91ÊÓƵÍøÕ¾ÎÛ

As shops grow, they must navigate how to balance the technology and processes that work for them in the moment with what will set them up for growth down the road. Metal Trade Solutions, a Winsted, Minnesota-based job shop, has found that standardization and ensuring it fully commits to any new technologies it implements are strategies that provide a pathway to success in both the present and the future. Sometimes this process requires trial and error. The first solution might not be the best fit, but is a step to incremental progress. 

Trade school classmates Tobias Flood and Mark Eiden started Metal Trade Solutions in 2017 with a CNC plasma cutter, some welding equipment and a manual lathe. The company has since added two CNC milling machines from DN Solutions and moved into prototyping and low-volume production work. Photos provided by Metal Trade Solutions. 

Learning the Metal Trade

Tobias Flood and Mark Eiden met in 2013 while studying machine tool technology. The two shared a goal of starting a business, so when they completed the machine tool technology program, they each took a third year of business-focused classes. During this time, they began renovating the building that now houses MTS. In 2017, they officially launched the company, working part-time and focusing on fabrication work due to its lower overhead costs as compared to machining. “We started with a CNC plasma cutter, a couple welders and a Bridgeport manual lathe. We hit the ground running with those,” Flood says. Eventually they added a used CNC mill. “Half the time was spent fixing the machine and half the time was spent making parts on it,” he jokes.

Featured Content

Automation is for Everyone READ MORE

Continuous Improvement and New Functionality Are the Name of the Game READ MORE

Machine Shop MBA READ MORE

In late 2019, Flood and Eiden dedicated themselves to MTS full-time and began considering new machine tools. “We signed a purchase agreement on a Friday for a brand-new DN Solutions machine,” Flood recounts. “And then the whole world shut down by Monday because of COVID.” At that point, MTS provided engineering services for medical device tooling and assembly work, but with the additional machining capacity, it has moved into prototyping and other low-volume work.

Standardization provides a foundation for MTS’s growth. The shop’s first area of standardization was its tooling, which it manages by limiting its tooling and keeping an updated tool library in Fusion360.

Tools

“I think the foundation to all of the standardization across our shop started with tools,” Flood says. It started as an extension of the lean principle of reducing wasted motion. If programmers are trying to program a part and don’t know what tools the shop has available, they have to get up, walk over to the tool cabinet and physically check their options. To reduce programming time, Flood decided to take advantage of the tool library in the company’s CAM system, Autodesk Fusion360. He had the shop’s only machinist manually add every tool in the shop to Fusion360, a process that took two weeks. “He hated it. I hated making him do it,” he says. “And then at the end he goes, ‘Holy cow, this is going to work so good.’” Limiting the tools in the library to a standard set further speeds the process by reducing the number of available tools a programmer has to choose from.

MTS ensures all new technology is fully implemented into the business. MTS has committed to using these Kurt vises as its standard workholding, which makes setup and quoting much easier.

Workholding

After MTS purchased its second DN Solutions milling machine (a slightly smaller version of the first machine, but still very similar for standardization purposes), the shop didn’t budget for tooling and workholding. So, Flood bought a random assortment of vises at an auction. “It was dreadful, horrible, horrible, horrible,” he says. “If you wanted to set up a 40-inch-long part in the machine that's 40 inches long, you'd have to set up four random vises and then indicate all the backs just to get your part in there. That would take probably two hours.” The situation was untenable and needed to change. “I went back to the bank and said, ‘I need another loan to buy tooling for the machines you financed the past two years,’” he recounts.

Some of the money from that loan went to six Kurt vises. It wasn’t a small investment, but Flood says it was worth it. “I calculated the ROI, and this is the best $16,000 I could ever spend,” he notes. “Now, I'm so allergic to those old hodgepodge vises. I'm like, ‘Just get them out of here. I don't want to see them.’” 

Even with standardization, the allure of new technology can be strong. Flood describes a different workholding system he purchased in the hopes of making the shop more efficient. “I bought that system and bolted it down to my machine. But then on Monday, I’d need that system and then on Tuesday I’d need a vise,” he explains. “I'm still flip-flopping stuff back and forth all day, every day.” MTS didn’t see the efficiency it could have seen from that system because it didn't commit to putting it in the machine and leaving it there. Since this incident, Flood is wary of “half-adopted technology.” Now, when MTS chooses a standard technology, it fully commits.

