loop and connect the dots to improving some sort of metric.

[43:20] David Vuyk: Yeah. And like really understanding how that’s tying into a business outcome. Exactly. As opposed to just. Chasing vanity numbers that aren’t, aren’t particularly meaningful.

[43:30] Camoren Schley: It’s a beautiful vanity number. Yeah, that’s totally, yeah. And that really segues into one of the other benefits to slide tech, the coaching aspect. Yes. Okay. So we have this data, fantastic. Don’t have the time, don’t have the knowledge, like how do utilize this? How do we make our business better? Mm-hmm.

[43:40] With this data. So that’s another aspect of slide tech is the coaching. Like we’ll review the data with you, we’ll help you understand. Right. And hennig. As a whole a ME and Hennig. You guys do so much stuff. Yeah, right. Work holding, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Automation like you can really start to dive into that data with a customer and then come up with creative solutions, whether it’s something that you guys sell or not, doesn’t make any difference.

Like we want to help you get better.

[44:10] Nick Goellner: Right. Yeah. And that you have to have this shared idea of success, like, so hopefully you’re getting them to some metrics that. Our real indicators of business performance. OEE is a great one. Mm-hmm. Well,

David Vuyk: it, and, and then you can help improve, improve it. Almost like having an accountability partner, right?

[44:20] Yeah. Because like, you know, coming from the shop floor, it’s very real. Like, there’s, there’s always different things that are calling for your attention. So you may be really well intentioned buying a monitoring solution and setting goals, but without someone checking in with you. And, and you’ve probably checked in with your customers pretty regularly, right?

Mm-hmm. Making sure they’re on track and getting value. In achieving those goals so that it’s a successful outcome.

[44:40] Nick Goellner: That’s huge. Yeah, it is huge. It’s like, you know, not not just buying the workout equipment, but getting a personal trainer who’s like, Hey, I can actually see how often you use this. Right? I have data on your health.

[45:00] Mm-hmm. Your heart rate is impr, your resting heart rate’s, improving your body. Mass index, whatever. Yes. And so like, and then I think, let’s talk about slide tech, warts and all right. When you were kind of solo, like solopreneur this thing and you start to get a lot of customers and how much were you able to even do coaching?

[45:10] Camoren Schley: Yeah. It’s not easy, right? Yeah. Very overwhelming. But it was identified. That’s something we have to do. Yeah. Right. And it worked well on a small scale. Yeah. But to really scale up. Yeah. It’s. And that’s why

[45:20] Nick Goellner: we bring in Dave and we bring in like the team that’s out here. Getting it into more shops. Exactly.

[45:30] So it’s like we recognize this really works best when you’ve got. Shared understanding of what success looks like for the end customer. Mm-hmm. And they’re, you’re not just like hooking up the technology, but you’re helping ’em get the result from it. Yeah.

Camoren Schley: Yeah. And that’s, that’s always bothered me, like to the core, everybody, you’d be lying if you say you didn’t like money.

[45:40] Right. Everybody likes to get paid for something that they provide. Yeah. But it, to the core, it bothers me when somebody buys something and they don’t use it, whether they pay their bill or not, let’s say they do. Um, that’s great. It just, it bothers me, but why did you buy this? Like, I will feel good about that.

Like I want you to use it and I want your business to improve from it, you know? Yeah,

Nick Goellner: yeah.

Camoren Schley: Absolutely.

[46:00] Nick Goellner: Because eventually, I mean, maybe they just keep paying even if they’re not using it. ’cause like we gave an example of a foreign manufacturer that uses some high tech stuff. Uses it as in it displays images on a screen, but they just wanna show their foreign owners and investors that they have technology, they’re not actually using it

Camoren Schley: and their customers.

[46:20] Right. They have this like really like nice little corner of the shop where the walls are painted, the rest of the shops like basically a dirt floor. Yeah. But they have this one corner and they take all their customers right over that corner. Look, we got dashboards with data and we have this and this.

[46:30] Nick Goellner: Yeah. That doesn’t feel good, you know? Um, you want people to. Improve their business and improve their life and improve manufacturing, which improves the world, so, mm-hmm. I love it.

