Producing sustainable steel is ArcelorMittal Long Products Canada’s prize goal. Yet, even as one of North America’s most respected steel producers, achieving carbon-neutral steel production within the next three decades remains a gargantuan feat – one that the company is working relentlessly on achieving. With upholding the Paris Agreement as its guideline, the company is acutely aware of dotting its i’s and crossing its t’s throughout every stage of its sustainable steel production processes.

Considering the company’s noble mandate to lighten its impact on the planet, it seemed nearly poetic, landing an interview with Francois Perras, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Philippe Boulanger, Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, on International Earth Day, April 22 of this year. Since the original Canadian operation opened its doors on St Patrick Street, Montreal in 1914, it has never looked back. Through several acquisitions over the following decades, the company was sold to steel giant, Mittal Canada, in 2006, merged with Arcelor in July, and became ArcelorMittal that same year.

Prioritizing sustainability
Headquartered in Contrecoeur, Quebec, the firm partners mainly with automotive, construction, welding, and manufacturing industries, among others. Part of the global giant ArcelorMittal, the Quebec outfit has sister mining and steel operations in Canada, including some located in Port-Cartier and Ontario’s Concord, Hamilton, and Woodstock.

“For us, steel is definitely part of the solution to fight climate change. It is an infinitely recyclable material and plays a role in modern infrastructure,” says Perras. “Long Products Canada is, we believe, very well positioned to support this fight. With our current operation model, our initiative to further reduce our carbon footprint, and with all our great people, we’re always up to the challenge. We are ready to improve as we go.”

These inspiring words are not mere wishful thinking, either. The company’s leadership is fully aware of the inherent challenges, and frank about natural resources being finite. “We cannot take something out of the Earth and believe that it will always be replaced. [Our sustainability decisions] are [long-term]. We are thoughtful of the impact we have. Steel takes a lot of energy, a lot of resources. We want to make sure it is done sustainably so that there is a future for our kids, a future for our industry,” Perras says, underlining the importance of avoiding waste at all costs.

The company has proven itself in several other industries also. “If a light or heavy truck is circling North American roads, there is certainly some ArcelorMittal Long Products Canada steel in it,” Perras says. This is the impressive statement that first caught this author’s eye when I was introduced to this game-changing firm. On further inspection, one discovers that ArcelorMittal is the biggest fabricator of leaf springs used in wheel suspensions and a trusted partner supplying steel to parts manufacturers that serve some of the largest automotive companies in the U.S. and Canada. “It is impossible to choose the best ones. We love all our customers,” both leaders agree.

As Canada’s largest producer of rebar products and also one of the most environmentally responsible, there are several ways in which Long Products Canada mitigates its already low carbon emissions. The company is astute and pragmatic in its approach to self-sufficiency, mining iron ore locally in the province of Quebec, which is then transported over comparatively short distances to its processing facilities. Every year the company invests between $20 million and $30 million on upgrades and equipment maintenance to ensure optimally reduced emissions.

Using hydroelectricity as a main source of energy, Long Products Canada recently installed energy-efficient reheat furnaces that came at a hefty price tag of around $70 million, making its product one of the lowest carbon-emitting steels on the market. The wire rod mill will be upgraded at the end of 2021, increasing its capacity over 100,000 tons, according to Perras. Since 2018, the company has invested over $160 million to secure the future of sustainability for its long products Canadian plants and facilities.

Smart technology investments are another driver toward becoming greener. “When the replacements were done for the reheat furnaces in the past year, we chose the most efficient equipment available. We reduced our emissions by tens of thousands of tons of CO₂ by doing this,” says Perras.

Always evolving
Long Products Canada is a powerful, diverse company optimized for efficiency within its closed-loop supply chain. Iron ore is extracted by its mining outfit along the northern coastline of Quebec and turned into a large range of steel products. To ensure the responsible re-use of scrap, the team founded a new joint venture, Integrated Metal Recycling (IRM), in 2020 to handle recycling – a process that supports both sustainable and regenerative design. Amidst debate on what material is the most recycled on the planet, steel can arguably be considered the leader by weight. And in this field, the company claims the position of largest local steel recycler in the province of Quebec by transforming up to a whopping 1 million tons of scrap into new, top-quality steel annually.

While Long Products Canada fabricates steel products for the automotive, heavy equipment, and construction industries, one sister operation, ArcelorMittal Dofasco, is part of its highly integrated value chain where steel is rolled and taken through several more stages of fabrication. Beyond this well-organized group of facilities, the company’s global research and development (R&D) team is another force to be reckoned with.

“We do our research and development with our customers,” says Boulanger. “People are saying that construction is not evolving. But [it] is evolving.” To this end, the R&D team is constantly working to improve and evolve its offering to support its clients’ environmental goals. “Our most recent developments include high tensile martensitic grades promoting vehicle light weighting without compromising the properties of the part in question as well as bainitic grades for hot forging and cold heading applications that allow customers to reach their desired properties without any heat treatment, therefore reducing the carbon footprint of these products.”

Another of its new concepts, Steligence®, treats the construction phase of every building as the transient creation process of a permanent yet evolving module that will serve those who occupy and give it life for decades – even centuries. “On the global front, two years ago we launched our Steligence® brand,” explains Boulanger. “Steligence® is the way that ArcelorMittal is now using a philosophy based on science that proposes building holistically and using ArcelorMittal steel solutions integrated into buildings that will improve their environmental, economic and social impact while enhancing the functionality and aesthetics of the building,” he explains. This philosophy is supported by modern, leading edge steel solutions that consider the full life cycle of building and fully enable sustainable construction.

