The $5 Automation Project Hiding in Your Shop | Ep. 50

[0:00] Well, and let’s qualify this, Eric. You’re asking the guy who’s trying to put a truck horn on his commuter bike. Um, that’s just safety right there. I respect that. That’s safety. Exactly. I was commuting in New York and people would always park in the bike lane. And it was just like, this is so annoying. So I put a truck horn on the, and, and I was commuting over the, uh, the Brooklyn bridge, which like just has so many tourists on it, which it’s a beautiful bridge and I should not be biking through there at 20 miles an hour. For sure. But you know, and you’re out of my way at the same guy comes ripping through with a truck horn and a flaming helmet and a suit of armor, you get out of the way, you get out of the bike lane. That’s that’s yeah. Talent is scarce experience even more. So driving up costs and 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. 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 Golner, Eric Nekkett, and David Buick. Hello folks, and welcome back to another episode of the Lights Out podcast.

[1:42] And today we have a very special episode. We’ve got an excellent guest, uh, but first a little hook to tease. There’s an automation project on your shop floor with perhaps the fastest ROI you’ll ever see, and it has nothing to do with robots. Ladies and gentlemen, today’s guest Uriel Eisen from Arda. Welcome Uriel. Gosh, you’re so good at that. Thanks so much for having me. Seriously. I know Nick and Dave. I’m so excited. Nick and Dave really want to talk about automation, but I’ll be realistic. I can’t hear a talk about flaming helmets and armor and how that’s all going for you. Have you been reading Uriel’s LinkedIn? I have, and it’s, uh, it’s, it’s David’s promised it would deliver greatness and it certainly did. So, so flaming helmets and armor. Sure. So, I mean, I’m guessing I’m not alone in this, um, you know, grew up taking things apart and building things, right? Like everyone on this podcast probably. Absolutely. And yeah, I’ve always been super interested in just like all the different materials and processes and like wanted to try doing them with myself, not just interested kind of intellectually.

[2:57] And that led to all sorts of things. Um, yeah, metal work. I didn’t have a, uh, my, my dad was more of a woodworker, so I didn’t have access to a lathe. So I would like chuck bits of metal up in a drill press and get at it with an angle grinder. And then like the first time I saw a lathe, I was like, holy shit. Can we do a quick finger check? Uh, if you don’t mind, Uriel, are they all there? Oh yeah. Yeah. Perfect. Good. No, just good. This one is a bayonet map, but yeah. Okay. Yeah. So yeah, I mean the flaming helmet was just a terrible idea to attach cans of, I think it was isopropyl. No, the flames weren’t bright enough with isopropyl. And then we had like air scoops that would push air into these cans. So the flames would like really come out under speed. Cause the idea was to bike with it. And, uh, at speed, just a can there’s no plume really. Cause the air just kinda, you know, you don’t see much fire. So like, is, is this on YouTube somewhere that we can look up? I, it’s not. And my mom very quickly was like that. No, like I don’t understand the application. Is that like, it was like, come on, mom. Picturing Eric, like riding his bike down, down like a cul-de-sac in a neighborhood and his head just blows up when he tries this. And you can get it on Amazon now. So beautiful way.

[4:23] No, really? I was like, there’s no way you got that past the safety regulations. Come on. I was Googling it. I was ready to buy one. Yeah. Uh, so built all sorts of stuff, uh, micro cars, uh, wooden boats. I always designed it and built it, which always meant that my projects were worse than if I just took like a kit car or something, right? Cause a, they have a lot of revs under their belt and B they have experience, which is useful. But I think what you do learn from doing things yourself is like really the trade-off curves. Other people sort of had to navigate, you know? So then when you look at other people’s designs, you’re like, Oh, I totally ran into that problem. So like, I did a lot of space suit, a lot of soft goods design that eventually led to designing spacesuits for NASA. And there I did all my own patterning. And I early on learned that in production sewing, no one uses pins. I don’t know if you guys so, but like, yeah, that’s my favorite thing to do. I saw a lot. He sews a lot. I do a lot of sewing to be clear. And, uh, I’m a big take the pieces of fabric and pin them ahead of time. And then make up for the fact that you’re, the thing you’re making is a bad pattern so that the panels don’t line up and actually flat wrapping.

[5:43] Sheet metal for like aerospace and cars is exactly the same as patterning for sewing. Really? Right. You, you can only have curves in one axis at a time, right? So you’re dealing with like cones and triangles. Uh, if you’re doing complex faces and stuff like that. And so I stopped, I didn’t pin and I was designing my own patterns. Right. And so like everything I sewed for the first, like two years was just complete garbage, but you get really good at it. So that’s so cool. Fellas. Hey, well, I got you both real quick. So I’m really trying to drill in like our work, holding options at Hill and all of our shops. Any advice, Mike, it’s as simple as Raz Ram as what? Raz Ram. You’ve never heard of it. I have not all what Nick is referring to is the seven habits of highly effective workholding. That makes more sense. Repeatability, accessibility, scalability, reliability, adaptability, and modularity. If you want to find all of these principles in one catalog, check out the SMW auto block catalog. You can find it at SMW auto block. EL okay. That count. Thanks fellas. How did you get the gig to like start designing stuff for NASA? It seems like something like every kid would want to do and probably a long line to actually get chosen to do that. I think, um, a friend of mine said like his dad always told him that he insisted on learning things the hard way. And I guess I feel like I’m sort of in that camp and it makes the, the process a lot slower to get to good results, I think, but then, like I was things on hard mode with sewing, like patterning myself.

