Synchronizing Innovation and Manufacturability
Episode 1,
April 27, 2020 
Engage with Sales Engineers regarding costs related to manufacturability and how a manufacturing partner can help guide you through design engineering decisions.
Rob Hamm:
Good Morning and good afternoon. Thank you for joining us today. I’m your host Rob Hamm and today we’re going to be talking about synchronizing innovation and manufacturability and joining us from RV industries and industrial equipment manufacturer in South Eastern Pennsylvania. We have Pete Koegel and Allen Stoltzfus. You guys, could you tell us a little bit about yourselves?
Pete Koegel:
I’ve been with the company for eight years now. Started with RV, actually directly out of college, was a welding engineer there here I should say for five or six years. Ran the welding program and then transitioned into sales a few years ago. So I’ve been working in sales engineering for a couple of years now.
Allen Stoltzfus:
My name is Alan and I’m a sales engineer with RV industries. I’ve been with the company full time for about a year and a half, but I started with the company back when I was going to college for a mechanical engineering degree. I interned part-time, full-time summers for about three years in a variety of roles from design engineering to manufacturing engineering and got a good perspective to kind of move around in some different areas of the company before eventually post-graduation settling into more of the sales side.
Pete Koegel:
Thanks, guys. It’s always a pleasure talking with people who have a passion for what they do. I’m looking forward to today’s topic because it’s really going to benefit engineers and designers who are in an early design phase of either a new product line or a new project-specific to the industrial equipment industry. So let’s jump right in. Pete, you have an excellent background in manufacturing engineering. Could you share with us, when it comes to material selection, what should be considered when selecting the right materials for your project?
Pete Koegel:
For us as the fabricator, we don’t know what, exact chemicals or loads, or environment that the equipment you’re designing is going to be in. Our primary goal is to make sure that the conditions of the material are still there. Be it corrosion resistance strength when we’re done processing the material and building the components. The big factor that we really like to try to assist designers with is manufacturability, purchasing, commodity availability, especially when you get into some of these high alloys where there might not be a specific high-grade alloy coupling or flange sitting on a shelf somewhere that you’re trying to design this part out of. That’s really where giving someone like ourselves who has worked through purchasing, has worked through making parts out of these high alloys a chance to look at this early on or budget stage or, really just having someone as a partner that you trust going through your design and helping to really refine it is just a good thing.
Allen Stoltzfus:
To jump into that, a good example is just recently I was working on estimating a job where a purchasing manager from a company we work with a lot came to me and said, Hey, we’ve had you build these pumps in the past and we’re looking at different materials. Without going incredibly in-depth, I reached out to the vendor that produces the material. Saw what they had in stock, saw where some issues were with material availability, and put together rough pricing for our customer. We are able to talk through some material limitations and where we’d have different issues and he was able to pass that on to their engineers. They’re still looking at potentially going down that route, but at this point now they have a lot better understanding of how easily be able to manufacture in that grade, and then also rough pricing. There’s a good example where instead of fully designing something to an exact material grade before knowing how available it was, they reached out to a manufacturing partner just to get an idea and open the discussion for how easy it is to actually build it.
Pete Koegel:
Specifically on the high-end alloys, say you’ve got a really corrosive environment and you found some specific Haynes product or high nickel cobalt alloy that can withstand the temperature, the abrasion, the strength, and it’s the perfect material for your application. That doesn’t necessarily mean that that material has flanges sitting on a shelf, pipe sitting on a shelf, coupling sitting on a shelf, and all these different product forms. We invest a lot of time, especially with customers that we do regular business with, helping their development and their R and D groups out, helping them with sales quotes and budget quotes on these research and development projects, doing things specifically like Allen was referring to. So it’s a good example of how someone with experience can maybe guide you in the right direction a little earlier.
Rob Hamm:
Those are two excellent samples of, material selection when working with a customer. Alan, you’ve been, working in manufacturing and preparing drawings for a while now and in estimating. You deal with tolerance requirements. How did they affect the pricing when specifying a job?