Leading a winning team
Of course, COVID-19 arrived as a disruptor to the ArcelorMittal family of companies. The Long Products Canada team adapted accordingly but did have to halt operations temporarily following lockdown orders in several parts of the world. But, after business returned to normal at the end of the year, the firm is once again operating at levels similar to prior to the pandemic.

“The resilience [our employees showed] as they had to navigate through this new normal, adapting to new health restrictions that we’re not out of yet, working at home, protecting their families, and making sure that the business was still answering our customers’ needs, showed us the importance of steel and that it’s part of the fabric of life. It created a lot of pride and ownership in our people,” says Perras.

Long Products Canada is about all of its 1,800 employees, first. That quickly became apparent when I asked Perras for the company’s definition of safe and sustainable steel. “For us, our main objective is that when everybody comes to work, they have a great experience but also [that] when they leave work they are in the same or even better shape than when they came in. That is number one. We want everybody to be able to enjoy their lives at work and home and be safe everywhere,” he says.

This means that nobody’s safety or wellbeing is compromised for the sake of production. “This is the number one [driver] of every decision we make. It has to be present all the time,” Perras adds. In turn, company staff benefit from incredible growth opportunities. “Our sandbox is very large,” he says. Alongside international assignments, the company offers professional development through training opportunities like its proprietary ArcelorMittal online university.

Naturally, the success of the customers they partner with forms part of the team’s strong sense of responsibility. “[We are on] a journey with our customers as well,” says Boulanger. “That part is really important. When we talk about making responsible choices, we also look at [the quality and innovation] of the product we offer to our customers.”

Supporting the arts
The firm appreciates and supports its local communities as well as the arts – in this case, art that supports workers’ rights. ArcelorMittal Long Products Canada donated 20, 24-ton steel slabs, 10 meters high, for a sculpture by Armand Vaillancourt, “La Force Ouvrière” or “The Labour Force” in the Parc Michel-Chartrand in Longueuil, Quebec, where it also has a plant. The piece is a monument that celebrates the late labour activist and union leader, Michel Chartrand, for his contribution to labour equality and improving workers’ rights in Quebec. Thanks to the weight and dimension of the mammoth steel plinths, “La Force Ouvrière” achieves a tremendous sense of presence – one that succeeds in visually communicating the power of worker unity and cooperation for their shared benefit.

STEM education is another cause the company works to build awareness around to ensure that the quality of education and the people entering its workforce remains high. In addition, it supports the United Way, the well-known international aid organization to which the firm has donated around $3 million through company-wide efforts over many years.

Forging ahead
Being highly responsive to customer needs is a source of great pride at Long Products Canada. To future-proof this capacity, the firm insists on remaining flexible and moving with the zeitgeist. In the spirit of perpetual evolution, the firm is exploring new ways of shrinking its greenhouse gas emissions further by employing hydrogen, biochar, and other technologies. In 2020, it started a company-wide transformation initiative to speed up change. In an ongoing effort, it is rethinking and streamlining its processes, weeding out the deadwood of unnecessary tasks, and creating optimal flow between functions, making it more adaptable and consistent.

As automation and digitalization grow, ArcelorMittal Long Products Canada continues to find new ways to improve its production methods and shrink its carbon footprint. With the help of automation, it also continues to move people out of dangerous and menial tasks into safer and more fulfilling jobs. Looking toward 2050, the company’s goals are clear. By 2025 it is set to be a world leader in steel production while also being a transparent and supportive presence in its host communities – and we have no doubt that this dynamic company will reach its carbon-neutral steel production goals way ahead of schedule.

The post Transforming Tomorrow<p class="company">ArcelorMittal Long Products Canada</p> appeared first on Manufacturing In Focus.

Pueblo’s growth skyrocketed when the private equity group Huron Capital acquired the company in 2017. The company immediately began acquiring other mechanical firms to join the Pueblo name. These acquisitions, along with ongoing organic growth, took the company from a $65 million a year business to a $120 million a year business. “We’re talking 180 percent growth over a two-year period,” says Sales and Marketing Vice President Brandon Hunt.

Huron Capital gives Pueblo the freedom to run the business while providing the funding and know-how needed to grow successfully. “We’re the operators. Where they positively impact is being able to provide the resources and the financial backing,” Hunt says.

Pueblo’s Service division experienced particularly strong growth over the last two years of expansion. Originally, the company concentrated on installations, but, with an expanded focus and new leadership on board, the company now boasts a full-fledged Service department. Where service work previously only made up about five to ten percent of the business of Pueblo and its recently acquired companies, now, this work makes up more than thirty-five percent.

“Being a combined company, taking [the acquired companies’] resources with the Controls business that we already have and making one big business with strong leadership, we were able to expand not only our products, but we were able to expand our capabilities,” he explains, and through one of its acquisitions, the company now can offer customers the Controls product line of Schneider, an international leader in the industry.

Maintaining a cohesive company culture has been important during this short period of rapid growth and multiple acquisitions. Leadership was careful to buy companies with similar cultures that would integrate well to create a unified whole.

“We felt the culture that they had [needed to be] close to our culture so, as we combined as a company, there wouldn’t be miles to go to be able to have one team,” Hunt says.

Once combined, management allowed plenty of time for successful integration. “We didn’t change anything. We didn’t come in [and say]: ‘You’ve got a new boss; you’re going here; you’re doing this.’ We let them operate, and we really found synergy between the organizations and the cultures.”