[7:29] And so I just was very good at like, I have some projects on Kickstarter that I did for other projects. And like the, the bags in the videos I made in my bedroom on my sewing machines. I’d like, uh, five industrial sewing machines and the bed was under the cutting table. Now I’m married. So my bedroom looks different, but, um, anyway, uh, and then I went to a talk with a guy, uh, the president of the company gave a talk and I went up to him after the talk and I was like, this is super cool and I’d done a lot of like bike packing bags and tents and like a lot of technical sewing with high loads and, uh, so what they were doing. And I’d done like welded structures, like fabric welding as well as metal welding. But, um, so it was just like, they have a lot of trouble finding people who can pattern, know how to do the prototyping and assembly and like by knowing the full process, it’s like the engineer who hands over a drawing with like a sharp internal corner for the mill, right? You know, like you clearly haven’t. Right. And so it’s the same, same deal. Right. It’s like, and it’s crazy. Like you were, you were asking about sewing and while I don’t actually sew, uh, Henig sews a lot because we make bellows. So you machine protection bellows for machine tools and a lot of them have to be sewn, um, so they can fit around the machine and keep the machine, you know, kind of safe from the environment that it creates. So it’s hard to find good sewing people, seamstresses or whatever the word is. You know? Yeah.

[8:56] Yeah. I think even harder to find, well, you need many fewer of them. So maybe it’s about even people who can do good patterning work. I really am thinking about partnering with you, Uriel, on a flaming spacesuit. I’ve got a few ideas. Don’t know if they’ll work, but anyway, this is by and far, I think, you know, we’re like 14 minutes into this episode and I’m like, this guy’s probably the coolest person I’ve ever talked to in my life. Yeah. Eric’s like only thinking about Dungeons and Dragons. Like I did do a fire proof bag. Okay. Um, that was the close I’ve gone. Pretty much the same thing. I mean, when the zombie apocalypse falls upon us, I think I’m just gonna, I mean, it’d be a bit of a drive, but I’m going to, I’m going to head your way to Washington, Uriel, because I think, I think you’ll keep me safe. That’s the general vibe I’m getting in the conversation so far. Maybe I can get one of those flamethrower helmets and for sure. Off we go. Off to dust it off. Yeah, that’s great. Well, listen, obviously that’s, that’s not what we’re here to talk about, but it does give some important context. I don’t know if I even shared this with you, Nick and Eric, but Uriel and I met first actually at the machining summit back in April, um, he gave a really great talk on inventory management. And so that’s kind of more related to what we’ll talk about with regards to Arda.

[10:18] I know Uriel, you also operate Ostair manufacturing. That makes really cool, um, just frankly, the most beautiful looking buckles and, and stuff that I’ve ever seen. I got to kind of hold onto some of those during the talk. And so shout out to Al Wutmo in the machining summit for bringing us together, um, and, uh, and a quick little, uh, plug for Summit 2027. You know, talk to us a little bit about how these really cool projects led you to Ostair, and then maybe some of the challenges you were facing with Ostair eventually spawned Arda, uh, and I know that’s a lot of ground to cover. So hopefully that’s okay. I’m excited. We already talked about spacesuits. So through all my soft goods time and including the spacesuits, I was always sketching the buckles I wish existed. And then COVID hit and I, most of my work was word of mouth. I decided to buy a CNC router and that quickly became a Tormach, which quickly became a Speedio. And so I ended up, I had a Speedio and I had all these ideas. And so I just started prototyping them and then launched it on line, March of 21, got a lot more demand than I expected because they’re like an order of magnitude more expensive, but I guess, you know, I wasn’t alone. And sometimes you don’t actually care about saving $20. You just don’t want your stuff to break when you’re in the middle of an adventure, um, or just kind of day to day, it’s nice to have like stuff that feels good, looks good.

[11:53] And so, yeah, I kicked that off, saw a lot of demand and I was making every single buckle. And so very quickly became interested in, in automation of all types. Um, and I think my head went where most people’s heads go when they think automation, right? I’m like, okay, I’ll get a robotic arm to load the machine. Quickly figured out that the cost of that was, you know, it totally makes sense assuming the production is there, but I was still ramping this brand. And so, um, ended up jumping into, bought some, some stuff from Shunk and put together like a spindle gripper kind of set up, that kind of kicked things off in terms of automation, but that was only really part of the problem. The other part of the problem is that I’d go reach for more aluminum. And go like, oh shit, I forgot. I used all of it last week and I guess I didn’t order enough in time. And so then I, you know, whatever setup I had on the machine, I’d take that off and then switch it over to some, to run a different part because I had those in, in stock. Right. And like the worst was we got a big order and I went to ship it and, uh, stocked out of 3 cent plastic bag. Right. And so now half of the order is packed. The other half I still need to pack. And I spent the day like driving around to hardware stores, trying to find one that looked close enough that it wouldn’t look goofy, calling my friends who also run machine shops, because a lot of people have little resealable bags.