Allen Stoltzfus:
That’s a great question. As I talked about earlier, I actually interned with R-V in design engineering for a while. So I kind of started out more on the drawing track. I was the one putting dimensions on, I was the one tolerancing stuff and still working on grasping a meaning behind that and what I was actually trying to convey with those dimensions. Now I have the privilege of being on the other side where a lot of the work I’m dealing with is build to print, meaning that our customers coming to us with drawings that are already either finalized or close to being finalized, and we’re working on estimating and pricing to build to those drawings. As I’m looking over these drawings, the dimensioning, the different tolerancing really tells the story of what is critical and how we’re going to build it. A weld tolerance drawing can convey that very clearly and very succinctly, and there are different processes that we need to do in order to adhere to that tolerancing. At the same time, it can raise a lot of questions. It can cause confusion and maybe causes us to approach it from an angle where we shouldn’t be when there’s a tolerance that is far too tight than it should be, or it’s dimensioned in such a way that we can’t even inspect it after it’s completed. It’s definitely really important to stick to a standard title block. That specifies how something is dimensioned and it brings a uniformity to the entire drawing where it’s all adhering to a specific title block. Here at R-V when we produce drawings, we have our own title block, and that is how most companies do that are creating drawings. It essentially is saying, unless otherwise noted, dimensions will follow this tolerance, and then as there are changes to that, it can be specifically called out in the drawing, but it really sets a standard for how something is dimensioned.
Pete Koegel:
On the one extreme, if you’re designing something, it would be great if everything could just be held within five thousands of an inch. Why wouldn’t you want it to be held that tightly? The reality is there are costs with every step to increase tolerancing. Obviously that isn’t necessary for most applications, but in some industries and applications it is, and that’s such a huge role of the designer to tell that story on the drawing and to convey what’s important and what’s not as important. Not to say that anything isn’t important, it’s just what isn’t as important. Say, an overall reference dimension versus a final machine bore where a bearing might sit or a bolt pattern might match up.
Rob Hamm:
I’m curious, Pete, just listening to you guys, do you have a real-life example of the instance where you guys were working with a customer who had an extremely tight tolerance which affected the project?
Pete Koegel:
A lot of times, especially in some startup companies, they might be giving us a drawing to take a look at to make and that initial reaction that we get because say there isn’t a standard tolerance block on it and everything is in two or three decimal place dimensions. An example of that; say something is 1.625 inches dimensioned in three decimals. That’s an inch and five eights. Well, standard schemes would tell you that three decimal places mean that might need to be held within plus or minus five thousands. Plus or minus five thousands typically mean that something, if it’s a raw shape, needs to get laser cut or if it’s an overall weldment, it probably needs to get final machined. Because they didn’t have a tolerance block, and they didn’t put things in fractional tolerances or mark things as a reference, we started heading down a road on cost that just wasn’t necessary until we had the conversation with them. We talked to them and try to understand the assembly and the overall part. The designer absolutely knew his component and what it was doing. But we were adding cost onto that part that was unnecessary because the dimensions that we were seeing based on it being, a three decimal place tolerance was unnecessary. It really could have been, what we refer to as a standard fabrication tolerance.
Rob Hamm:
Pete, thanks so much for that example. Another thing that we talk about is lead time. Could one of you guys speak to lead time and how that can affect the cost of a project?
Allen Stoltzfus:
Definitely. Lead time is really a critical component in this whole cost structure. Often we’ll be having a conversation with a customer or potential customer, someone that’s looking at a new project, and they go over it and we put a quote together and get back to them and maybe the price looks great, but the lead time can be significantly longer than they might anticipate. This is often what we run into. With someone that’s developing something new, maybe hasn’t had it manufactured in the past or hasn’t really worked with that kind of time-frame before. Some reasons for that are, initially when we’re just having that discussion in the quote stage, the pricing stage, whenever there’s a back and forth, or maybe a revision to the quote, a slight change, while that’s important and can really hone in on exactly what the customer wants, that always adds time. You can’t really expect a lead time of when a customer presents something to a manufacturer to start the clock ticking right then because there’s definitely that initial build-up phase of looking at it and estimating. Then beyond that, when a price is agreed upon, the customer’s happy with it and a manufacturer receives the purchase order for that job, there are also quite a few steps that need to happen during that process before something is manufactured.
Pete Koegel:
I think it’s us as a sales engineer at the beginning of a project, maybe we’re talking with a purchasing manager, maybe you’re talking with a designer, maybe you’re talking with a project manager from our potential customer is trying to understand just out of the gate what kind of lead time they’re working with. Sometimes it doesn’t really matter. I shouldn’t say it doesn’t matter, but the project can bear more costs than it needs to get done, in this amount of lead time, and that’s going to send us down a certain path. You can’t ask someone out of the gate, hey, what’s your budget for this job? That’s not something we would ask ethically or we’d want to know because we want to do our own detailed estimate. Lead time is something that can be shared pretty openly and it has such a big effect on how we approach a job and manage that.