This allowed the company to recognize what worked well and keep those aspects of each acquired company. “We came up with best practices,” he says. “This is a combined effort to be successful.”

One of the key components of the company culture is a steadfast dedication to safety. With nearly five hundred employees working in potentially dangerous job sites, a lot can go wrong “if you’re not paying attention.” It is “a priority as an organization to make sure everybody has it top of mind.” This requires commitment from office workers, management, and employees in the field.

“It starts at the top, from our CEOs to COOs to vice presidents,” Hunt says, “and it has to go all the way through the organization. Everyone’s got to have that safety-first culture.”

Part of this includes “tons and tons of safety training. We will never turn down anybody in any position that wants safety training,” he says, “and we have the resources to do that training. We’ve got an in-house safety officer that’s got the highest safety credentials you could have.”

The company’s guarantee of safety is just one component of its overall dedication to employees; it also supports them through open communication. “Every new hire goes to breakfast with their CEO,” Hunt says. “We’re big business, with five hundred employees, $120 million in revenue, the largest mechanical in the state of Arizona, but we don’t want to operate that way.” Instead, he explains, the company wants to operate like a small business where the CEO’s door is always open. “We’ve really tried to protect the family culture as we’ve grown into the largest mechanical in the state.”

The company also supported employees through the executive training program in which a group of selected individuals took on a twelve-month research project on employee engagement. The goal was to uncover “what it really means to be an employer of choice and be engaged with your employees.”

They learned that training, mentorship, and communication are all crucial factors when it comes to maintaining employee engagement and satisfaction. “Those are the things we try to instill throughout the entire organization,” Hunt says.

The company’s pledge of quality goes above and beyond what might be expected. Pueblo’s total quality management program carefully oversees the quality of the designs and provides customer solutions. As well, a quality team is sent to inspect work in the field. “If we have a mistake in the field, we want to catch it ourselves and not have our customer catch it,” he says.

“So we have a full-blown quality program that is led by a professional engineer that’s involved in the entire business—designing it and selling it but also taking a look at the systems and the process. Oftentimes, people think of quality as just checking to make sure the glass is clean when the job is done. That’s not at all what our quality program is. Our quality program is making sure we have the right processes in place to catch things. So we rate the performance of each of our jobs and each of our employees. We are looking at different types of specs. We’re not just making sure it’s shiny.”

Pueblo supports diversity and actively encourages women to join the team. As well as being the right thing to do, bringing more women into the company helps solve the workforce shortage that the industry faces. “People are retiring; people are leaving, and we don’t have the people coming up to replace that,” Hunt says.

Management sat down and put their heads together to try and solve the problem. “We looked at it and said, ‘Hey, we’re missing essentially fifty percent of the market out there by not having a very strong female presence.’ And so we really made it a culture shift and a topic.”

After researching employee satisfaction, the executive training program turned its attention to improving gender diversity. “They went through a full year of research interviewing different companies nationally and came back with suggestions of what we’re going to do as an organization.” Now, the company makes sure to actively recruit women and strives to have as many female applicants as male applicants. “[We’re] really making it a mission,” Hunt says.

Pueblo’s fully accredited apprenticeship program gives women and men who are eager to learn but have no experience, an opportunity to establish a career in the industry. “[We] find people and build them ourselves and create mentorship programs,” he says. “We feel that if we can build from within and train them, there will be employees for a lifetime.”

The company plans to continue expanding both organically and through additional acquisitions. The goal is to become “not only a leader in Arizona in the mechanical, plumbing and controls world but in the southwest and beyond,” Hunt says. With a strong track record of recent growth, it seems only a matter of time before Pueblo expands beyond Arizona to become a regional powerhouse.

The post Strong Growth, Strong Culture<p class="company">Pueblo Mechanical & Controls</p> appeared first on Manufacturing In Focus.

Asked about Dual Temp’s sure-footed evolution over a half-century, Bradley Noel, President of this Lehigh Valley company says, “One of my thoughts on that is that Dual Temp keeps evolving. We look beyond the day-to-day challenges to where tomorrow is going to have opportunities. We also take care of our employees. We offer them a great place to work with excellent health benefits and opportunities to grow their career to the next level.”

Promotion from within is a strategy that has long served Dual Temp well. The company ensures that there are comprehensive digital and traditional training resources available to ensure its employee-partners have opportunities to advance their careers. All of the project managers, service managers, and CAD professionals at Dual Temp got their start in the field.

“It’s important to show a career path for our field staff. This could be exceling in technical trade expertise, or moving into an office role. I can feel our team improving each time we fill an office leadership role with someone who has come from the field,” said Noel.

“We have a full catalog of digital training we can leverage. We can assign it to people and help them meet their goals for their career, or help set goals for them in their career, and increase the use of technology – to our advantage – to get them there,” said Noel.

Dakota Brown is an employee partner who has grown his career with Dual Temp, moving up through the ranks to assume the role of service manager. Reflecting on his success, Brown says, “If you want long term success, you have to have employees that are happy. You have to show your employees that there’s the ability for them to grow into other roles as part of their career.

“It’s that kind of place that’s going to keep pushing us forward as we look to tomorrow and the next challenge.”

The next challenge
In this case, the next challenge is addressing the increase in demand for services while also overcoming a persistent skilled labor shortage. Part of the reason for the increase in demand is the legislative changes aimed at optimizing indoor air quality (IAQ) to minimize airborne COVID transmission.

