MachineMetrics Helped Carlson Products to Increase Efficiency by over 20%

There’s always a sort of lag in the information we get from the ERP. It’s not real time, its not updated every second. We were able to see what happened yesterday, what happened last week but not what was happening right now, and we would always have to somehow fill that gap. Also, to get data into the ERP we were relying on a human being to accurately define and manually input the information to enter it into our database. All of the real-time monitoring systems that Carlson Products had seen were only dedicated to machining. They had chats with some of their equipment providers and the solutions they attempted to provide them with were not visually appealing, not web-based and felt quite rudimentary. They did attempt to do manual tracking before MachineMetrics, and they got so much junk data that they just stopped trying. They kept a Microsoft access database where employees would track this information themselves but with all the huge outliers, data it went to hell and a handbasket. The most important thing Carlson Products wanted was to look at was historical labor data information: whether or not the jobs were on target. Tracking down the supervisors and operators to understand why they weren’t on target was quite time consuming, not to mention most of their employees had difficulty remembering why problems had occurred when reviewing the issues reactively. There was no ability to identify systematic issues vs singular issues. Also, the lack of historical data made it difficult for them to calculate their utilization as well as their potential capacity.

MachineMetrics was their solution. Tablets were mounted to 15 individual machines to display job performance and provide operators with an interface that categorized downtime, setups, part rejections, and tool changes. Real-time dashboards were installed on large screen monitors across the facility to display the performance of jobs against the company’s production goals. Instant text notifications were set up so Production Managers could identify underperforming machines immediately and quickly address issues in real-time.

• [Efficiency Improvement - Operation]
  Instant bump in efficiency: Carlson Products has been able to take on more jobs than they ever had before because they are able to forecast our capacity much better. They actually turned down a job that they would have previously taken on before and failed at because they wouldn’t have had the information to know whether they would have succeeded or not. That would have hurt their relationship with that client. It’s very helpful for planning purposes. It allows them to run “what if” scenarios more easily.
• [Data Management - Data Accuracy]
  Acts as a check and balance for our ERP data: It’s an incredibly complimentary tool for an ERP System (Carlson Products uses EPICOR). They overlap in some areas that are extremely helpful to Carlson Products. The integration was simple and it was easy to get data into their ERP. Carlson Products uses MachineMetrics as a tool to verify and change some of the bad data that gets entered into their ERP.
• [Efficiency Improvement - Labor]
  Gives much greater level of accountability: One thing Carlson Products do is they use the job reports from MachineMetrics and review them every morning with their team. Everybody knows it’s coming and everyone is held accountable for their data. It’s important for them to see who’s performing well and who’s struggling in the moment. The management is now able to review the historical performance of specific shifts, employees are able to prove themselves, and they can incentivize their productivity.

• 24% IMPROVEMENT IN MACHINE UTILIZATION 10% INCREASE IN TOTAL EFFICIENCY

• 1,200 IN ADDITIONAL MACHINE HOURS PER MONTH 14,400 IN ADDITIONAL MACHINE HOURS PER YEAR

• $288K INCREASE IN BILLINGS PER YEAR 30 DAYS TO REACH ROI