Allen Stoltzfus:
Certainly, that’s a great point Pete, and that’s really a good way, as Pete mentioned, that we can qualify a job or see if we’re a good fit for it and offers good feedback initially. If a customer comes to us, it might be a great fit for us. It might be a great job, but if they say, we want this and one and a half to two weeks, that is going to be next to impossible to produce something unless it is maybe an extremely simple job. If we can have that discussion upfront as to just a ballpark of what they’re looking at, we can get a much better understanding and then turn that into an approach for how we want to price it. When we’re pricing stuff, we’re going out to, to our vendors, we’re looking at lead time from them. You know, how quickly can we receive raw material before we can manufacturer that. Are there other steps such as painting or inspection or different aspects of it that can really add up. The better questions we ask early on, we can start to understand what the customer actually needs in terms of delivery.
Pete Koegel:
A lot of times customers ask us, say, people that we build their product lines on a regular basis, what can we do to affect the price? Honestly, it might not seem like it from face value, but giving more time to build something really does affect the costs. It makes us, maybe even go after it more competitively because we know we’re going to have a little more time to work on it. It’s not going to be a rush job for us. There’s overtime, there’s expediting both in from our materials and the burden that it puts through manufacturing that I think it’s, it’s a kind of an overlooked cost factor. It’s easy to say, Oh yeah, I need this done in half the amount of time that we originally quoted it in and what kind of overtime will you need to get that done. Even out of the gate, giving consistently decent lead times has a really big effect on the job, more than I think people might recognize.
Pete Koegel:
Wow, that’s a lot of great insight. Regarding lead time. In your explanation, you gave a lot of examples of the steps that a project takes to go through a manufacturing facility. Could you speak to some of those steps and processes that a project would go through?
Allen Stoltzfus:
Yeah, definitely. Some examples of that are when we need to send that to an outside service. Maybe it’s a, a special kind of coding or plating or maybe it’s a more in-depth inspection. Those can really add some, some steps that are going to add to the lead time of our delivery. Whenever we send something out, we almost always expect, even if it’s a simple process in our scheduling that is probably going to take up a week. It might be a one or two-day process, but turn around, trucking, all of that can really add up.
Rob Hamm:
Thanks, Allen. Pete, do you have anything to add as far as the special processes or steps that you see happen or that you see come through that are going to add to the cost of a project that an engineer or a designer could watch out for?
Pete Koegel:
Alan touched on a couple that can, can add costs. I would spin it around a little differently and talk about some special processes that can cut costs. Alan, you’ve worked quite a bit with tube cutting, laser cutting. Will you talk a little bit about your experience in having tubes and structural shapes getting quoted to be done robotically versus, manually.
Allen Stoltzfus:
That’s an important aspect that we try to hit on. As you know, we’re a manufacturing company where we do a lot of high-end technical welding, et cetera. At the same time, we don’t always have such a wide technology to have the latest and greatest from every cutting aspect from, different water jetting, laser cutting, different tube cutting, all that stuff. At the same time, we can leverage the connections we have with a lot of great vendors that can offer us great pricing, competitive lead times and all that stuff. While we might not have everything in house, we can work with a variety of vendors that can offer what we need for each specific job. Just recently I was working on a job that had a lot of cutting on some large beams like 16 inches by 18 or by eight-inch cross-section. Really large. We had done a job where our welding department had worked to cut a lot of these by hand prior to welding together. While it worked great and the job turned out well, as we worked on another design iteration with our customer, we started looking into going out to some different cutting services with local vendors. We have a good vendor we work with that had just gotten a large robotic plasma cutter. They were able to cut the beams for the next job a lot quicker. It was significantly cheaper. We were able to offer more competitive pricing and better lead time, while at the same time cutting costs. So, win-win for everyone and we can really leverage the good relationships we have with different vendors to offer competitive pricing, on that kind of stuff.
Pete Koegel:
Technology changes so quickly. People that specialize in cutting, might have five or six laser tables or one or two, two cutters, or have a structural cutter. They’re constantly investing in that technology. Knowing the latest and greatest. We’re a turn-key fabricator. We don’t necessarily want to take up the footprint for two laser cutters. We’re not necessarily chasing just cutting work. We’re chasing projects and unique industrial process equipment that we can support the design and manufacturing of. So that’s why, like Allen said, leveraging our supply chain and the relationships that we have, we don’t have to be holders of this technology in one of our buildings when we can work and build relationships and build our supply chain to integrate that into the project.
Allen Stoltzfus:
While this is a competitive industry and yes we have competitors who we are trying to beat to get different jobs, et cetera, at the same time, we’re really in it together with a wide variety of different vendors. We see if we can really double down on what we believe are our strong suits, we can leave other aspects of the manufacturing stage to other companies that are, are better suited, are bigger and can focus on their laser cutting and we can focus on some different aspects of fabrication that we feel we can do really well. When you bring it all together, it can offer a much more competitive price point.
