DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION: HOW MACHINE MONITORING CAN DRIVE CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT By Liz Stevens, contributing writer, The American Mold Builder
D
on Dumoulin, the CEO and owner of Precise Tooling Solutions, Columbus, Indiana, knows that plastic tooling manufacturing is a challenging business, even in the best of times. With COVID-19 affecting supply chains and deliveries, and Chinese businesses competing for market share, Dumoulin believes that now is an excellent time for moldmakers to expand their resourcefulness, boost their productivity and increase their bottom lines. He admits, however, that achieving this is not a slam-dunk. “We have somewhat limited resources as toolmakers,” he said. “We only have so much capital we can deploy every year. We only have so much time that we can put against projects that will change our dimensions, if you will. And we only have so many things that we can do in a given year to really drive improvement.” Dumoulin believes that gaining a better understanding of a plant’s machines and how operators run those machines can give manufacturers valuable insight that can lead to profit-yielding changes. For him, advancing beyond the use of paper scorecards to record machine downtime is a key to gaining greater understanding, and machine monitoring is an ideal next step. After all, he notes, “the machine monitoring industry will tell you that the average machine utilization in our shops is 26%.” This equates to a loss of about $1.5M per manufacturer for downtime. Finding ways to reduce or eliminate machine time loss, and thereby increase the productivity of both machines and operators, is critical to profitability. And while reducing repair time and set-up time is an obvious way to improve operations, in Dumoulin’s experience, “continuous improvement also can happen with reducing the time needed to track down cutting tools, with improving steel availability, with making sure that programs are available for machinists.” During the AMBA Continuous Improvement virtual conference, held November 4 and 5, 2020, Dumoulin and co-presenter Akshat Thirani, the co-founder and CEO at Chicago-based technology company Amper, outlined Precise Tooling Solutions’ journey to find and implement a machine monitoring solution.
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the american MOLD BUILDER | Issue 4 2020
THE SEARCH FOR A MACHINE MONITORING SYSTEM “I have long believed that machine monitoring was part of the solution,” said Dumoulin, “but I really struggled to find a positive return on investment.” He found that sophisticated machine monitoring systems can come with a $30,000 or $50,000 price tag for software, plus an additional $10,000-15,000 to get all of a plant’s machines retrofitted for monitoring. So, when Dumoulin sat down with his team to prepare for another round of searching for a machine monitoring system, he and the team boiled down their wants and needs to a succinct shopping list. “We wanted leading indicators versus lagging indicators,” he began. “We wanted a culture of lean and accountability. We wanted to make sure that our technology was data-focused and staying ahead of the curve. And we wanted to make sure that we also were looking at the opportunity cost to collect that data.”
We wanted to make sure that our technology was data-focused and staying ahead of the curve. And we also wanted to make sure that we were also looking at the opportunity cost to collect that data.” Since machine monitoring includes integration with existing equipment – be it brand-new equipment or 20-year old machines – any plant considering the addition of machine monitoring should consider the cost of outfitting older machines with updated technology to allow for the most advanced monitoring systems. If the cost is prohibitive, Dumoulin suggests considering a more modest approach. “Maybe you don’t jump right to full-blown machine monitoring,” he said, “but you work instead on getting some of the machine monitoring aspects in place first. If you can’t afford those kinds of upgrades, but you at least need something that gets you going down the data path, a simpler version of machine monitoring might be a good choice.”
