Nathan Byman, Wolfram Manufacturing Technologies: Automating to Survive

Wolfram’s Open House Keynote and Welcome by Nathan Byman, President and Founder of Wolfram Manufacturing Technologies

Full Video Transcript

Okay, wow, thank you everybody for coming. My name is Nathan Byman. So I’m the president and founder of Wolfram Manufacturing, and this is our open house. So welcome to our new space. We have been here for about 90 days. So, you know, just bear with that as we kind of move out into the manufacturing floor. We did put the flag in the dirt and said we’re gonna try and be up and running by the time this open house got here. I think we pulled it off. We focused on the machines first and then some of the other stuff, but it all seems to have come together.

So, alright, I’m going to do just some quick thanks first. So first, if she’ll stand up, my wife, Deirdre, she’s also filming. Nothing really happens without the support of the ones you love, so thank you my family, which I’ve got a commitment to watch Percy Jackson with the kids tonight. They haven’t seen me for a few weeks. If anybody’s watching that. Our whole Wolfram family really is family. I just appreciate everything they do and you know anything you see here that is worthwhile is something that they did. I just talk.

I’ll say kind of our secondary family, is like our Caron family. This is Wolfram Manufacturing, but we also have kind of this side note of a Caron Production Technology Center. They’ve been a critical part of helping us develop and grow, and we’ve got a lot of their team here, and earlier this week we were having their integrator meeting. So not only the Caron family, but the extended Caron family of the other integrators from around the world, and then just the manufacturing community in general. We’ve got a lot of folks here that, you know, the folks that are here are all vetted people that we use and appreciate so you know it’s a little tight-knit, but we’re representing some of our manufacturing community and let them come out and kind of party with us, and then I’ll just mention a couple specific ones and then I’ll roll on.

So if you feel like the operation looks like it is put together and clean and organized, that’s going to be our Operations Manager Katherine and her team, so very far corner back there. I could roll through the whole group, but the only other one I’m gonna point out is our barbecue today, so that is Dale. He’s a local team member and you know a lot of people bring in barbecue and they do it as a hobby and you’re like okay all right, his is amazing. So we’re super appreciative that he ran the pit for us here today.

Okay, a couple of housekeeping things: Tours. Y ‘all are watching manufacturing change in action. We were gonna do big batch manufacturing, and we’ve decided to scrap that immediately and go to almost one piece flow. So instead of like on the hour big groups for people who wanna go out there and see what’s going on. Which I think is probably everybody. We’re just gonna do groups of like four to eight people and we’re gonna do them almost constantly. We’ll line up folks over at the door and they can walk through and get a little bit more individual attention without anybody shouting at each other. Okay, I am gonna ask just as a general rule, no pictures out there if you see something interesting that you would like a picture of just let us know and we are happy to sanitize it and get you a picture of whatever you would like to see. So no pictures out there. If you do see somebody taking pictures that is somebody that I specifically gave authorization that we’re reviewing later. So don’t feel left out.

Okay, one quirk of this building is the bathroom is way out in the menu for floor. So, unfortunately, you’re going to have to participate in a tour or grab somebody with a name tag and they will run you out. So, that’s a little awkward, but it’s a manufacturing facility. Okay, anything else? One thing you’re going to notice is that it is really warm in there. The AC units that serve the entire manufacturing area – they’re like 30 years old – and I think it was cold when we were moving into the place and then when we put the first machine in, I think they looked at it and they’re like, “We’re out.” And then they just all died in a row. So very hot out there. We’re working on that, but not quite yet.

Okay food already mentioned Dale, but food’s gonna be out front and available anytime. So if you want to now it’s practically lunch time but available anytime.

So I’m gonna quickly go through a presentation that I did at a kind of a neat conference. It’s called the automated shop conference a couple months ago. So I’m gonna briefly touch on that but real quick before that I’ll tell you just a little bit about us. Like what do we do? Why are we here?

So the first part of that is like what does Wolfram believe in? Like why are why are we so noisy? Why do we show up in your LinkedIn feed or something like that? And it’s really, we believe in manufacturing here, manufacturing locally. We believe in making jobs here. I have three kids. I like manufacturing. I’d love it if they like manufacturing. You know, not necessarily making jobs for them at Wolfram, but I do like the idea that there is manufacturing here and we need to keep some here. Thank you.