“There’s money available to companies who take advantage and apply for funding to make investments in their indoor air quality so that their employees are safer, and they can [safely] bring people back to their buildings,” says Brown.

He notes that Dual Temp is more than happy to help clients devise a strategy to take advantage of that funding so as to have optimum impact on buildings and employees.

Brown acknowledges that every building is different, but that, nevertheless, Dual Temp always offers a true full-service experience for its customers. “We sit down on a case-by-case basis and make our recommendations based on their indoor air quality and the design of their system, and we make adjustments to their building automation systems.

“We have competitors who say they’re a full-service mechanical contractor, except they don’t do this or that. We really do all of it. We really can provide that one-stop destination for our customers to get the services that they need, in a timely fashion and with absolute transparency,” says Noel.

Transparency through technology
Transparency, in the case of Dual Temp, is a competitive advantage and a point of differentiation, and technology has a role to play in this regard. For twelve years, Dual Temp has invested in ensuring that the latest technologies and innovations are integrated into their operations. This includes ‘video-reporting’ for their customers’ peace of mind and a guarantee of a job well done.

According to Brown, “A lot of the time in our industry, the only things a customer sees from us are check-in, check-out, and billing. They don’t see what’s going on up on their roof – it’s a mystery to them. But with the video reporting that we provide to our customers we can be absolutely transparent with them, so they not only know that we were on the site, but they see exactly what we’re seeing, and they see exactly what we did.”

Optimizing with SightCall
Dual Temp’s technology-enabled team-based approach is facilitated by a platform called SightCall, which is an enterprise-grade video cloud program that gives the Dual Temp team scalability and capacity across its footprint, and a process by which its day-to-day operations can be optimized.

“It was already part of our culture to leverage technology, but we had to start looking at other ways to use technology through things like SightCall so that we can support that greener technician while they’re on the job,” says Brown.

SightCall provides connectivity amongst the various divisions and allows technicians on site to video conference product- or service-specific experts to troubleshoot any problems and deliver the optimum solution and the greatest possible value to the customer.

Each employee-partner at Dual Tech is valued because the company’s leadership team knows that success comes from the strength of the sum of its parts, which is why connectivity tools like SightCall are elevating the level of service it provides.

“We use technology, we have good people, we value them. We work together as one big company, one big team with our diverse backgrounds, fusing all that stuff together with the resources, the logistics – just making sure that people can stay on the job and support the territory we have,” says Brown, and he emphasizes that the company’s goal is to do so safely, above all else.

Efficiency with skilled labor
Efficiency is key to maximize the value of the company’s skilled labor more effectively. The company instituted material support and logistics to ensure that technicians have the materials on-site when they need them, instead of having to source them on their own, which caused delays and wasted valuable time.

“In the past we would have our field foremen and our field technicians run for parts, but skilled talent is too valuable to be running logistics for parts pickup. We support them in the field with our logistics team to get them what they need, when they need it, and to let them focus their unique skilled talents on the mechanical project, service call, or construction job that they’re on,” Noel says.

Prioritizing safety
“I always say that safety comes first. Safety comes before profit. Safety comes before project schedule. Safety even comes before keeping the customer happy,” says Noel. “It’s up to us to prioritize our own safety and safety is an expectation.”

Brown echoes this sentiment: “That [attitude] trickles down through all the departments starting from Brad. We all know the expectation that our employee-partners show up here for work whole. They show up a certain way and we make sure they go home a certain way. Everyone needs to make sure they look out for themselves and the people they work with.”

Dual Temp also prioritizes the community. The three areas of emphasis in its philanthropic outreach are education, in particular reading programs for kindergarten through grade three students; food access programs to support the one in ten people in Lehigh Valley who struggle with food access; and seniors who are dependent on others for their basic needs.

“We’re cornerstone partners with the United Way of the Greater Lehigh Valley. These guys are experts at delivering these services where they are needed most and we participate with our time and our dollars,” says Noel.

Dual Temp hosts what it calls an annual Day of Caring, which is a day dedicated to getting its employees out in the community to volunteer in some way, be it Meals on Wheels, or performing maintenance and upkeep on a local youth home. Employees are paid for their workday but spend it in the community making it a better place for them all to call home.

The people of Dual Temp believe in leaving spaces better than when they found them, and in an industry that’s typically slow to evolve, it blazes a trail using technology and innovation to foster its own culture of success. And of course, seek out opportunity for the future.

A future with Dual Temp
Noel and Brown close by promoting a career with Dual Temp and a job in mechanical contracting in general, given the continued focus on improving indoor air quality generally. And of course, there’s also the consistent demand for mechanical retrofits and building improvements that will undoubtedly power the industry for the conceivable future.

“It’s a great industry to get into if you’re looking for employment. Or if you’re in a building trade right now and looking for a change, mechanical contracting – HVAC – is a really good move because you’ll always have work, you’re always busy, and it will only become more so.

“We have the technology available to us,” Brown adds, “the training, the resources, the support. If you want to make a move, we’ll support that change and we’re able to help build that new career path at our company.”

The post Where Success Thrives<p class="company">Dual Temp Company</p> appeared first on Manufacturing In Focus.

DAP America’s parent company is in Bielefeld, Germany and has three primary manufacturing plants in the Czech Republic, Romania, and China, alongside subsidiaries in Southern and Central Europe trading as DAP Italy, DAP France, and DAP Poland, all handling distribution. DAP America trades throughout Canada, the United States, and Mexico, as far south as Argentina, providing sales, field service, applications consulting and technical support.