Rob Hamm:
Thank you for that insight. Leading into the next section with welding and fabrication, Pete, you’ve been a weld engineer at R-V industries for quite some time now. Do you have any advice or tips for designers and engineers when designing a new product?
Pete Koegel:
That’s our core competency here at R-V is welding. Out of our 160 manufacturing employees, about 95 of those are fabricators, fitters and welders. One thing that we see that comes in kind of a full array on a drawing is weld symbols. I feel like that’s one place we consistently add a lot of value to designers and we are always, looking to make sure that what they have annotated on the drawing is what they want, be it a full penetration, whether it’s not a full pen, sometimes we see fillet welds with no size noted on there. Another thing to really think about with welding, if you had any type of quantity that you’re designing for, anything over, depending on the size, maybe 10, 20, 30, 50 parts a year even, really trying to look at design for automation. We have a robotic welding system. The cost of automation, the capital cost to put an automated cell in is a lot lower today than it was 10 years ago. So there’s really a big opportunity if you can design it with fill it welds with a tab and slot laser cut parts to really bring the cost down to get your part intended for a robot. Anytime you, have specialty alloys it’s really important to think about distortion and how that material is going to react to the amount of welding that you have designed into it. We touched a little bit about inspection, but it’s just really important to also note, does this need visually inspected, a liquid penetrant, spectate, x-ray, inspected. Again, all that stuff that’s cost and all that stuff makes sure that your part is done and conforming to how you want it to be manufactured.
Rob Hamm:
Pete thanks for your insight into the welding processes. Allen do you have anything regarding machining or a special process for machining?
Allen Stoltzfus:
Definitely. This ties in well to when we were talking about dimensioning, tight tolerance, and that kind of stuff. The reality of it is for a lot of items that we’re looking at that we’re manufacturing, need steps beyond the fabrication level to accomplish what it needs to do. That might be, a tight finished on a surface, it might need to be parallel to another surface or maybe it just has a few drilled and tapped holes to mount a bracket to something else. All of those are, are generally a great fit for, for machining. The different levels we look for are, are we machining small aspects before welding it together or are we machining it as what we would call it as a final weldment. Often we’re looking at machining items after it’s welded together. Our reason for that is items move as we’re welding them due to heat distortion. Plates might shift slightly, and in order to get everything flat, we need to skim the surface of that. Some important aspects to think about as a design engineer for that are, is this item easy to machine after everything’s welded together and what are the steps as that’s being done. An example of that is if you have a plate that has a few items welded around it, underneath it, on top of it, and you want a, a flat surface on the top of that, then you need to look into adding a little extra material onto that before it’s welded together. So that when we go to machine and we take a little bit off of that surface and you end up hitting the dimension you need at the end. That’s often something that we as a fabricator when we’re looking at quoting these jobs, we’ll make sure there’s what we call machine allowance to allow for that skim surface so that when we cut it, it comes down to the dimension we need. It’s always important to have that discussion and also as a designer to be thinking about those important characteristics on the design stage because it can really affect how items are machined at the end. It’s really a large topic and you go into a lot of different in-depth analysis. We have a large machine shop at R-V industries and can handle a wide variety of things and also work with a lot of good vendors that we can send things out to when we can’t hit what we need to do with the job.
Pete Koegel:
That could be like specialized cutting, like EDM, unique five-axis cutting that maybe we don’t have the ability to do in house. We have plenty of a supply chain of vendors to support us with that.
Allen Stoltzfus:
Without going into too much of a deep dive into this, that’s where you can really start to compare the costs of fabricating something versus machining. Is it more expensive to start out with a large block of something and cut it down? Or is it better to weld on some different geometric shapes to the side of something to hit what you’re trying to accomplish as a finished item? That’s where it’s important if you don’t have that experience of understanding to work with a manufacturer that can answer those questions and at the same time give you, pricing on those different options. I think as someone that estimates a lot of jobs, that’s where I probably see some of the largest volatility or price comparisons between different things is how you machine something and if you are machining it. If you add 10 hours of machining to something, it can make a massive price difference and it’s, it’s definitely something to be considering in the design stage.
Rob Hamm:
We talked about cutting, welding, machining, pre-machining versus final machining. How does final finishing effect with the type of material the customer is using?