[13:16] Trying to remember who it was. I saw on Instagram somewhere, a post about the Toyota production system. And start, I think I saw a video from like Paul Acres. Um, maybe it was like Saunders tour of, uh, of the Pearson shop. You know, I guess I’m kind of a sucker for like spending way too much time on systemization, even when it maybe doesn’t make sense, but then the numbers you read about in these books on like the turbo production system are like, it’s not uncommon for it to double or triple throughput, right. Or you have the same production in half the square footage. And I was in a 325 square foot barn. And, uh, yeah, we were really wedged in there. And so, yeah, that was, that’s kind of what kicked things off. And like one thing led to another, started implementing Kanban, doubled my throughput, made some other changes, doubled it again, all with the same amount of space and no extra people. And then Kanban super cool and very effective, but then it was kind of high friction, um, a lot of parts of it making the cards we’re using like Sharpie and index cards, and then once we knew what to order, we still had to place the orders. And I was spending like a day a week doing ordering when really I should be designing new products. Yeah. It was just really frustrating. And so like one, one thing led to another and, uh, now we have like a whole team of folks and software and a bunch of people kind of using it for prototyping for production, but yeah, that’s kind of how that all came about.

[14:42] Wow. So, I mean, before you fixed all the problems at Austere with this inventory system, what did a bad week look like? And then what did like, what did the change look like? I mean, what, what was kind of the contrast there? That’s a good question. So interestingly, you know, I don’t think Kanban is good for everything everywhere. Um, and actually what, where we see customers are most successful is only part of what we do with it at Austere. A bad week for me early on, you know, I kind of mentioned the plastic bags, but I’m sure everyone listening, if you’re running a machine shop or a different production environment, like it’s kind of like, Hey, let me know if we’re running low on something, right? No one does. And what does low even mean? Like everyone has a different idea in their head. And if you have multiple people pulling from one bin of parts, they sort of go like, well, I only use two of these a week, so I don’t, we don’t like, yeah, there’s four left. So we have two weeks of stuff left. Meanwhile, another department pulls, you know, 20 a week. And so they walk in and wipe you out. And so, um, it was just always running around. Like every, every time we got a big order, like early days, starting a brand, right, a big order is awesome.

[15:59] But every time we got an order, I’d be like, Oh shit, I really need to like get in tomorrow morning and walk the shop floor. And like, do we have enough aluminum to make the components? Do we have enough painted parts? Do I, Oh, do I need to order more paint shit? Did I run out of like the gloves? And do I need new cartridges for my, for my respirator? And some of those failures mean you can’t ship to customers on time and you have to call them. Some of the failures were more like, maybe we’re not greasing our machine when we should maybe. But then there’s like little dumb stuff. Like, uh, you can lose half a day of production because you don’t have a probe battery. Right. Or like your caliper battery is off. So now you’re walking around for 10 minutes, trying to find another set of calipers, or it’s just like a lot of little stuff that all in meant we just weren’t shipping parts. So that was, that was kind of what it, what it did look like. Is the opposite true? Maybe not in your case, but maybe in some customer cases of, you know, you just described like not having what you need, but I’m sure on the flip side, sometimes people will just order way too much because they’re like, well, whatever, we’ll use it eventually, which ties up a lot of cash as well. Yeah. So I would say I kind of forgot to mention that piece.

[17:15] I think like every time I stocked out of something, I would go like, well, I don’t want to do that again. So I’d order a whole lot of it. Right. But as you said, like some stuff I wouldn’t do that because we just didn’t have the cashflow. And then the problem is very non Toyota production system to just carry tons of inventory. Yeah. Yeah, no, no, they would, uh, yeah, definitely not, not approved. So the problem with ordering a lot of it is twofold. One is ties up cash. The other is it sort of in your head you go like, oh yeah, we have a ton of this. Right. I had a situation in my kitchen, which is probably less interesting here, but brown sugar, I kept thinking we were out, so I bought like three bags of brown sugar and then both me and my wife were like, we have a ton of brown sugar. So we didn’t, we didn’t. And then we ran out again in like, so it sort of just defers the problem and it eats up a lot of square footage. You end up with a lot of damage often. Or it goes obsolete and you go like, yeah, we bought 50,000 because we’re getting a 10 cents off on each. We had a customer who, uh, obsoleted $5 million of cardboard boxes. Oh man. 5 million bucks. Yup. And he didn’t know he was sitting on them either. Cause they have like three warehouses and they were in one warehouse and then the design team released a new rev on their packaging without like, and it wasn’t tracked anywhere. So they scrapped $5 million. Yeah.

[18:35] That’s insane. That’s a lot of boxes. Well, I mean, even, even thinking like in our world, I mean, we, we make a change on like catalogs or whatever, and then you got all these old catalogs. You’re like, oh crap. Now, what do we do? So you can’t spell high end without DN if you’re serious about taking your shop to the next level, it might be time to stop thinking in terms of good enough and start thinking in terms of capability, flexibility, and my favorite automation. DN solutions is helping manufacturers make the right decisions. Moving to true high-end machining with their SMX multitasking series, the DVF 5-axis machines and advanced automation solutions designed for shops that want to run smarter, faster, and more competitively, the SMX platform gives you the ability to combine multiple operations into one setup, reducing handling, improving accuracy, and helping you get complex parts out the door faster, their DVF 5-axis lineup delivers the precision, rigidity, and confidence manufacturers need for today’s demanding aerospace, medical, and high-performance applications. And when you pair those machines with automation, you’re not just buying equipment. You’re building a more scalable business, high-end parts, high-end capability, high-end thinking, because you can’t spell high-end without DN.