Then just building, building our community. So how do we do that? Everybody says that. There are a couple virtuous circles is kind of how I like to think about it and so I’ll highlight two of those, how I like to think about things. There are, you know, in manufacturing there could be like neutral – like okay, I’ve got a super long long-term contract, the price is never changing, so I can just kind of try and live my life and then there’s decay like well, I’m not gonna talk about that one, but we’ve all seen like withering workforce and all these things that we’re fighting against. So what are virtuous circles here? So in my mind, it is you hire fewer better people who make you and your operations more efficient, which then in turn allows you to make more attractive jobs that allow you to get, you know, now it’s slightly more, but still fewer, better people. So we believe strongly in this, and it is in everything we do. When we look at tasks that are people or machine type tasks, we’re like, how’s that going to work? We get that back on a machine. You’ll see on the tour and a little bit of the stuff, I’ll show some of the technologies that we really lean into for that.

Then another virtuous circle, I guess, is those technologies. Our business has three legs. We have the manufacturing operations, which we put a ton of effort into. The other two legs, it could seem like we’re spreading ourselves out in strange directions, but they’re all connected and they all reinforce each other. So the second leg is there are a lot of technologies, but primarily it’s a lot of the Caron Engineering Technologies. So it’s a lot of closed-loop machining. Let the machines really take care of themselves, stop themselves, adjust themselves, call for help automatically. So kind of the care and engineering systems help make our manufacturing better, but then, well, I’ll go around the full circle. And then we have our software division, which is OnTakt, which is what’s on the screen right now. So we look at our shop and it shows us everything about what’s going on with our manufacturing and it dispatches our relatively small team to where they need to be to take care of things. So those three things working together, it’s like we manufacture better using the software, we manufacture better using Caron, which makes it, you know, those products in turn better. We feed everything back to Caron, and we put everything back into our software, and it just keeps on spinning. And then, you know, we are a distributor and supporter of the Caron products, so it helps us help other people. Same thing on OnTakt. We ran it for years, about a year ago, we decided to bring it to market and now we help other people get better using that. So it has been like grabbing hold of a rocket. We get better. The stuff gets better. We have other people get better. We get better. It’s been a lot of fun.

Okay, so checking time. I still have a few minutes. All right, so I’m gonna do a slightly abbreviated version of what I did for this TASC presentation. Okay, so it was called, “I Thought That These Robots Were Supposed to Make Everything Easier”, and when you go out there, you’ll see we have robots. But robots are not necessarily the end-all-be-all here. So, you know, I already talked a little bit about who I am and where I came from, so I’m going to skip that. I didn’t really, but I’m still going to skip it. Okay, when I mentioned fewer people, and that we’re seeing kind of a withering workforce and we’re all fighting against it. This is just one lift from an incredible slide deck from the guys at Industry Week. The editor showed us this presentation, it’s a bunch of governmental data and it is a truly horrifying presentation to behold. So I’ll just highlight this one chart, and I’ll talk to the others. So that blue line is employment in manufacturing and this is from 1997 to roughly 2007.

So, employment in Manufacturing, and this is Productivity in Manufacturing. So, this is kind of like this mid-90s – mid-2000s. That’s when I was entering the manufacturing workforce, and everybody, like my dad and everybody else I knew in manufacturing, is giving each other high fives about how good they were and changing the world. And it kind of looks like that, right? But it turns out that was sending all the cheap parts offshore. So it’s not exactly what we thought. It’s like it used to kind of, like, people putting an effort and our effort would go up and they’re kind of matched. When we get to the far side, they’re actually really matched again. So we had that displacement, but we’re not as good as we think we are, and we’ve got a lot of ground to cover. The rest of the slides that were tied to this are around, oh, let’s see, we have the lowest labor force participation since a couple years after World War two it’s just been a steady decline that like that peak was when we had men and women both in the workforce because the women had supported the entire industrial base during the war all downhill from there, the people who are willing to quit their job. So there is like a quitting index.