Allen Stoltzfus:
That’s definitely an important question. A rough breakdown of it is when you’re working with, with carbon steel, if you don’t have any kind of surface finish on it, any kind of paint after its cut and welded and done, you’re going to get rust. For almost every application, if it’s bare carbon steel at the end, it’s going to be finished in some way. Then you have your stainless steels, different nickel alloys and with many of those, they don’t require any paint or any plating. They’re not near as susceptible to rusting or different kinds of corrosion. At the same time, sometimes the paint can really protect the surface. It might be an aesthetic of it. Then you also have aluminum where we often work with anodizing things. We send those out to different vendors or that can be painted as well if it’s prepped correctly. The long and short of it is almost any fabricated manufactured item has some kind of surface finish or at least some kind of post-weld cleaning that gets rid of different contaminations on the surface.
Rob Hamm:
It’s great having a partner like you guys who can leverage your own expertise and skilled craftsmen as well as your vendors. Putting all this together is challenging enough. How do you guys manage a quality program in this environment?
Pete Koegel:
The quality program or quality requirements of a part kind of start with the industry that it’s being supplied into? We have a nuclear quality assurance program. We’ve got an ASME pressure vessel program. We also have a general fabrication quality assurance manual. The components that we make all are falling into different types of industries that have different practices. What we try to do is take the part and the industry that it’s in and run that through one of our three quality programs that make the most sense. They all overlap with inspection processes and procedures and personnel. The important thing to consider is are you doing enough to make sure that you’re compliant and are you potentially asking for too much that might be driving the cost up. We found that it’s really helped and it’s really clarified when a designer or an engineer is including, the level of documentation the level of inspection, the type of inspection that they want, the code of construction that they want this built to, all right on the drawing. It takes a lot of the guesswork out for us and it makes it very clear to what they expect their part to meet when it’s done, when it’s finished, what code construction are we inspecting these parts to, say visually or x-ray or liquid penetrant test and it doesn’t leave anything up for us to interpret, and they get exactly what they’re asking for.
Rob Hamm:
When you’re looking for a vendor or for a manufacturer, as a customer, if I were to start seeking out a manufacturing partner for my new project, what would you suggest that people look for when choosing a manufacturing partner? What’s the, what are the important factors to seek out?
Allen Stoltzfus:
There’s definitely a lot of, different important areas and different angles to look at it. I would say one of the key concepts is to focus on what is the bulk of the project. Is this a really simple metal item that has a lot of post-fabrication processes, whether it’s painting or plating or something else, or is this primarily a weldment or is it maybe just a really high quantity of a simple laser cut item? All those questions can point you in the direction of what kind of company you want to approach to have this done. I think one thing that really helps us, R-V industries as a manufacturer, in dealing with customers, we’re definitely not always the best ones to take on different jobs and we can be the first to tell you when it really isn’t a good fit. One thing that really benefits us is we work in a very wide variety of industries. As Pete mentioned, even just with our quality, there’s a lot of different aspects in that depending on the kind of jobs we’re working with. Whether it’s, it’s a simple job without a lot of quality requirements, maybe without a lot of inspection, et cetera. We can do well with that. It might be a really high tech job working with a lot of high nickel alloys, different expensive metals that are hard to work with. We can have experience with that as well. At the same time, we can point people in the right direction to another company. That’s always a good sign and something I like to see with companies. As I go out to different vendors for applications and stuff. Sometimes they just tell me, Hey, we’re not a great fit for this, but here’s the contact info of someone else that can maybe answer your question. That’s always something that’s good and I think important to look for. If you go to someone that really says they can just answer all your questions and everything’s easy. While it might be true, honesty is always the best approach. When I have someone that can give me a clear answer to something and tell me whether or not they’re a good fit for it and why I think that really answers a lot of questions and helps me to feel more at ease when I’m going out to different vendors.
Pete Koegel:
To add on that, Allen, I think a common theme of what you’re talking about here is trust, and experience with one another. As you said, it’s easy to hear what you want to hear from someone that you gave your drawing to or you’re getting a quote from. But building a level of trust with someone is going to pay dividends for yourself and the organization that you work for, really, for a long period of time. We call it a partner, and the idea here is synchronizing your product line, the developments that you’re making with the experience that we have as a manufacturer in all these different topics. We’ve had numerous relationships with customers for decades in some cases at this point. I think it just goes to show the importance of building that trust and building a relationship and making the opportunity for yourself and us to be successful together.
Rob Hamm:
Yes, thanks so much for that Pete and thank you to Alan. It’s always a pleasure getting deeper insights into industrial fabrication. You were listening to an episode covering synchronizing innovation with manufacturability. Get Sparked is a series of episodes covering unique solutions to complex manufacturing problems. For more information, feel free to reach out to R-V industries online and talk to one of our representatives like Pete or Allen, who you’ve heard from today. Thanks again for joining us.