[19:56] Learn more at dnsolutions.com. On the production side of the house, I thought we needed another CNC mill because we were stocking, we’d go to ship orders and we were stocking out of machined components. Intuitive answer is we need more parts. And then I was looking at our inventory and I’m like, so Toyota says that overproduction is the mother of all lean wastes, so there’s eight lean wastes. We are all in the business of manufacturing, which is making stuff. And so it seems really counterintuitive to say, no, no, you’ve made too much stuff. Right? Like, uh, make less. So we would have a lot of component A and then none of component B. And so we didn’t have an assembly to ship. And I was like, wait a second. That’s like misallocated human labor and machine time in that one bin over there. And so by actually just con bonding all of our stock there and not like doing strict FIFO on our con bonds, instead of it’s really tempting as the operator to go through all the cards and go, Oh, we need to make like 500 of these. So I’ll pull them all to the front instead of doing 50 and then doing a changeover and then 50 of something else. So simultaneously we read a SMED, single minute exchange of dyes and cut our setup time from 17 minutes down to three minutes on our mill.

[21:19] So now part to part changeovers are about three and a half, somewhere in there. Um, so then the time, you know, it’s just not a big penalty to change. And suddenly we doubled our throughput, our effective throughput doubled because we always had the stuff we needed. That’s kind of where we were at. Um, but then I would have a bunch of Kanban cards sitting on my desk and I wouldn’t do the ordering in time. And then we’d stock out anyway, which is very embarrassing. So, so let me get this straight then you, you were experiencing the frustrations and the pains of not having a great system in place, you dove into some lean principles, you know, Toyota kind of solved this like 70 years ago with index cards. Was there a point where you were like, Hey, I want to do the index card thing, but I want to give it a brain and make it smarter. What kind of brought you there to kind of art as we know it today? Was it, was it strictly going to be an internal system or were you right away? Like, Hey, this is actually, this is a product or a service I can, I can sell. Definitely the former, we had no intention of selling it. I have a podcast called Incremental mentioned it on there after like six months of working on it, it finally got to a point where it was useful and kind of mentioned it on there and ended up with some, some customers who are interested in paying and I was kind of like, well, legally we should probably start a company here. The big thing, funny enough was actually our aluminum vendor took email orders and a lot of small businesses send emails to their vendors and it was always annoying.

[22:50] I’m like scrolling through my inbox, like, right. Like I have a million things to do as a small business owner, or even just like a shop manager. And I need to place an order and it’s like a 10, 15, 20 minute task. And so it’s really easy to defer it to the next day. And so I spent like a month trying to put QR codes on these dumb Kanban cards that I could scan and it would give me a draft email automatically. And then my co-founder happened to be building a email automation tool. So he was like, I just as a buddy, I can like spin that up for you. And so that was really it for me was like, sort of what you’re saying. Like, I really like the physical card on the physical floor. Like if I, I painted like a hundred plus thousand buckle components myself, right? You have paint on your hands. You’re not trying to like log into a computer to be like, I used one ounce of paint. And so the physical cards are awesome. But then building out that automation to like place your orders, to remember your primary and secondary vendors to just like streamline a lot of those workflows. Not having that was the next thing that sort of started tripping us up. And in terms of automation, like I think somewhere people fail at with implementing automation projects is just sometimes people get a little too idealistic of like, let’s automate the whole thing instead of being like, okay, what’s taking 80% of my time, like 20%, right? Like Pareto, right? We’ll just go like 20% of the effort’s going to save us 80% of the time.

[24:18] And so that was like implementing Kanban with index cards and Sharpies. And if like, if people are listening to this and having these issues, like tomorrow, you can go out on your shop floor with a Sharpie and index cards and write what the item is, how many you want to have at a minimum and stick the card into your inventory in such a way that anyone in your shop who’s consuming that thing will hit the card at the point you want them to tell you. And then just be like, Hey, when you hit the card, instead of having to like write it on a whiteboard, just put it on my desk or even better. You put a cup near the shelving where they’re consuming it. It’s like five minutes training. It’s like $5 of supplies and people don’t really believe this, but we often see our customers free up 20% of their time on the shop floor, which sounds insane, like those micro interruptions just stack up and so we regularly see that we see people releasing new products because you’re freeing up the main people on the shop floor from instead of like running around being like, fuck, why didn’t you tell me we were running out of screws? It’s like the micro interruption itself. And then it’s also the like time it takes to get back into whatever you were doing to like get back to that level of focus or whatever. You can only say it’s like 15 minutes. Every interruption like costs you like 15 minutes.

[25:41] Right. Yeah. I believe that easily. Yeah. I believe it too. You know, it’s funny that like, we’re talking about that. Cause we see that so many times in like manufacturing facilities when we’re talking about, you know, automation, when we’re talking about setting up machinery, when we’re talking about fixturing, cutting tools, the whole nine yards, you kind of get that interruption to your point, right, where I’m, I’m looking for an Allen key, I’m looking for a torque wrench, like, and it’s just. It’s just such a way to snowball waste. Uh, and it’s, and it’s innocuous enough that people tend to not focus on it, you know? Yeah. And there’s a tendency, I think, to also write stuff off as exceptional, like, Oh, well it was down because I couldn’t find the Allen key. It’s like, okay, but if that, if those interruptions happen reliably once, twice a day, let’s start knocking them off. Why are we losing the Allen key? Right. Or if we know if we should treat it like a consumable, maybe we should have a place where you can grab another one cause they’re whatever, 35 cents, right? Yeah. And keep the machine running. I, it’s funny. I’ve been, um, making, we, we give out these, uh, screw you magnets. Don’t let stock out. Screw you as the joke.