Brands represented include Dürkopp Adler, Pfaff, and KSL, while its variety of technologies accounts for industrial processes such as automated sewing stations, sophisticated software, and robotic systems. These offerings ensure flow improvement and allow for generous margins resulting from the quality stitching needed to make products with the luxury edge that discerning users demand.

In 2018, we reported on how our world is held together by DAP America’s renowned sewing technology. Little did anyone know then that the industrial sewing giant’s innovation would soon also be responsible for holding together the personal protective equipment (PPE) that would ultimately save the lives of many Americans.

There is hardly an aspect of its business that did not see an epic 2019–2020 thanks to the leap that COVID-19 spurred in the firm’s capabilities. As fate and fortune would have it, this company held the key to what has arguably become the hottest mask manufacturing technology in the world. Creating this unique machinery has changed how masks are made.

“Given our technologies, we were able to make a couple of plays that helped us to stay financially viable and healthy in that sense and, more importantly, being able to safeguard citizens against the public health challenge of COVID-19,” says DAP America President Mariano Amezcua.

While everyone knows and understands old-fashioned sewing, fabric welding is a new method used on specialized fabrics. “To a certain extent, [fabric welding] has been a bit of a niche technology. For example, the Crew Dragon Demo-2 space mission’s space suits were made with PFAFF Industrial welding equipment. So it’s always been a bit of a high-tech, unique niche application,” says Amezcua. The method is increasingly used on polymer-based personal protection equipment (PPE) to protect the integrity of seams and thus prevent the spread of the virus to healthcare workers and first responders.

The company works with partners that are known for pushing the boundaries of fabric and design. DAP America had collaborated with one of these esteemed partners, The University of Cincinnati College of Design Architecture Art and Planning (DAAP), before COVID-19. As DAAP is one of the twenty best international design schools, DAP America would have been hard-pressed to find a better partner.

“They’re one of the premier institutes when it comes to design in academia. We had partnered with them before, giving them some of our technology that they [then] had on hand. [With the pandemic], they immediately rose to the challenge by experimenting and working with their local community to support initiatives,” says Amezcua. As soon as COVID-19 hit, the University of Cincinnati’s DAAP team got straight to work to design and develop a superior face mask.

The project was led by Professor Ashley Newsome Kubley, head of the Evelyn G. Burgoyne Fashion Technology Center and assistant professor of fashion design at the Myron E. Ullman Jr. School of Design at The University of Cincinnati College of Design Architecture Art and Planning. The Fashion Technology Center started to take shape toward the end of 2018, driven by the globalization and automation of the fashion industry.

“This center was started on the feedback we [received] from our industry partners and the fact that the fashion industry and the design industry were changing and moving toward technology-driven initiatives and integration of automation,” says Kubley. The professor then led an initiative to make the latest equipment and technology available to students, giving them hands-on experience with industry-standard machines and knowledge to empower them in their roles when they enter the apparel job market.

Allowing students to spend time learning contemporary skills brings the college’s curriculum in line with the university’s cooperative education program that expects students to commit to compulsory internships in their field of study spaced over alternate semesters during their undergraduate and graduate courses. “Our university is very connected to industry because students have five internships throughout their undergraduate degree over five years. They go to different companies all around the country and all around the world, actually working and getting paid to be designers before they graduate,” Kubley says.

The Fashion Technology Center is the home of a PFAFF 8312 ultrasonic welding machine and an 8303i that does continuous seam welding. The idea came about when DAP America President Amezcua and The Myron E. Ullman, Jr. School of Design’s Endowed Chair and Director Dr. Gjoko Muratovski agreed that the machines would be a decidedly positive addition to the school’s facilities. “The machines [have given] students a huge opportunity to learn a brand new, specific, useful, and relevant technology. This is of particular interest to students who are interested in designing activewear, outerwear, footwear, and other applications that are PPE-related, so things for workwear,” Kubley says.

By the time the reality of the effects of the COVID-19 virus struck home, the machines had not been onsite long. “All the students were learning, day and night. [Then] everything came to a grinding halt all at once. Although sales and industry felt like it was stopping, education kept on going,” says Kubley. It was time to strategize. Setting up the machines had demanded a significant capital outlay, and now they risked remaining dormant until normalcy returned.

Research and production could go on, however. Kubley joined in a mission to devise a strategy that would see PPE produced and delivered to first responders, medical and healthcare workers, people working in primary care facilities, educators, and other essential service providers serving in the University of Cincinnati’s networks and beyond.

“We [could create] a seamless union [between] two polymers [through] some heat source that prevents the penetration of the COVID virus [to] protect the health and safety of our healthcare workers that were [and still are] fighting the good fight,” Amezcua says.

It was an exhilarating time, although challenges were plenty. Traditional sewing causes perforations that can potentially offer the COVID-19 virus admission to the wearer’s respiratory system. Instead, PFAFF Industrial machines fused fabrics without stitches, and this method was the best way to create large volumes of masks, fast. With very few other materials to work with due to the lockdown and a goal of creating two thousand masks in a month, Kubley and her team had their work cut out. Several partners made valuable donations of fabric and other construction materials for the masks.

“We dialed the process into the ultrasonic sewing machine. Every aspect of the construction of the mask was done with the welding machine. We laser-cut all the pattern shapes for the actual mask design itself, and then we used the ultrasonic welding machine to create this fused seam in the front which makes the mask air-tight and the shape is a lot more comfortable to wear than conventional pleated masks,” Kubley tells us. The team was unable to find elastic, which meant that the bindings were also laser cut while a clever, easy-to-follow guideline gave helpers an intuitive pattern of sorts that they could follow as they fed the masks to the machine.

