Salvagnini (Hamilton, OH) is well known for its panel benders. Several years ago, Antunes (a food machinery maker in Carol Stream, IL) made the leap to panel bending and never looked back. In the meantime, Salvagnini has provided support to Antunes to help them reap the rewards of design for manufacturing (DFM). Meanwhile, they engage engineering teams and operators to arrive at practical design changes that save money one part at a time, building up to mid-six figure savings over a handful of years.
Salvagnini’s resident DFM expert and globetrotter Peter Kitzler (above right) talks about DFM with Antune’s Adam Pautsch, Senior Product Designer (above left) in this tandem interview.
Fifth Wave Manufacturing : We’re going to talk about some of the things that DFM has delivered. And as it turns out, we have a key customer right here with us.
Adam Pautsch: Glad to be here.
FWM: Peter, if we could start with an intro of entering the customer situation, and where you saw some opportunities for them.
Peter Kitzler: Yes. Antunes in the greater Chicago area is a very long-time Salvagnini customer. They started with a P2 <panel bender>. They now have two P2s, the last one being a pretty new machine. What is so impressive for me, and it was very visible from the beginning, is that they started to use the technological possibilities of a panel bender. They started very early in the process to think, what can we do better? What parts can we make better?
It comes down to our famous three topics: 1) Integrate multiple pieces into one piece; 2) Make the process of running the parts better in the factory; and 3) Instead of having partial bends, redesign the parts—change the part to make it fully complete on the panel bender. Adam was on this part of the job from the very beginning, and I think he can really tell some interesting stories. For me, from the Salvagnini side, it’s just simply beautiful to watch how a customer is using the technology and that I can also support with an idea here and there, to make things move even faster, even better.
Pautsch: When we brought Salvagnini in as a partner for a machine tool supplier, I was still just a fabrication supervisor. Out in the shop, doing the day to day. And the initial thought was just to increase capacity, and have something that’s a little bit better of a tool to make it easier to find labor. Finding skilled labor always has been difficult, and it’s growing ever more so difficult. I don’t think DFM really was really a thing back then.
DFM quickly grew into a big subject when we got a panel bender. Being a shop supervisor out on the shop floor, you’re always looking for ways to, in a sense, cut corners, to make things easier for your team. And Salvagnini did that. They dove into getting the machine up and running, getting the parts in there, seeing what it can do for us, and then starting to imagine what it could do more and better. And it grew into us getting back with Salvagnini and bringing them off product line as we started to grow more into the panel bender. And as we started to grow and we saw the benefits of challenging the team, the operations team, bringing key people in, like the fab supervisors, the press brake experts. How do we change these parts to make them better?
We started off with a product, a Dial-A-Cup, one of our product lines. It’s a cup dispenser with a thinner sheet metal component. It had tab fold. It was always prone to stripping those tab folds when you got to the assembly process. The construction was a box panel; perfect for what Salvagnini does and what a panel bender can do. But it was still a very simple product. People typically don’t like to make things more complicated in DFM. Things like add more bends or add more features to the forming.
But with a panel bender, those things aren’t as scary. They’re easier to do, they’re more accurate to do, they’re more repeatable with quicker turnarounds. So that initial product that we really dove into with Salvagnini flipped the switch. It drove the rest of what we did from there. It’s good to shoot for an entire product line redesign, but it’s not always possible.
FWM: Because of marketing issues?
Pautsch: Marketing issues, sales issues, customer specific designs. Even though you may not be changing the function, it could seem like a very large, daunting task to the customer. You want to go back to and say, hey, we’re looking to change this. The response might be, “Well, we’ve got to go back to field testing. We’ve got to go back to product testing. We need assurance that it’s not going to change anything.” So it can act as a deterrent to doing the full, large-scale redesigns.
So then what I always like to say is focus on the 10%; focus on the small things. Say you have a product line that is made up of 10 things. If I can take that one part, redesign it to make it simpler, make it on a panel bender, and really utilize it—or maybe that 10% is 10% of a a unit that is composed of 30 parts. Redesign a few of them to eliminate resistance welding, eliminate stud welding, eliminate pin insertion. Adding in features on, let’s say, your combination machine, your punch machine, but in a specific form and fashion where I could still utilize my strongest tool in the shop, my panel bender. Those small wins, those small changes add up to be large changes, large efficiency gains.
FWM: When we’re talking about DFM, we’re talking about small things. Can you move that bend a 16th of an inch, can you remake something that is three parts into one part, can you redesign that one thing, can you make it out of the same gauge material as opposed to three different sizes of metal? Individually they are very simple things, but they add up to something rather profound.