[26:56] So I’ve 3d printed like, I don’t know, 15,000 of these things. And it’s so tempting with automation in general to kind of try to cut cycle time. And I feel like you’re like, Oh, let’s make it faster. Let’s make it faster. And then you get a failure and you’re down, like you lose a whole night of production. Right. And then you’re like, Oh no, no reliability, way better up, like way better total throughput than speed. And I think that sort of also gets into it. It’s like building a culture of systemization over time. So far outstrips the, like you have one star employee who’s like great at firefighting. Can like a machine goes down cause you broke the last quarter inch end mill. And then you have this one guy who just like reprogrammed it brilliantly with a, whatever, three eighths end mill and you’re back up and rot and rolling. But meanwhile, the machine was down for an hour. Right. And now like that actually stole an opportunity from your business to improve and become less reliant on that person. And I bet you money that that guy would be way better, way higher leverage to put them on, like, Hey, we get a 7% reject rate on this machine. Right. On this part that we run for a customer once a month.

[28:15] What’s up with that? Like, can we get that down? Um, but instead they’re running around doing like stuff that absolutely is solvable, but just takes like a little bit of just stopping and thinking like, Hey, this is, this is something that can disrupt production. Let’s keep it in stock. Right. Let’s, yeah, let’s build that system out. so as you’re talking, I’m just thinking of the OEE equation and you’ve got like the availability, you know, are you running? How many hours a day are you running based on what you planned? The performance would, you know, are you doing the thing or as fast as you thought you’d be doing it and then quality and you just gave like two pieces of that. It’s like what Walt from Eaton aerospace said too. He’s like, we’ll start with quality. That’s the most important thing. Like you mentioned a scrap right there. And then I think the first and the third are more important than the second in terms of like how fast the cycle time actually is, I think, are you running your machines consistently, reliably, you know, somewhere close to 20 hours a day, 24 hours a day. Right. Instead of just part of one shift. And then is the output actually quality, like consistently delivering quality then, but where all like the marketing and energy and messaging goes, it seems like is in the like speed it up, cycle time, work faster, you know, better cutting tools, this and that. And it’s kind of funny to me because I think that’s actually like the least important of the three elements in the OEE calculation. Yeah.

[29:47] I think it’s because you’re looking at just like throughput, right. And not really hyper-focusing on the individual processes within it. But, and I think that that’s, what’s beautiful about OEE and exactly what you’re talking about Uriel, right. I have a quick question for you. So, you know, we’re talking about Kanban and, and, and I want you to, to finish expanding on that. But my, my brain just got triggered when we were talking about Allen Keys. Do you do any sort of like, you know, 5S strategies, tactics throughout your facility? Like, do you utilize shadow boards, things like that to help eliminate waste? So we’ve done a little bit of shadow boarding. I find it a, one of my big things is like reducing friction, I think drives the best results. And I kind of bring that philosophy, I think to everything I do. My issue with shadow boarding is that it has a lot of inertia, right? Like you make a beautiful shadow board, it’s pretty awesome. And then you go like, shit, should have put that, the like flipped. Cause now when I pull it, I need to flip it 180 into the machine. Right. Or like, oh, I actually want to switch tools, whatever. And then you’re like, ah, I don’t really want to redo it. So then you have, I’ve been to a lot of facilities now where you see the 5S. Uh, you know, they did like some big Kaizen event and you see all the shadow boards and there’s just shit stacked on it, right? Like it didn’t stick. And that’s like, I don’t know.

[31:12] I don’t know where the blame lies for that exactly. Like it’s probably some amount in leadership and like staying on top of things. But honestly, from my point of view, you’re always better at making the right way of doing things also the easiest, and then you have no problems. Right. And so like, yeah, that’s, that’s a good point. Having things on wheels, for example, is makes it so much easier to be like, wait, I’m taking five steps from here to the sandblaster every time I want to like change it over while doing assembly. Now let’s wheel it over here and try that. Right. And like, just dropping that friction. I think similarly, like one of the big things you kind of mentioned, like Kanban was invented 70 years ago. One of the big things I’ve seen now implementing with customers is like, if someone doesn’t make a card for something and then you stock out, you can waste whatever $5,000, it’s not really an exaggeration, right? So like, but, and so you can say, and I’ve seen facilities that do this. Hey, we need to like discipline our people. They’re lazy. They’re whatever. And it’s like, that’s no, you’ve made. Like I saw a Kanban system. They’re like, oh, we’d run Kanban already. And it doesn’t work. And then I was like, okay, well, like how are you doing it? And they’re like, well, there’s a Kanban number written on the label and they need to scan this QR code that’s 10 steps away and then fill out a Google form with a 16 digit, like alphanumeric number and it’s like, yeah, of course they’re not doing that. Like it’s so prone to failure. It’s a pain in the ass.