DAAP reached its goal of delivering two thousand masks in a month: one thousand disposable and one thousand washable. Three thousand more followed, and over forty people were trained to use the equipment. The PFAFF Industrial welding machine is so simple to operate that even those usually reluctant to use industrial machines lost their reserve when they realized how easy it was to use this technology. Not everyone who helped sew masks knew how to sew. Volunteers, engineering students, and industrial design students could pitch in to make masks using the ultrasonic welding machine.

Today, research continues into new fabric welding applications. One example, raised by Amezcua, is the rideshare movement, where fabric contamination from paper cuts to pets or children becoming unwell is a genuine concern, and navigating the often exotic microbiomes of public vehicles is an issue that needs serious consideration. “Due to the social trends where we’re going into this rideshare type of community, I see [the] automotive [industry] looking more and more at how [to] use the fabric welding technology in the production of automotive interiors,” says Amezcua.

The company’s next great achievement of 2020 was the automated face mask making machines it created and delivered to the state of Ohio in record time. The machines were fabricated in Europe and assembled in the U.S. “We went from a napkin sketch to loading a fully automated [ready to assemble] system onto a plane within roughly six weeks,” says Amezcua.

Based in Cleveland, Ohio, the Manufacturing Advocacy and Growth Network (Magnet) assists small to medium-sized manufacturers in Northern Ohio with varying levels of assistance to help boost their effectiveness and profitability in the state of Ohio. At the start of the pandemic, the group was mandated to act as an intermediary between the governor’s office, hospital system, and the state’s manufacturing industry. The aim was to drive the transition from standard manufacturing to PPE manufacturing. Carla Macklin was a consultant on the Magnet task force that assisted manufacturers in fabricating masks, helping with everything from creating patterns to sharing sewing know-how.

“Through this consulting project, Magnet, along with the state, identified that there was going to be a gap in what the manufacturers could produce in terms of cotton face masks and what the state wanted to buy immediately. Even after [converting] twelve manufacturers to start making masks, [they were] still millions of masks short in meeting Ohio’s demand,” she says. The state of Ohio turned to Dürkopp Adler to help with that. “It truly was incredible to watch a concept of a mask shared via sketches turn into a piece of automated equipment that could produce huge volumes of these masks within about six weeks,” Macklin adds.

The speed at which this project came to life was nothing short of breathtaking. On the day of our interview in May this year, Buckeye Mask Company’s fabrication count stood at 8.14 million masks, and in collaboration with its partner Stitches U.S.A., 65,000 masks are produced by nine automated machines in any given sixteen-hour workday. For machines in the testing phase that landed on 1 August 2020, that is a phenomenal performance by anybody’s standards.

“This was a unique request. When we got it, we didn’t necessarily have a system in place. We [had] weekly or twice weekly conference calls with Germany and the folks up in Ohio figuring out how to possibly do this. We had never built a system like this. This group wanted North American-based manufacturing with top-quality German manufacturing to support them,” says Amezcua.

The state of Ohio set the bar rather high – they challenged Dürkopp Adler to create a never-before-seen automated fabric mask system that not only would be more cost-effective per use and more sustainable than disposables, but also capable of delivering on a ten-million mask contract. The cotton, reusable masks needed to be washable and durable so that the state’s workforce could get back to their jobs. An all-hands effort included the support of a local senator who requested approval from the state department so that the company’s German technicians could fly to Ohio to assist in initial set-up and machine start-up.

Considering that it took around fifty people to bring this to life across continents brings home the importance of combining technology with teamwork and vision. Once again, DAP America leads the world of sewing into a new epoch with style, determination, and state-of-the-art technology.

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Steadily growing since it was founded in 1990, HAHN today has, besides its German and USA operations, strategic locations in the Czech Republic, Great Britain, Croatia, Austria, Mexico, Turkey, and other sites.

With many companies and brands under the umbrella including WEMO Automation, HAHN Robotics, Invotec, Rethink Robotics and REI Automation, the respected business has a powerful presence in the United States as HAHN Automation, Inc.

Located in Hebron, Kentucky, HAHN Automation was formed in the U.S. over 20 years ago, and continues to live by its motto, “German engineering made in America.”

Experts in automation, robotics and testing processes, HAHN Automation remains both a pioneer and a leader in the industry, continually expanding its services, and investing in technology and employees for the betterment of its many customers.

From HAHN to HAHN Group
Known globally for its work with clients in the automotive sector, the company decided to help stabilize and diversify the business, creating the HAHN Group about four years ago. As a holding company for HAHN Automation, which is a multi-site company, the move saw HAHN add medical and consumer goods to its roster.

These include sizable independent companies not under the HAHN Automation brand, and owned in their own right, such as Miamisburg, Ohio-based Invotec – which designs and manufactures automation solutions for medical device manufacturers producing test, inspection and assembly equipment – and REI Automation, Inc.

These companies, and others, keep their original names, and are supported by the HAHN Group. As an added benefit some, like Columbia South Carolina-headquartered REI, also cover a region that wasn’t as well supported before joining the Group.

Growth strategy
A shining example of the HAHN Group’s strategic growth strategy is REI Automation. REI (Reverse Engineering Inc.) was created in 1991 and owned by Paul Brown and Grant Phillips for the past 23 years.