People thought it was just post COVID. It turns out it is just like a linear line for the last 10 years. And COVID just took a quick break in it. Onshore, a lot of people are bringing back. So it seems like we don’t have enough people, but every year I’ll earn a lot of money in the world is every bit is hard. So there are a lot of people who are foreign direct investment or bringing things back home. Everybody knows what’s going on with how expensive things are cost of living, inflation, right? So it was for 20 years that averaged like 2.7 and then it’s where it is like this 5, 8, 10 depending what kind of view you take of the last two years. So people are more expensive, they are more willing to leave, there are fewer of them, it’s costing them so much to get into housing. So the idea that any of us can just pay a little bit more and stamp out the people we need is not there.

So, like the concepts that we’re talking about, like software that dispatches people to where they need to be, things like that, things that watch machines for you, that stuff in my mind is just a given. And then you add robots. And there’s still this dumb, dumb thing in front of us. So,my plan – what’s going on attack, the risk control the process, and for the purpose of this presentation, it was to understand what robots are not. They are not as smart as people, and they’re not a replacement for people. But there’s still things we have to do to automate. It used to be that adding robots was taking jobs away from people. Fortunately, now that’s not the case. We’re all at a scarcity of people, and we’re just figuring out how to try and get things like automation in place. Ok, so first,know what’s going on. This is just showing how we look at it. We think this is a fantastic system. I suggest for any of you, and everyone find a system that is watching your equipment. So you just have to know. and it’s a lot more than just keeping score. So like this, for example, we have our targets on machines. And this is actually a series of dots that would be charted. And so that is the machine producing. And these vertical lines are some of these subsystems that we have like the Caron Engineering products catching the machine and stopping it from doing damage to itself.

That’s a really important thing. If you’re going to run with fewer people, as we all need to be, you need this first do no harm set of protections around you. Thank you. You also just have to communicate and having the systems reach out to you is incredibly important, so this one is just an example that again it is not always robots, so that’s the production of a certain part and it looks pretty why lumpy and it’s definitely not meeting its goal. It is clearly under that line by the end of the day. Parts and time. So a small chance of being aware of the challenges is just having the machines call for help. And so in this case, oh shoot, you know what, I’m actually talking about that in a minute. – I’ll make it. – All right. – Stop. Know what’s going on. We track all our tools through the shop. So every tool change on every machine is all done through our software. So from a distance, we can see what is going on and capture patterns. A person can click on it, the to-do list, and see the upcoming tool changes across all the pieces of equipment through the shop. We can also see things just for the importance of knowing how to secure your operations. We can see like these tall blue lines or tall green lines were things that were changed normally. And then we get to see a pattern of how to secure our operations.

Somebody was struggling with an operation and we saw a tool snap and you’d be surprised, or you wouldn’t be surprised if you run a manufacturing operation, how someone will struggle with something, and how long they’re willing to do it before they raise their hand. So that we get these signals sent to us is an important thing because the more you automate the fewer people you have in the world. When a problem happens, it is more disruptive to you, because that person already has their time shared. So it’s kind of like you get bitten twice. So to really build in dependability, with respect to tooling and everything else, just knowing what is going on, this is a screen of the Caron Engineering system which you’ll see is running on all of our machines. The TMAC in particular, and we can see you know down to a thousandth of a horsepower what is going on on every cut and we record that so that we can go in later and figure out what is going wrong. Recording downtime whenever we have gaps, we grab the gaps it tells us we attribute it to something and then it tells us how much money that we are spending on that thing, so when you roll through the tour one of the things you’re going to see is there are a lot more chip conveyors in this facility than there are machines, it’s not because we got the chip conveyors delivered first it’s because the chip conveyors weren’t doing their jobs properly and we were able to track a new downtime to them to say you know what that’s a new cheap chip conveyor right there, no ifs ands or buts it’ll pay for itself in three months. So go and having that confidence by tracking what your challenges are is a very powerful thing. Okay I’m not gonna show this but this is pretty fun if you were to scan this it brings up an inspection test that we made, and this just shows how good people are at doing simple math and entering things repetitively, and that’s all it asks you to do. It shows you some characteristics, and then it will tell you what you have just inspected, and you do a little math to figure out what the actual value is. You type that in, hit submit. That’s it. That’s it.