Kitzler: Yes. And I think what we also could see in Antunes when you, Adam, and your group of engineering people started this DFM process, it had an impact on the company. You know that, for example, the technical office, the designers, they are willing to support such a design change. And then they see the result, they see the success, and then they think, ah, I can really contribute with my design changes. If we work in the team so we can really reach together, we can reach many 10% steps.
What I like so much about the company Antunes is the willingness of the engineering people to be open for such changes. Just yesterday, somebody here at FABTECH told me a story. They did fantastic DFM projects in the factory. They tested it out on the Salvagnini panel bender, had the samples ready, had the programs ready. And it was just a question of a little bit of reverse engineering and the technical office, the designers just simply waved it off. They said, we don’t have time for such changes. We don’t do it. I mean, the money you leave behind—the time, the capacity, the opportunity of doing something much better is just tremendous. And something like that absolutely is not happening at Antunes. It’s actually just the opposite. They are striving every day to find a new idea to make their product better.
Pautsch: And we weren’t always like that. It took some time. It took the large project that we did with Salvagnini to really see that. I struggled with it at first, really being that guy on the shop floor, the supervisor asking the engineers, can we do these small tweaks? Because if we can, I can then process it like this. You know, of course, they look at you. It was just the fab supervisor asking me to do things. I don’t have the time for it. I’m working on a full new project to create a new machine.
The reason that I’ve been with Antunes as long as I have is that we’ve created a massive culture of learning. I was given the opportunity by management team and actually brought on to operations engineering from fabrication. I was sent to school to learn CAD design to get in to do the designs and build the cases myself.
In a sense, they put the right people in place. You’re asking and you’re challenging your shop operations. Give me the idea. The engineers can design anything. They’ve got the platforms in front of them. They’ve got these fantastic ideas, but the people who can really build anything are the operators on the floor. Those are the experts at the machines that really can pair together with the engineers to really drive DFM, the small changes that the engineers may not have thought of when they’re trying to create a solution to match their customers’ needs. But pairing the engineers and operators together and creating that layer and that culture of learning to really build and challenge the folks to do those changes. We want them to remember to do those changes on the onsets and not just when they “have time.” We want them to implement them all along the way.
Kitzler: It’s great teamwork, this willingness to communicate and to listen to each other. You know, the designer sometimes is a slave of the job. I mean, a part has to be designed a certain way because of a big customer asks for that. But in the fine details, it pays to listen to the guys on the shop floor—what can we do and what can we not do? What is good, what is not so good? They find a solution because they are smart people. At Antunes, you can see that from the front to the end. It’s really nice. When you look at the products, not only did they make them more efficient and faster and better quality, there is also a good portion of just simply good industrial design. The parts look good and you know how it is: when people look on a product and it looks good, it looks solid, then it is good. And then are going to buy that one and not the cheap stuff from somewhere else. So I think there is a lot of additional effects in this DFM effort.
FWM: Now Adam, to go a little further than the technical aspect, your company must have been happy—even the accounting department must have been happy.
Pautsch: <Laugh>. Yeah. And it’s funny enough, once you started doing all those onesie-twosies…again, we’re big on the culture of learning and presenting what we’ve changed. And we have a training program to bring a lean yellow belt to anyone who wants one and put them on the path of lean and getting certified within each one. We document it with a yellow belt project. We show the savings, we put a small slide together and we actually present to our executive staff. Now it’s harder to do because we’ve been doing more on the design side and the upfront side. It’s been harder for us to track. But yes, on our presentation tomorrow here at FABTECH I put together a small number.
It’s only about five years’ worth of data that I brought back together because it’s all piecemeal. But we had a savings of north of $400,000 just with some of these small 10% parts. It’s impressive! If I can change one part a month and get 12 parts and even pull out a dollar or two in processing by eliminating two spot welds. And now I’m snapping something together, and decreasing material thickness. Now cost varies for everyone and, and your purchase power is behind it. But for us, an average of 25% savings, roughly, per gauge, if I can increase or add a form feature, bend more efficiently on a panel bender than I can on a brake and decrease my material thickness because of this, there’s 25% of your material costs.
FWM: Yes.
Pautsch: So I pulled out a dollar of a part. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but I’m running thousands of them. If I do 10,000 parts, that is $10,000, and if I do that to 12 parts throughout the year, those dollars add up really fast. Sometimes it’s hard to sell that to our salespeople. Because well, I could go to the customer and let’s say, let’s say it’s an outside panel and we simply want to change the aesthetics slightly from a radius to a 45-degree angle. Something small. Well, I can pull out the small dollar amount. Maybe it’s $2, maybe it’s $3, whatever that dollar amount is. Think of how many we’re going to sell to the customer this year, next year, and a year after that.