“We bought a fledgling two-employee company when we were young,” says Grant Phillips, President of REI. Starting off with General Electric’s management training program and growing within the organization, Phillips later purchased REI. Expanding the business to almost 80 employees and $25 million in revenue, REI became an integral part of the HAHN Group on November 1, 2019. REI continues operating under its existing management.

REI focuses on five different industries: automotive work, medical products, electronics, the nuclear industry, and consumer goods – a sector seeing marked increases in the level of automation.

“Electronics, consumer groups, and medical products are three areas where we definitely focus on growth,” says Phillips of REI, which also has groups from Germany and Connecticut heavily involved with testing and vaccination products for administering COVID-19 vaccines.

“Growth has been organic, growing from within, as well as acquisitions. In the case of REI automation, we were a rapidly growing company when we became part of the HAHN Group a year and a half ago; in fact, in 2019 we were named one of the fastest-growing companies in the Inc. 5000 list. Now we are part of the Group.”

Still operating as an independent company under the REI name, Phillips is pleased with the acquisition, and the benefits for both REI and HAHN. “We are still agile and free-growing,” he says. “We have the resources and best practices to share with the Group companies. It’s a great strategy that is very different from anything else in the world.”

Philipp Unterhalt, Managing Director of HAHN Group, said in a media release at the time of the acquisition: “We found a passionate team with an impressive track record building the company in the past and ambitious plans to develop it further. We are ready to support REI Automation on its further journey and are delighted to have them on board.”

No time for idling
Never the kind of organization to stand still, the HAHN Group and its companies keep developing.

In 2015, the company created a new location in Queretaro, Mexico. The next year, it doubled its production capacity by investing in its Hebron facility. 2017 marked not only the 25th anniversary of its Rheinböllen location but also the Invotec acquisition.

In the years to follow, the company saw ORWIN and Multi Automation come under HAHN Automation along with REI, and HAHN Automation launching SmartSolutions, its “first own standard product on the market,” as it’s written in the company history.

Among the Group’s companies is HAHN Plastics. Formed in Connecticut in 2017, this division is active in many sectors, including assembled plastics parts and connectors for the automotive industry, the molding of medical devices including equipment and disposables, oral care, packaging, and more.

“They have really grown these past several years,” says Greg Earle, Managing Director, who has been at HAHN Automation since 2012.

Automotive automation
With the automotive sector still going strong, HAHN Automation is actively involved with its counterparts in Germany, supporting global customers like American multinational supplier BorgWarner, and Brose, the fourth-biggest automotive suppliers in family hands.

Since HAHN has locations worldwide, the company deploys and supports machines in the United States, Mexico, the Czech Republic, China and other sites.

Working through Tier 1 and Tier 2 suppliers, HAHN Automation builds equipment for world famous shock manufacturer Bilstein, which makes shocks for Tesla, one of the world’s biggest makers of Electric Vehicles (EVs).

Additionally, HAHN works with other Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) producing parts for respected automakers like Volkswagen, Volvo, and BMW. “Most of the automation in car manufacturing is in building the components to go in cars for the final assembly of the vehicle,” says Phillips. “It’s a lot of hand assembly, and the automation is usually in the body-building.”

Although HAHN Automation is stepping up its efforts in the medical and consumer areas, it is also seeing growth in other areas of the changing automotive market, especially with the shift away from gas to electric-powered engines. This includes working with a company on the base-plate for the heat sink that seats rechargeable batteries.

Active in so many areas of automotive, HAHN Automotive remains highly competitive in traditional areas such as turbochargers, fuel consumption, and additional power extraction, but is also familiar with the present and future needs of electric vehicles.

And, in a similar way to the shift from gas-powered engines toward EVs, the company expects green energy will be an area of growth in the next five years.

The source of solutions
With many decades of combined experience, HAHN knows the ins-and-outs of automation.

By working closely with clients who usually come bearing drawings and specifications, HAHN Automation proposes the best solutions for assembling the product. “We are experts at knowing what to do first, second, third, and what are the best transfer mechanisms and best processes for putting products together,” says Phillips.

“Customers come to us with a product design, and we typically develop the assembly line for putting the products together. The final assembly line is built as a project – that’s what we do.” Sometimes, when there are unique or difficult processes, HAHN works with the client on prototyping.

To provide their customers with the best, most informed processes, the HAHN Digital group created EVE Vision.

Experts in the digitization of manufacturing companies and combining digitization with automation and robotics, the group’s EVE Vision provide a viable, advance solution with which to address manual vision inspection challenges.

Used for augmented reality, these glasses allow experienced technicians to see inspections for themselves but from a distance, through the eyes of staff on site – who may be less qualified but who literally act as eyes, ears and hands.

“They wear these glasses, and we are able to see what they are seeing” says Earle. “And then, within the glasses on our computer, we can say, ‘Push this button,’ and circle it in their glasses, or say ’Type in this number here’ and display it, or send in the print or schematics.

“It lets them keep their hands free. Plus, it lets us see exactly what they are seeing so they don’t do things to wrong way.”

As an innovative technology that merges glasses from electronics company Epson with software from HAHN, EVE Vision has really taken off in the marketplace. Especially, according to the company, since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic over a year ago, since fewer people need to put themselves at risk.

Room for VR
To further support customers, HAHN Automation created a Virtual Reality (VR) room for design presentation and reviews. “It’s pretty cool,” says Earle. “The VR room gives customers the chance to see our machines and our products in a virtual environment so they can walk around the machine, check the heights, check the ergonomics, see parts move in a computerized virtual environment, and get a feel if this is where they want things – is this the right height? – and those kinds of things.”