Questions? And just to kind of jump to the punchline, this is roughly what we see when we do hundreds and hundreds of tests. So chance to miss is for the group that I’ve got here a little over 7%, chance to crash over 4%. So that’s like they missed it by a little bit or they missed it by a mile. It’s fascinating. You take a good group of machinists. It comes down, but you’re still at like three and a half percent and three percent. It is high so this is some of what we use to think about when we’re trying to figure out how to make people’s lives easier and make our operation better. Okay, so I am going to have to go even faster. Alright, so again now we’re at the attack the risk part and get to the solutions. So people go to problem solving, creativity, and the human speed of action which is slow. Machines, repetition, information movement, fast action. So some of the things that we have people do that don’t necessarily fit these. Tool setting, tool loading, comps, calculations, managing tooling, waiting for something to happen, critical stops, none of those things people are good at, but we ask them to do it every day. So how do we get past that? Tool setting. Of course, pre-setters are great. Touch setters and machines are great. Lasers and machines are fantastic. Tool loading, asking somebody to type something in. Like really, you should take that inspection test. It’s fun, it’s informative. When somebody says, “I don’t know, I typed it in and I’m not sure what happened next.” We know exactly what happened next and there are ways around it.

So whether it’s barcoding, whether it’s RFID chips, so you can never lose it and it doesn’t go wafting off through your shop when the sticker doesn’t stick. There are manual comps and calculations. There are, you know, I’ve mentioned some of the Caron Engineering products. They happen to have one that you can take any digital inspection data, feed it right back into the comps on the machines that you’ve established, tie that tool to that feature. Very handy if your production supports that. Consumption management, the idea of walking to each machine and asking it whether its tools are complete, what it’s got left, that’s a big hassle. People don’t always get it right. And if you’re good, you’ve got it set so that your machine stops automatically and it doesn’t go over. And if not, then maybe you scrap something, maybe you break something. Computers are better. And just different perspectives on it. We track, that is, every one of those bars is a tool. So when we put tools in and we start to run them, we really get to see which manufacturer has more uniform tooling. Now, that seems pretty erratic. What is great about this is it is erratic. Like the best tool, you know, something will change. Your temperature is different. You know, an AC unit went down and it’s five degrees warmer in that area of the shop. Your material is harder, so many variables. What is great about that being erratic, one we see it, we can have it trigger and send messages to us, but also with some of the other subsystems, and this is where it all ties together, most of the time the machine stops itself automatically and we don’t incur injury to a process or machine. And again, we believe strongly that all these things should reach out and come to us.

Okay, the waiting. I showed this chart before. People are lousy at waiting, even if they’re looking for a light, but you’re asking them to man multiple machines. So, in this case, all we did was toggle a checkbox, so that their phone lit up every time the machine finished a part. Like magic. That’s its production after. So automation, not always robots. – Oh yeah – Oh, and then we reward ourselves. We have it send messages that you actually completed it. And then just for like the critical stops, I’ve alluded to this several times, but if you really, what we believe in, if you want like your virtual parts, your virtual machinist, they’re manning it for you. I think the closest thing you can get to something like that is like the Caron Engineering’s TMAC system. You can see anything and anything you can see you can automate against. I strongly believe in that.

And we like to full circle on all this stuff and have it tell us what it’s actually saving us, report all that out to us. And when we’re not meeting our goals, have it tell us how much we’re leaving on the table. So it can feel like that’s hurting our feelings, but it helps you know where you want to drive your investments and what you can do for your customers and your partners to be better. So when I gave that talk, I left most of the names of the companies out, but since we’re kind of here on Home Turf and just kind of celebrating what we do, it was a little heavier handed with mentioning the people we work with. All right.

And that was, it felt like I just gave that talk and it had our old address on it. So that’s how new this whole deal is. All right. I ran right up to my time, and I’m not sure if we had planned on doing questions anyway. So I’m just going to say thank you again for coming out and kind of celebrating with us a little bit.

Again, food is out there. I think we’re gonna do some door prize giveaways. I’m not even sure how that’s gonna work, but if somebody taps you and suggests that there might be a door prize, it’s probably Legos or something like that. That’s kind of a theme around here, or Star Wars or both. Anyway, all right, so again, thank you very much. What we’re probably gonna do for tours is, they’re worth it, just like if you look towards that door where Katherine is. We will make sure that a Wolfram team member or a Caron team member is available there. And if you want to roll out and take a look just head over there, and as soon as we have three or four people, somebody will roll out with you.