It’s big enough to even give them a price cut, right? You win on competitiveness, a price increase avoidance for that next year, with a small simple change. It still can be difficult because you have to go back. Maybe they want you to do product testing, maybe it needs to go through the approval process and the sales team says, well, it’s only $3 or $4 <laugh>. We’re presenting the ideas. We can show you the number at the end of the day. And if we do 12 of these a year, I can buy a new machine. I can make the shop even more efficient. I can get into new technology and challenge my operations team and my design team even more with the money that we save and reinvest back into the operations team.
FWM: Now that 400,000 was over what period of time?
Pautsch: Roughly five years. And I’m sure it wasn’t everything. But it included what was documented, plus a small number that I estimated for things that we’re starting to divert in the small team that we’ve built in operations engineering. This small team is made up of what I like to call the best of the best of the best. We created a prototype room not only for rapid response in prototyping to get product to our customer fast and efficiently, but to push back on the engineers to remind the engineers this one small change that we can make here in the prototype room is one less change that we have to propose back to the customer on why we want to change it or to the sales team why we want to change it. So we’re doing that ahead of time now.
We started building our operations team probably about seven years ago when we expanded the company and expanded with Salvagnini by bringing in another P2 because of the savings on a lot of those small DFM projects, as well as the big one that we did. We brought on the team and really started challenging holding our own. It was just design for manufacturing small internal discussions that our team held with engineering and brought in operations to talk.
FWM: Don’t worry, we will not ruin the $400,000 payoff number for your presentation tomorrow. I won’t have the video ready then. So you’re safe <laugh>. Well, that’s really great. I mean, that, that feeds in exactly to the small changes leading to big results. And Peter, at the same time, you’re not overdoing it for your engineering staff either.
Kitzler: Yes, now that we are talking about this DFM topic, it is impressive how many parts and facets of the company are touched. I mean, we talked about quality, we talked about cost reduction, and efficiency. So the whole manufacturing process is benefiting, the accounting is benefiting. And we learned, and even the sales guys, because they have work competitiveness on the market because they have a little bit more leeway on the price if it comes down to hard negotiations. The company has built, through Adam and his team, a little extra safety net for the customer. The whole company is touched by it; just do a few design changes.
Pautsch: Yes. Just rethinking how you approach stuff really is really what it is. And, you know, you say it’s DFM, and I say it’s just simple common sense. If you’re a builder, if you’ve ever built, if you’ve engineered something, if you’ve designed something, you always think of those small things and those people that can get in the room if you don’t have all the experience yourself. You may not be able to go to engineering school, but if you can bring all of those people together to simply be in a room and discuss and do it quarterly, do it monthly, do it yearly, even just to get those heads together you’ll gain a lot. And even if it’s just a lot of the little parts, because the little ones make the big ones.
FWM: We’ve reached a point in fabricating where there are no earth-shattering changes anymore. You look for the spots where we can make those little changes and over time, like water wearing away a rock, those small changes and the savings that you talked about happen.
Kitzler: For some there’s not a lot of motivation to do it, like the company not willing to make changes because “we have no time,” or “we always did it that way.” It’s just the worst thing somebody can say. You damage your company saying that.
Pautsch: You’ve got to be open to breaking that cycle.
Kitzler: Because otherwise you never get the payoff.
FWM: Peter, you have talked to so many people out there. Have you had people that say they don’t want anything to do with DFM?
Kitzler: Absolutely. More often than one would think. And not only in the United States or in Canada. It’s especially true in Europe. For example, Germany is a super big industrial country with a lot of engineering, but also in Germany and in Austria—my own country—you get resistance when you say, why don’t we make this whole thing new? Fortunately, it’s trending to the better now.
The companies who are resisting are becoming fewer because they also see the advantages as the guys at Antunes have seen the advantages. Right now, I’m working on a fantastic project in Sweden. It is about a completely new generation of elevator doors and the world has not seen such an elevator door yet. Alright. First samples will be running next month in November. And this is just an example, like Antunes, they, they are tired of their old parts of their old products. They want to make it new.
Pautsch: People like that, that’s what I wish for all the time.
Kitzler: And they have absolutely no fear. They have absolutely no limits. Here is a three-dimensional room. And inside that room, you will design a completely new elevator door <laugh> and tell us what it is. Fantastic. The results so far are good.
Pautsch: I like that.