[46:40] David Vuyk: What would you, what would you say Cam, like, you know. Is this a solution that’s really only for the big players, or can small shops benefit from this

Camoren Schley: too?

[46:50] That’s a great question, and both right. Large players, but really the reason, honestly, that we started doing this in the first place is for the small to midsize shops, whether you have. 40 machines, five machines. Mm-hmm. 150 machines, whatever. Because a lot of the solutions out there are everybody’s going after the whales.

[47:10] Everybody wants the big win. Right. General Motors, Smith and Wess and Caterpillar, whatever. Yeah. And that’s great. Yeah. Obviously we would like that too. Um, but a lot of people overlook like the heart of manufacturing in America, right, man. Yeah. Or the world really, wherever. Yeah. Yeah. There’s just so many smaller shops that can benefit from the technology.

[47:20] But obviously price is a barrier to entry for the smaller shops. Ease of use usually stretch pretty thin. In a small shop, everybody wears a lot of hats. Yeah. So those are kind of driving factors of why we tried to develop it and the way we did.

Nick Goellner: Yeah. And frankly, this can be like extremely affordable and really accessible.

[47:40] Mm-hmm. Or like, depending on how far you want to go with it could be very expensive and it could be a massive project. Mm-hmm. So it’s on us. To prove the ROI at the smallest micro level and at the most macro use case as well, but yeah. Yeah, it’s exciting, man. So exciting. Like I tell everybody, we’ve been acquiring all these businesses and it’s like, yeah, well.

[48:00] We wanna get out of the, there’s the automation trap, there’s also the commodity trap where you make something that’s easy to make and there’s people all over the world making it. And when you’re in machine tool peripherals and chip and coolant management or work holding or automation, like how do you keep staying on the bleeding edge of making your customer successful and what that’s gonna look like 5, 10, 15 years from now and mm-hmm.

[48:20] Honestly, thanks to my relationship with you and what you’ve brought to the company, I feel like we’re more equipped than ever. Dave, so excited to have you like joining team. Let’s go and crushing this and Eric’s gonna tell the whole world about it and how to buy it. Yeah, no pressure. Hey Eric. No pressure.

[48:30] No, but not today. ’cause this is an educational podcast.

[48:40] Speaker 6: So I think that sounds like a good segue. You know, one of the things we talked about last week was we wanted to make sure that when we ended these episodes, we left the audience with some tactics, could. Take. Mm-hmm. Tomorrow this afternoon. Depends what time you’re listening to this exercise.

[49:00] But you could take these tactics and start moving in the directions that we talk about the Lights Out podcast. And so, David, do you care now?

[49:10] David Vuyk: Yeah. Let’s unleash the Lights Out. Plan of action. So, I mean, unleash it. It’s bigger than the Kraken. Let’s go. Yeah. So what we’re trying to do with this whole show is equip folks to kind of take that step towards.

[49:20] Lights out production, right? And a lot of what we talked about today had to do with the enemies of lights out production, the likely culprits you’re gonna run into as you start to go down that road. And so some of the things that you could be doing, you know, you could be starting to take a closer look at your tool life using sister tools, consider, you know, a conversation with a company like Slide Tech in terms of how technology can really help you avoid some of those common pitfalls.

[49:50] Try to understand what like 10, 15% cycle time savings would get you in terms of mm-hmm. Moving the needle forward for your business. What else, guys? What, what else? I mean, I, I’ve

[50:00] Nick Goellner: seen some, and I, I’ve heard some manufacturing leaders talk about their consumables cost as a percentage of their sales. Like, yeah, if you don’t know that, you should probably start there.

[50:10] Yeah. Because then what Dave just said is like a next, a next. A logical next step. Okay, well how much could this be? If I could get more outta my cutting tools or without sacrificing in the case we gave earlier, like they’re sacrificing productivity ’cause they’re slowing everything down. Mm-hmm. Well, like how do you get more out of ’em without doing that?

[50:20] So yeah, just

[50:30] Camoren Schley: understand your tooling cost. Look and look for the low hanging fruit. It’s human nature. I think, especially for me, I like to overcomplicate everything. Yeah. Don’t go after this whole thing, like, we’re gonna digitize everything in our shop by the end of the year, first quarter of next year, whatever.

