Video transcript

Bill Hewitson, President:

‍The operations became much more complex. There are a lot of different areas to try to monitor and maintain and it just became impossible to do with the old systems that we had.

My name is Bill Hewitson, I am the president of Ruland Manufacturing Company. And I've been employed here for 28 years.

I've had the chance to experience many different positions engineering, sales, I.T., marketing. There was a lot of manual data collection. It was a lot of firsthand observation green lights and red lights, examining what the problems are, talking to the operators to get their impression of what the problems are that they're experiencing on a daily basis.

So it was it was quite manual and time consuming. We were looking for a system for DNC and machine monitoring and we were getting hung up trying to find the perfect system that incorporated everything. I was talking to other people in the industry and came across an industry friend who is a user of Amper and he recommended to me that we take a look at it and see what you could offer with Amper.

First thing we noticed was we really struggled getting machines up and running in the morning. It was very frustrating to see how long it took for us to get started. So that was the first thing that we were able to attack. This really pointed out to us that we had inefficient processes, especially during start up, and we were able to address it right away.

Dustin Vinci, Engineering Manager:

My name is Dustin Vinci. I'm the engineering manager at Ruland Manufacturing. I've been here almost ten years now, about nine and a half. There was there was a different engineering request system out there, but it didn't give the operators any information back. They had no idea if someone was working on the issue, if someone had even seen their email come through or were in meetings.

Are we out doing testing are we running a machine on the floor? There was no feedback from the operators to see. So they just like sent off a request into like the abyss. What Amper has given us as a tool like as as far as communication of the shop floor now, it gives them a piece of information back that like, okay, someone has seen it, someone's working on this.

And I know like, who can I bug if I see him at lunch? Like, Hey, are you still working on that program for me? So it gives them the gives the operators an additional sense of communication.

It's helped us significantly to understand what level of utilization we have with our machines and what efficiencies that we have there.

Bill Hewitson, President:

So the integration with SAP was really a big timesaver for us, and it was a big help for us to get operators on board with the process and it really sets up the system inside Amper for us to measure our targets, keep track of whether we're on time with our our production and ensure that we're getting up to date information.

So the ERP integration helped us to actually scan a job number and it pulls in all the information, pulls in the part number pulls in the cycle time, it pulls in due date, it pulls in all the information they were typing in manually. So it reduces the double entry of things and it reduces the potential for incorrect information coming through.

It helped in that sense to reduce the level of which we ask of the operators to actually input these things, as well as helping us maintain only one set of data. And so, like, it allows us to just focus on the data in our ERP and know that that is the correct data that's getting pushed out every time.

That that had a great impact on the efficiency and the the buy in from the operators on the floor.

I think people always have the impression that they're operating more efficiently than they are, especially at the beginning of the day. You may not have full supervision on the floor seeing the data not just listening to the people and their impressions really brings clarity to this.

So it just, it was a game changer for us.