[32:40] Yeah. I don’t know. And so like we’ve added like, and this sounds kind of silly, but it really drives compliance. Like we added an Amazon import tool. So you just like, you can search Amazon, run the product. You’d be surprised how many people order all sorts of like cleaning supplies, all sorts of stuff from Amazon. So just to bring all, we, we added a Chrome extension, like anytime we see failures of people sticking to Kanban and like using Arda, it’s like, okay, well, there’s too much friction here. And I think like, similarly, we set aside, I don’t know, 30 to 30 minutes to an hour at the beginning of every day to do a continuous improvement, which is the only way I’ve found to like stay interested in making buckles all day, every day. Right. I don’t know. We do like all sorts of pneumatic fixtures and 3d printed stuff. And like, it’s pretty fun. So we’ve done a bit of shadow boarding, but a lot of it is like, one of my favorite things is like having color coding materials available easily. So like you notice you’re setting something down in the wrong orientation or the wrong spot, or like we had a hand truck, this sounds small, but all these interruptions really stack is a hand truck that I would hit the wrong latch to open it in the way I wanted to. So like I labeled one of them just green and the other one yellow. And then, so at a glance, you’re like, oh, hit there. All of our setups on the CNC are color coded. So like, you’re always, you’re pulling like the purple tray with the purple vice jaws and like all the things, right.

[34:05] Purple, purple spindle gripper jaws that are 3d printed. Our sewing machine used to be two week training to train someone on the sewing machine to make a strap. We 3d printed fixtures. That’s like sticking to that single minute exchange of guy principle. Most sewing machines, it’s like, I don’t know, 30, 40 minute changeover from program to program. So these are, I don’t know, five seconds, but they’re also color coded. So you just reach up and hit the green button if you’re using the green fixture and it’s going to sew the correct program for that size. Strap. Yeah, we do a ton of, uh, a ton of continuous improvement stuff, but I think less, I’ve found less juice in the, like the traditional stuff that looks really good and clean and fancy and more in like fundamental process improvements. It just seems like, uh, that optimization side of your brain just is just never stops, right? Like you, I do find that you’re, you, you get it to a point and then you’re constantly reanalyzing constantly. Kind of like just trying to continuously prove almost to an infinite degree of functionality or. Yes. And I think it’s not always a good thing. Uh, well, and let’s qualify this, Eric, you’re asking the guy who’s trying to put a truck horn on his commuter bike. Um, that’s just safety right there.

[35:28] I respect that safety. Exactly. I was commuting in New York and people would always park in the bike lane. And it’s just like, this is so annoying. So I’ve put a truck horn on the, and, and I was commuting over the, uh, the Brooklyn bridge, which like just has so many tourists on it, which it’s a beautiful bridge and I should not be biking through there at 20 miles an hour. For sure. But you know, and my way at the same guy comes ripping through with a truck horn and a flaming helmet and a suit of armor, you get out of the way. You get out of the bike lane. That’s that’s yeah. So I like what you said about the wheels though, too. Like just put, put wheels on stuff. You can move the car. What Eric does at work. You see him in the shop. He’s got those roller shoes, you know, with the, like those little, like shoes, but you got the little, yeah, exactly. And that’s also what made him so cool in high school. What, one of the reasons why he was the runner up for homecoming king. Cause he was, he was just scooting down the hallway. All the girls loved it. That makes sense. In manufacturing growth, isn’t accidental it’s engineered, but a lot of suppliers are still building their pipeline on outdated lists, inconsistent follow-up and hope based marketing, hoping their website will somehow bring in leads.

[36:48] Gabe Draper, the founder of Factor knows that struggle years ago, he ran a shop that went bankrupt, not because of quality, but because he didn’t have a steady way to generate new opportunities. That experience is what led him to build Factor. Factor helps suppliers create consistent sales opportunities by combining targeted outreach with marketing that puts you in front of the right buyers. Their team finds the right companies, starts real conversations and sets qualified meetings. So if your pipeline swings with referrals or seasonality, Factor brings a system that puts you back in control. And for listeners of this show, Factor is offering a free custom report that highlights the best opportunities in your industry, plus a list of real companies that match what you do. Request yours at factormfg.com slash chips. That’s F-A-C-T-U-R mfg.com slash chips. It sounds like process improvement, reducing friction, simplifying the process has kind of been, you know, core to, to your success. The one thing I did want to challenge you on a little bit though, is, I mean, we live in the, it’s, it’s 2026 and we’re talking about physical Kanban cards. Do you get pushback on that? I mean, it’s, it’s an era of paperless and digitization. If you do get pushback on it, what do you say? How do you, how do you address that for folks? I mean, one thing is just like, just swearing.

[38:12] It’s a great point. It’s a great point. Tell them they’re wrong. I think, I think that we, we joke in the, in the company, our shorthand for this is like the, the, the sexy robot, right? People like your go to IMTS, you’re looking at like some sexy robots. Even if you could get higher ROI on your whole operation with a bunch of paper cards, I think there’s two big problems with that one, like reasons that people sort of end up with that. Like one is just kind of like, yeah, it’s 2026. And so if you go to your boss and you’re like, Hey boss, we’re going to do a Kanban. And they’re like, wait, there’s like AI, there’s robotics. Like, what do you mean? It’s just, you know, you’re, you’re maybe putting yourself out there a little bit more. I don’t know. I find myself sometimes over-optimizing small things when you have much bigger gains in sort of analyzing the, the overarching picture, but what I would, what I often say is like, okay, yeah. So like, how is that working out for you? Like you have an ERP. Why is it that you took all the screws out of the ERP? You’ve taken like your cleaning supplies out of the ERP. It’s like, cause the numbers were never right. Right. And so, or even like carbide tooling or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. And, and actually like, I kind of joke that the world has converged on pull, but no one knows it. And so what I mean by that is like, a lot of companies get a vending machine, right? $30,000 piece of equipment sits on your shop floor. You’re paying 15 to 30% more on a per part basis because you couldn’t figure out how to keep your end mills in stock.