Standardizing its workholding with the Kurt vises has not only streamlined the production process, but the quoting process as well. Flood showed me the worksheet he uses to quote new parts and points out a field for how long the job will take to set up. “I almost don't even use it anymore because I know that machine can be set up in six minutes,” he says. “My customer isn’t paying for setup time. They just want parts.”

In 2021, MTS started tracking its work using kanban cards before migrating to Excel and eventually a custom ERP system built in Airtable.

ERP

MTS also had to standardize its ERP system to keep the business running smoothly. Setting up processes that are standardized to gather and keep track of necessary data consistently in a growing company has not been easy, especially given that MTS has not been using a traditional ERP system.

In 2021, MTS started using kanban cards to track workflows. The shop quickly transitioned this information into Excel, where it soon found inefficiencies. “Only one person can have it open at a time, and then you step on each other's feet,” Flood remembers. “We were running around saying, ‘Can you close this document? I need to add something to it.’” These issues compounded as the company grew and added its first full-time machinist. As more data was added, the Excel document became larger and more unwieldy. Eventually, the file became too difficult to manage, even with paper travelers.

Flood realized the company needed a database that could point to other databases, but he didn’t have the resources to build a SQL/relational database from scratch. He remembered a 91ÊÓƵÍøÕ¾ÎÛ article from July 2021 about Defiant CNC, a small shop that built its own ERP system using Airtable and Zapier. Flood reached out to Defiant CNC founder Jeremy Taylor to learn more. While Flood worked on figuring out the more complex aspects of Airtable, he started with a simple application: a time clock. “We bought an iPad, put it by the front door, downloaded Airtable and made a simple form,” he says. “You can view that information, put in the pay periods and calculate everything. Accounting could just look at the dashboard and everybody's hours are already right there.” He estimates this eliminated an hour of work from every pay period. As Flood learned more about Airtable, he continued to move data over. By the end of 2022, MTS had migrated everything, including new orders, its customer list, supplier list, tooling list and more from Excel to Airtable.

As the business grew, the burden of building and populating the custom ERP became too much. Flood estimates it takes two hours to build a form such as this one for adding new end mills to the company’s tooling library, and it doesn’t even cover all of MTS’s tools. The company recently invested in ProShop to alleviate this burden.

But Flood says creating the framework of the ERP from scratch and populating it with existing information was a lot of work. For example, he showed me the form he built to add a new end mill to the carbide tool list. It includes fields for product manufacturer (with a dropdown list of carbide tool suppliers), product ID, electronic data processing (EDP) number, end mill subtype, whether it’s standard/metric or ferrous/nonferrous, diameter, coating, flute count, length of cut, overall length, chipbreakers and reduced neck, as well as space for a link to the product’s web page. “I have put in a ton of work to make sure A, this is easy to do and B, you can't mess it up, so that you get consistency between each person,” he explains. “That is such a thoughtful and detailed process. It's super difficult to get right.”

And that carbide form doesn’t even handle all of the shop’s tooling. “Every time you get a new tool type, you'd have to add a new form because that type of tool has different information,” Flood notes. For example, he says the Airtable doesn’t yet have a section for dovetail cutters. “If I wanted to, I’d go in there and add a new table with stuff specific to dovetails, then I'd have to make a form for the dovetails,” he says. “Then I would have to make an automation to connect this way back over to the master list to draw its number. Let's call that a two-hour task, which I've done several times. But it's that two-hour task to get the functionality we want or need.”

Eventually, Flood realized he was spending so much time building out functionality for his ERP system, when an off-the-shelf ERP system for manufacturing would have everything MTS needs already. The shop recently invested in ProShop and is working on implementation.

Flood says the transition from the flexibility of his custom Airtable ERP to an off-the-shelf system might require changes in other areas of the business. “You can see the workflow that they want you to use very clearly and it's a little bit different in my business,” he says. “I have to take a step back from Airtable and say, “That was our workflow. We have to change that workflow just a little bit.’ And figure out how my organization is going to maximize that.”

Despite this, MTS is going all-in on the new ERP. “I'm committed to it,” Flood says. “I hired a new employee to handle the ProShop implementation.” And at the end of the day, he says ProShop is the best fit for his vision of the future of MTS. “I think once it's implemented, I'm going to go, ‘This is the best decision ever,’ because we're maximized for making money 18 months from now, or three years from now.”