[50:40] Like look for the low hanging fruit, like Yeah. For example, you know, the machine monitoring will send you a text when the machine goes out of cycle or stops or whatever, and doesn’t have to be a machine, it could be a robot or whatever. Yeah. Low hanging fruit would be, this customer had this robotic cell putting parts into another part in a simple way of explaining it, and it would jam all the time.

[50:50] It would go unnoticed for like three, four hours a day. Which sounds really, really simple and basic, but just getting a simple text. Hey, robot’s been down for a minute and a half. Like they’re through. Saved those three or four hours, their throughput went through the roof. Yeah. On just simple, low hanging first.

[51:10] My point is like, don’t get consumed with like super complicated problems. To start, just, let’s start talking about industry five or 6.0. I saw that on LinkedIn. I’m like, whatcha talking about, let’s just like solve the problem right in front of you. Nobody was like. Yeah, somebody’s posted something. Yeah.

[51:20] We’re in Industry 5.0. I’m like, oh, come on. Yeah.

Nick Goellner: We’re still trying to figure out

Speaker 6: what slow point on me machining in space. Yeah.

[51:30] David Vuyk: But to your point, those small wins, they start to snowball. Yeah. So absolutely. If you target those first and it’s pretty impactful, like you can accomplish within a few months.

Nick Goellner: Yeah.

David Vuyk: Rome wasn’t

Nick Goellner: built in a day. Right.

David Vuyk: So

[51:40] Nick Goellner: actionable takeaway. Figure out, okay, this is like a cost accounting thing or a accounting thing. Like figure out what your actual tooling cost is. ’cause a lot of times like consumables includes a lot of stuff that isn’t your cutting tools. Just like figure out what that is as a percentage of your sales start there.

[52:00] ’cause then now you have something you can work with. There’s ways we can improve that. Or in the case you gave, like pick one metric, figure out how much utilization you’re getting out of that robot for the case. Case you just did? Yeah. Or out of machine A. Mm-hmm. Or machine B, like what’s your utilization?

[52:10] How many hours should that be running? Which theoretically we have 24 hours in every day. So it can run that that much. I think Eric has like 26 amount. Yeah, I do. How many? We’ll get it to that next year, but then how many is it

David Vuyk: running? So how many machine, like burden hours, like do you think about the, just the machine rate?

[52:30] Mm-hmm. Sitting there in downtime, you know, is just waste.

[52:40] Nick Goellner: Yeah. Yeah, well, we have to have a much less fun meeting now, which means we have to wrap up this episode. That we’re recording in person. I love that. I’ve got all three of you guys here with me. I

Eric Nekich: dunno

Speaker 6: if I wanna go to that one now that you said it’s not gonna be fun.

David Vuyk: That’s not how you sold it to us.

[52:50] Nick Goellner: Appreciate every one of you guys. I hope we equipped and inspired the audience to run their shops lights out with. Thank you, Cameron. With that, thank you. This is a motion controlled room we’re in where the lights turn on if you move. So to shut the lights off on this episode, we have to be perfectly still.

[53:10] Goodbye. Hey guys, it’s Nick and I’m so excited about Machine Shop Mastery being part of making chips. So my good friend Paul Van Mader, he’s been a partner. He’s been a sponsor, he’s been a friend and he’s been involved with making chips for a long time. And now his podcast that I love is part of our group.

[53:30] Here’s why you should listen to it, Paul. Just run a software ERP company for machine shop leaders. Paul was a machine shop leader. He loves machine shop leaders. He’s the one leading the charge to thank all the machinists out there for all the incredible work they do and the. Best thing about ’em is he actually knows how to make their incredible work turn into an incredible business.

[53:50] So when you listen to Machine Shop Mastery, you’re gonna hear Paul and his guests talk about exactly what they’ve done to overcome their challenges and make their business successful. You’re gonna get those kind of like heart wrenching stories that tell you what people have been through, things that you can empathize with because you’re a manufacturing leader too.

[54:10] So check out Machine Shop Mastery and learn how to master your machine shop. Hosted by my good friend Paul Van Mader, under the Making Chips Network. Thanks.