Kitzler: Yeah, me too. <Laugh>.
Pautsch: I mean, to me that sounds like a mini kaizen. Get, get a bunch of the heads in the room and think differently and challenge yourselves. Do it better.
Kitzler: This Swedish company is getting tired of welding. There’s an enormous amount of welding. I was visiting the company back in August and the first thing that was really visible when you walk through the manufacturing area was welding. A lot of welding. Their biggest and first motivation is to change the design and get rid of the welding. There must be something new.
Pautsch: It’s one of the most expensive processes.
Kitzler: We are on the way to completely remove it. No more welding. If that happens, it’ll be a major step forward for that company.
Pautsch: That is fantastic.
Kitzler: It’s fantastic. And you did it in several of your products.
Pautsch: A lot of them are exterior. It’s one of the things that you look at the most. On top of being one of the most expensive processes, it is also a very skilled process of, now I welded it, now I’ve got to grind and polish. If I don’t match that stainless look that brushed finish from this edge to that edge, it doesn’t look good. And it’s really easy to not do it right or not do it well. So if you can just simply eliminate that or potentially even move it to another position…if it’s a front cover and it’s the full corner seams because that’s the only way to do it is I weld two corners together. Well, if I can roll those edges, if I can move that to a different area, you benefit. But if you can completely eliminate it, there you go. You take 50% out of your individual component cost. We always push to eliminate welding of all types. Resistance welding too, it leaves blemishes and how do you hide them? I can’t hide them, I want to eliminate them.
Kitzler: Another experience I have had in the recent years, let’s say during the recent two to five years, the discussion and the topic of DFM, design for manufacturing itself, is becoming more common. This year I’m doing what I call the, the exhibition tour through the world. Two weeks ago I was at the Maktek exhibition in Turkey. Now this week we are in Orlando, Florida at FABTECH. Next week we are at the EUROBLECH Expo in Hanover, Germany. Here in Orlando, customers are asking us about design for manufacturing. What can we do to optimize that part on a panel bender? What can we make new? The resistance against it is shrinking. Customers are seeing the benefit.
Pautsch: Now it’s hard to hard to ignore because, I go back to this: it’s common sense. It’s time for manufacturability. Design for manufacturing, use the technology, use the tools, challenge the people to think in a different manner.
Kitzler: Salvagnini is seeing and understanding that too, and is growing the DFM capabilities and capacities. DFM means that you travel to customers. I go to Chicago and see Adam, if there is a completely new idea popping up, that is time and capacity. That experience with people, capacity, and programs builds up inside Salvagnini to better serve our customers. That is a very big key to success for the future.
FWM: I’m not sure how far along you are in DFM activity, but each one of those things <DFM projects> is its own case study. And that gives you and your customers a lot of data so that the next customer you visit will have that much more experience available.
Pautsch: More ideas, more case studies that you really have reviewed, and you really retain the knowledge and apply it anywhere else. I think that’s why it’s been so easy for us to work together. Our ideals and our visions are identical; it’s been a fantastic mesh. We have worked together, we’ve built off of each other. I could tell Peter is extremely passionate about it, and I’m passionate about it. It has been great growing together with Salvagnini and doing a lot of these projects together.
Kitzler: Antunes is a very dynamic company. And there will be more products, and they will be designed for a panel bender because they will be run efficiently, lean production, a one-piece flow; more efficiency is not possible if you do it like that. If you want to become a market leader and be safe against all the cheap products from overseas, it makes you safe because you are good, you are strong and your product is top-notch at a very reasonable price because you are so efficient. This is the only way we should grow into the future.
Pautsch: You could talk about safety in another light, too. The panel bender handles everything for me. I still need an operator there. Not always, but often, literally the panel bender handles the component for me. I don’t have that operator getting tired after an eight to 10 hour day, slipping their finger in that one wrong spot, nipping their finger on a brake tool. You can look at it a lot of ways. It bolsters the safety of the product and, and the quality of the product, but it also drives safety within your team.
Kitzler: And here is another aspect which is touched by DFM is amazing. It touches the whole company, every department. Quality, safety, accounting, everybody is touched by DFM <laugh>.
FWM: Alright guys, that was a lot of information and very valuable too. I want to thank you very much for sitting with me and talking about some of the actual benefits of DFM.
Kitzler: Thank you for having us and give us the opportunity to talk about that.
Pautsch: Absolutely Dave, we appreciate it. I appreciate Salvagnini even having me out here and partnering and just doing a lot of great case studies and individual components and shooting for the future.
More information: www.salvagnini-america.com
More information: www.antunes.com