[39:50] And so you have a different company, put a big, expensive piece of equipment that they’re charging you for on your floor. Every time you pull one, it sends them a signal. And so we can do that with paper cards that are way cheaper. They’re distributed their point of views. And they’re low enough friction that the guy on the shop floor, you’re just like, Hey, move this to there. And then it just works. Like you get really good adoption. It saves a ton of time. And so, I don’t know if people kind of have that perception. I think we definitely run into that. That’s fine. There’s plenty of people who look at it and they’re like, we’re in a bunch of people’s R and D shops. Right. Like big tool companies, shoe companies. And the reason they do it, like I shit you not, like sometimes I get on these demos and I’m a little bit insecure for exactly the reason you mentioned. It’s like, I’m pitching them physical cards. And the guy’s just like, I was kind of like, Hey, what caught your eye about this? Like, what are the reason you want to use it? He’s like, honestly, the biggest thing for me is that just that it looks simple enough that our guys can do it. Right. And we’ll do it. And so the physical cards are sort of the UI on the shop floor that make it easy. But then we build that digital link back to the back office essentially. And so I think there’s like two main sources of value for implementing Panban. If you go out on the shop floor today, like pause this podcast or let it rip, but go out and put a card, like I said, index card, Sharpie, tuck it in. You can feel the like mental load lift of like, Oh, that’s like another thing.

[41:23] I that’s on autopilot. I don’t need to worry about. And I think similarly reducing the friction of passing data information from the shop floor to the back office is a similar, a big unlock for people where the second it’s easy enough to do it, there’s like no reason to order a shit ton of it, right? Because it’s like, Oh, I can order. We just switched from a bulk ordering our aluminum to just like one box at a time. And the boxes are smaller, way lower chance of a back injury for lifting them. That sounds like a joke, but like, I, like, yeah, I don’t like lifted the old boxes were like 60 pounds, right? Off of a high truck. And it’s just awkward. So there’s a lot of improvements there. I think Toyota has a lot of interesting information on this, like focusing on robotic arms. They’re inflexible. They’re right. Like you can’t change. There’s a reason human operators are still doing their thing, right? It’s like, you don’t need to reprogram it. Not I’m a big, big, uh, I love automation. Like I’m not saying don’t do it, but I think there’s often simple things that could increase your throughput more significantly, right? We talk about that all the time, right? If you’re, if you’re just trying to, to, to automate a process that’s unreliable because you really haven’t taken the time or the energy to dissect it, you’re just, you’re just going to multiply the amount of dumb things you’re doing, you know, so it’s a good way to put it, you’re just doing them automatically now, you know, right.

[42:53] You’re automatically dumb. Uriel, let’s pretend that a listener is hearing this and a light bulb is going off in their mind for the first time. And they’re realizing how much waste there is in their, in their machine shop, and that they really ought to embrace some of these principles you’ve been talking about. What are the steps? You know, if they, if they want to get started with this on Monday, you know, what, what was kind of the low hanging fruit, how would they get started? I’ll pitch you on not using Arda first, because yeah, uh, basically grab a stack of index cards and then write like some stuff that you’ve run out of that have tripped you up that you’ve lost half a day, a day that is sending your manager out to home Depot to get more acetone right. Middle of the day, put a Kanban card on those things. And then the next biggest thing you can do is commit to not ordering stuff without systemizing it. So put it like anything you need to order. You go, Oh yeah. Sometimes we need new hardened inserts for our soft jaws, right? Okay. I’m creating a card and now I’m ordering it. It takes three to five minutes to make a Kanban card using Arda. And it draws, it takes your ordering time from like eight minutes per item on average, down to about one minute per item.

[44:09] So your ROI is that first time you order it. And so it’s just, and then every time after that, it’s just more reliable, more efficient. So that’s the biggest thing is getting cards out on items. I would say less data, more cards, right? Just go put cards on things. So it gets triggered. And then over time, when that card lands on your desk, you go, Oh, where did I order that last time? Scroll through your inbox. Like you normally do to find the SKU. Now you create a card, you put the SKU in Arda, you put the, in whatever the, you know, the vendor in there and next time you’re fine. So I used to do all the ordering for my small manufacturing business. I now do none of the ordering. I actually just got a text yesterday from the guy being like, Hey, you didn’t put a vendor on this thing. Like it no longer lives in my head. And even if you don’t do the ordering and you’re a shop owner, the one person who does like what happens if they retire tomorrow, right? Like all that information leaves with them. What happens if they’re on vacation? Oh, that person can’t take vacation because production grinds to a halt. You know, we all have those people in our business, but so yeah, step one, getting cards on items. I would say just more broadly, I think giving people time in the day, and this is risky, it feels risky. I should say, but everyone who does it has crazy results. Give the people in your shop, the time every day to improve how they do their work, not just asking them to do it faster, they can like, if you actually take that time and build that trust where you want, like you’re willing to invest in, in their ideas, you’re willing to like put some money into getting those projects in place, you’re going to massively increase retention, which saves a huge amount of money right there.

