Quest uses IT to boost tooling production

Lapeer, Mich. — Mold makers love to brag about their latest CNC machining technology. But for Dennis Hoover, the coolest news is how his company, Quest Industries Inc., has greatly improved its information management systems.

"The future is very bright," Hoover said. "Our efficiencies have gone up tremendously. Our on-time deliveries are skyroketing. Our profitability went up. We no longer worry about work once it hits the floor. We now worry about keeping enough work in the shop. That's the true story."

But it wasn't easy. Hoover learned how much he didn't know about handling data. And changing how work flows through a mold shop has to take into account people, since employees have to accept a new way of doing things.

"It's not 100 percent implemented yet. It's not 100 percent fully understood by everybody yet. But we have come a long way in a short period of time," he said.

Hoover, the company president, and other leaders of Quest Industries told their story during a tour organized by the American Mold Builders Association at the Lapeer mold shop, which made 288 molds for plastics and rubber last year. Quest, founded by Hoover in 2001, now employs about 70 on three shifts. Lapeer is located approximately 60 miles north of Detroit.

Quest opened its doors for the AMBA tour on June 12, the day before the two-day Amerimold conference in Novi, Mich. AMBA ended the tour with a best practices discussion and a reception.

Hoover is a down-to-earth tooling guy, but the topic of information management gets him animated. He set the scene right at the start: "Basically, what this tour is about, it's not about our machines. It's not about how we do things. It's about our processes and our efforts to improve our communication within our company."

Quest began as a prototype and detail machining company. The company grew into a mold building shop serving automotive, medical, defense, aerospace, electronics and other markets.

When the company was small, the shop's program managers could easily schedule jobs on machines.

"But now that we're bigger and we're managing more jobs and they're more complex, it doesn't work," Hoover said.

Hoover said that more seat-of-the-pants method is common.

"Every one of us came from small shops. And the way it was done in small shops, you had one or two key guys. They also scheduled the machines," he said.

But now, programmers are now in charge of managing departments rather than scheduling machines. Quest even uses Skype to communicate internally, so no more long lines of shop floor people waiting to ask program managers questions, General Manager Rick Kaupp said.

The program manager and the scheduler can Skype back and forth to make changes without leaving their work stations.

About a dozen years ago, Quest began using the JobBOSS ERP system. Hoover said it had strengths and weaknesses, like any ERP system. "And it's only as good as the information that you're feeding it. And how you apply it," he said.

For any manufacturing operation, program managers are key people, and that goes for Quest's three program managers.

"They basically take a mold from cradle to grave. They interact with the customers. They oversee the design. They lead the job through the shop and they see it out the door," Hoover said.

A program manager could handle three or four molds fairly easily, but the job got a lot harder — and more stressful — when they were asked to coordinate five, six, seven or eight molds at once. And molds have gotten more complex.

"If a mold has 50 components and there's multiple operations for each component, there's no way that you can make a good decision on your own. There's no way a program manager, if he's got 10 molds, can decide what goes on a machine next. That's what we used to do. When we were smaller, it worked. But now that we're bigger and we're managing more jobs and they're more complex, it doesn't work. So we had to change," Hoover said.

To solve the work crunch, he thought about hiring another program manager, but he was still faced with the machine-scheduling problem.

"I thought I had to add another program manager, and I thought I had to have another designer," he said. "I thought I had to have more machines. I thought to myself, 'I can't afford to add onto the building. I can't afford to buy any more equipment right now. I sure as hell can't find anybody on the street. I can't develop them fast enough.'" Tour attendees nodded. They could relate.

Hoover said he found out that Quest was only using about 10 percent of what JobBOSS offered — a typical issue with ERP technology. He thought about going to another ERP system.

"So, I decided to take a step back. Let's learn it and see what we get out of it," he said.

Hoover discovered that Quest was not using its metalworking machinery efficiently.

"I realized I wanted to schedule the machines. But it was going to be a tall order," he said. "Especially when these guys [the program managers] have been doing this for 20 or 30 years — this is how they been managing a job. To take that control out of them is going to be hard, so I had to make sure it was right."

Creating detailed job templates under JobBOSS helped a lot. But Hoover still was not satisfied. "The reporting wasn't good enough. I was operating in the dark. I had no idea how much work I had or anything," he said.

After about a year of searching, he found a software product called Exact Synergy Enterprise, which could tie into the JobBOSS database and extract data, presenting it any way Quest wanted.

Hoover first bought Synergy to help manage the sales force.

"But once I started getting into it and I started seeing what it could do, I realized it was way beyond me. I wasn't smart enough to do it. I just don't get that stuff," he recalled.

Quest hired a consultant from California. For the last year and a half, Quest officials have worked with him remotely.

"I've been able to some pretty incredible things," Hoover said.

Synergy coordinates workflow, document managing, project management, customer relationships and business management for the entire company.

Information is tailored to each type of employee, giving them key information. Program managers, for example, sometimes would find out they had to schedule a machining job late in the afternoon. First-shift people would have to stay late to program the job for somebody on third shift.

Synergy helped solve that.

"What it's been able to do, I've relieved so much of the burden on program managers that I have," Hoover said. "Now they can handle a lot more jobs, and they're a lot less stressed."

With good people hard to find, Hoover wants to keep his employees happy.

For tour attendees, Hoover showed a slide with the Synergy/JobBOSS link that gives a full report. It focuses on what each person needs to know but they can still drill into the report to see all the details. Thirty days after a job is completed, if there is no more activity, the system archives it.

"We never had this before. A lot of times the program manager would get really frustrated because they had to do to everything for everybody. It was just frustrating. But it's all done automatically now," Hoover said.

However, the new information technology did require a different mindset, said Ryan Reamer, Quest's continuous improvement coordinator and welding supervisor. Program managers had to learn to back off and trust the ERP system, he said.

"It took us a year, basically, to fix all the things we were doing wrong with our ERP system," Reamer said.

Quest uses Unipoint software for its quality department, tied in with Synergy. "We've been able to correct issues much better because we record it," Reamer said.

Quest also rearranged its shop floor so machines are organized by department. A computer map of the shop floor lets employees see what job is running on each piece of metalworking equipment, and they can click on it to get a full report of everything that's scheduled for that specific machine. "This is very interactive," Kaupp said on the tour.

Hoover said the experience with ERP and Synergy to clearly show all the data, in real time, was a revelation.

"A light went on for me," he said.