Continuing to win awards for its work – including the Inc. 5000 fastest-growing companies in the U.S. for 2019 for REI, and Kentucky Manufacturing Company of the Year in 2015 for HAHN – the company plans to continue to innovate and expand to meet the needs of customers, now and in the future.

“We will continue to grow and cover a multitude of regions around the world, as well as touch every industry with factory automation solutions,” says Phillips.

The post Have Automation Solutions, Will Travel<p class="company">HAHN Automation, Inc.</p> appeared first on Manufacturing In Focus.

Before the COVID-19 health crisis, many manufacturers repeatedly reported that the issue of labour shortages was driving the rapid drive toward implementing as much automation and digitalized manufacturing processes. Naturally, precautions such as social distancing, shelter-in-place, and lockdown measures all accelerated the process around the world. But, far from taking away jobs from humans, experts assure us that artificial intelligence is here to free people from repetitive, monotonous, and sometimes dangerous labour to enjoy more fulfilling work. For the manufacturing industry, this has meant technological advancement at an unprecedented pace.

Recent advances have transformed manufacturing methods through the advent of smart tools. Let’s take a look at just a few of the most interesting tools available to fabricators today.

Like construction companies, manufacturers are increasingly employing technology to ensure the health and safety of the environments in which they work, as well as the health and safety of their staff. With their high integration capabilities, Industry 4.0’s smart tools can now inform management when staff members are risking injury to themselves or others through the use of cyber-physical systems (CPS) that collect, share, and examine data in a closed-loop system. This technology can also be applied by manufacturers to observe and manage waste, preventing landfill issues and other pollution hazards.

CPS is made possible by complex networks of robotics, sensor, and visual technologies that interact with the physical and mechanized worlds to not only measure and analyze the context but also interpret data to respond to situations intelligently.

Additive manufacturing, referring to three-dimensional (3D) printing, is another manufacturing star. This method most commonly deposits a continuous filament of thermoplastic material in a process known as fused deposition modelling. Three-dimensional printing also can combine liquids or finely ground substances, like thermoplastic polyurethane resins and other hard-wearing, versatile materials, with printing technology in several ways to build fully-functioning parts by layering rather than the traditional milling of three-dimensional forms from metals, known as a reductive process.

While the technology was initially employed for rendering prototypes and replacement elements, it has evolved far beyond that. In a 2014 white paper titled Industry 4.0 Challenges and solutions for the digital transformation and use of exponential technologies, Deloitte quoted Dr. Robert Sekula, head of manufacturing technologies at ABB Corporate Research, as noting that 3D printing may well bring about fabrication times around ten times the current speed, making this a much more relevant technology than perhaps initially thought.

Augmented reality is another technology that has exceeded expectations in both the number of applications and the market value. In 2019, market research firm Statista forecast that the augmented reality market will reach close to US$200 billion in the next six years from just under US$6 billion in 2018. This, of course, is no small matter and confirms the value that the technology is adding to manufacturing across myriad markets.

Augmented reality (AR) is especially useful in training technicians. It is mainly used to create simulations of real spaces, machines, or systems. The technology gives manufacturers huge cost savings as maintenance and other training can be done while plants remain fully operational. Manufacturers also report a vastly optimized workflow.

Cloud computing is slowly entering the broader language of manufacturing in 2021. But what is it? As you may know, basic cloud computing relies on a network of web servers to host, manage, and process data remotely. This means that devices linked to the network can add, update, and in some cases, change data from anywhere in the world.

Cloud manufacturing uses the power of remote access to information to allow multiple manufacturers to collaborate on projects for a single customer, who can buy manufacturing from one website via the internet of goods (IoG), another term for Industry 4.0. IoG combines digitized distribution via e-commerce fulfillment centers with digitized production and new manufacturing platforms like cloud manufacturing. IoG relies on automated assessments to determine whether parts are ‘manufacturable’ or not.

This sustainable and adaptable tool pools resources in a single service-based cloud. With global participation, lightning-fast analyses, and quoting, it has tremendous power to transform how manufacturing is done. Currently, it appears to be especially favoured by sheet metal and computer numerical control (CNC) operations.

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is what makes smart manufacturing possible in many ways. IIoT harnesses the power of sensors and electronics actuators for technological feats such as predictive maintenance to nip pending malfunctions in the bud. It even supports advanced machines in servicing themselves as needed.

For consumers and end-users, the technology promises to mitigate manufacturing’s potential environmental footprint by detecting and alerting gatekeepers to pollution levels, dangerous chemical leaks, and radiation. It can help prevent traffic jams and predict the weather, helping manufacturers plan and schedule accordingly, and improving cities’ ability to prepare for natural disasters more effectively. Beyond manufacturing, the technology can be used to take care of nature, monitoring factors that can aid in preventing deforestation or protecting endangered species such as rhinoceros and bees.

Back in the manufacturing sphere, IIoT’s benefits provide hope for those looking to lower energy consumption. This technology also vastly improves manufacturers’ communication with their supply chains, providing information on shipment statuses as well as overall efficiency.

Despite the obvious challenges like cyber-security, smart tools promise to continue transforming manufacturing, exposing the industry to world-changing ideas that were once nothing but out-of-reach dreams.

The post From Cloud Manufacturing to Augmented Reality<p class="company">Smart Tools for Streamlined Manufacturing</p> appeared first on Manufacturing In Focus.