[45:51] Massively increase their comfort, and then massively increase your throughput. And I mean, massively there’s, there’s a company, 500 employees, eight hour shifts. They took one hour, they started one hour to do continuous improvement, which is just, it feels like that’s so such a massive portion of your production day. By the end of year one, right? The first day is all negative. You just lost an eighth of your day, right? End of year one, they were past break-even on that time. End of year two, they had doubled their throughput. Oh man. Those are some crazy numbers. It’s not unusual. It’s you can graph this out. I made a spreadsheet. You can just, you can go like, how much time are we, are we saving? How much time are we spending on saving that time? Six months out, it’s all bad, right? We just are three months out. We’ve wasted tons of time. By the end of year one, you are often like, you know, 1.5. By the end of year two, you’re often like two to three X where you would have been had you done nothing. So that’s awesome. Maybe that’s where I’ll leave things. Yeah. Yeah. On that note, I love how you were so, um, like practical it’s, you know, things that anyone could do if you’ve got index cards, you gave, and then if you actually do it, like the next thing you’re going to want to do is put an image on the card, put a QR code, tie it back to a database. And that’s when you should call us. Well, I think one of the things that stood out to me too, is just that you know, inventory management can be viewed as an automation project in the sense that reordering is a repetitive error prone manual task, and that’s the same profile as, you know, actual like machine tending and other things that you’d automate on the floor.

[47:33] So you can, you can treat it with the same seriousness while being mindful that you can do it at a fraction of the cost. And I think that that’s the real impactful part about it. It might even make a bigger impact than adding a robot. Especially with the kind of numbers that you were, you were telling us there, you’re real, just in terms of, of throughput increases and time savings. Yup. 100%. Um, I think like what gets me super fired up about it, because not only does it, I don’t know, it definitely fits the profile for automation when you put it that way, but I think it also sort of suffers from a thing that seems extremely boring and monotonous, but like the numbers, like the lab that sequenced the human genome went from a push style production process with three month lead times down to pull where they could process a sample in under a week. Wow. Just by like essentially Kanban, right? So it’s like reducing by like 90% or more. Yup. Yeah. Engineering teams who implement a Kanban board, which is why you hear about this in software engineering, regularly double to triple the throughput, right? If you have a bunch of people doing CAD in your facility and you have programmers, it feels like the more like, Oh, give them more work.

[48:49] It’s like, no, give them less work. It’s very counterintuitive. I’m a sucker for like counterintuitive shit that has like great results. Then also just, there’s better things for humans to be doing there with their time. I would rather free your best people up to then have enough time to plan a good robotic arm implementation. Right. But then like, how many CNC’s do you see? You walk into a shop and you see like half their machining centers are idle and you’re, it’s like, Oh, well, yeah, we don’t have necessarily like, I don’t know, or we’re working on programming for that one, that one, we had the probe tip break, and so that one’s down for that reason, and it’s like, these are solvable problems and they don’t cost, it doesn’t cost money to solve them. It just takes a little bit of, uh, yeah, attention, I guess. That’s amazing. Well, great. I think, you know, maybe that’s a great place to, to end the show. Thanks so much, Uriel. I think if, if the audience takes one thing from this conversation, make it, make it this, automation doesn’t always look like a robot arm. Sometimes it looks like something as simple as a laminated card in a bin. And that card, you know, to Nick’s point might have the fastest payback, a faster payback than any machine, certainly that’s on your, on your floor. And the challenge then, you know, like you kind of iterated, Uriel, is watch your shop floor and stop and look at all the things that, you know, over the last month caused you to, you know, stop production or do a last minute hardware store trip, uh, because you ran out of it unexpectedly and, uh, you know, I bet that list would get pretty long, pretty quick, but yeah, thanks, thanks for being with us, Uriel, where can people learn more about you and, and Arda? Yeah. Really appreciate you having me on a really fun, fun conversation and really appreciate what you guys are doing for the industry and, uh, just making people aware of like places where they can do automation things to think through as you tackle those projects, cause it is the future. And I think we do need to stay, you know, with the times, stay competitive globally.

[50:49] And if you want to check out Arda, it is www.arda.cards. That’s C-A-R-D-S. Um, and then on Instagram, we post a lot of reels, which is, which is, uh, Arda.cards on Instagram, check it out. And then if you want to check out some fancy buckles that hopefully are going to space next year. Um, that is, uh, austere mfg.com or austere underscore manufacturing on Instagram, where we post a lot of the improvements we make and automation in the shop, including how we use Arda. So, um, yeah, really appreciate you guys having me on here. Love the podcast. So keep it up. Dave, do you know how to spell austere? Give, give, give us that URL cause I’m lost on that one. A-U-S-T-E-R-E. Awesome, man. M-F-G.com. Yep. Love it. All right. Well, if, if this episode hopefully saved you even one afternoon hardware store run, do us a favor, subscribe, share with anyone who needs to hear about this topic and leave us a comment, tell us the dumbest thing your shop ran out of at the worst possible time, or just come and grab us at the 2027 summit. We met Uriel at the, at the 26th summit.

[52:09] And that was awesome. Also, we do have a free card generator on the website, which I should have mentioned. So if you want to skip the index cards in Sharpie, but don’t want to pay money, just jump over there and you can make good looking cards. So that’s awesome. All right. We’re the Lights Out crew equipping you to build a world-class shop, and we’re going to turn the lights out on this episode. See you on the next one.