Dramco embraces short walks to boost lean tooling production

Grand Island, Neb.-based Dramco Tool Co. Inc. expanded its headquarters site with an 11,000-square-foot addition strategically designed to improve workflow.

Founded in 1978 as a two-person shop with basic manual machine tools, Dramco has grown into a company with 55 employees building metal stamping dies, plastic injection molds, compression molds, tooling for composite parts, fabrication and custom machine building.

Dramco serves the automotive, heavy-duty equipment, aerospace, military, consumer products and agriculture markets from what is now a 37,000-square-foot facility.

Company officials also acquired a second 10,000-square-foot facility in February to start a welding division and increase long-term storage.

Dramco owners invited their colleagues and competitors for a peek inside as hosts of the first virtual tour offered by the American Mold Builders Association (AMBA).

The Indianapolis-based trade group puts on workforce development, networking and benchmarking programs aimed at giving U.S. mold builders a competitive edge.

About 80 online attendees took an inside look March 8 into Dramco's journey to create a lean advantage in the marketplace.

Every year an AMBA member open its doors so others in the industry can benchmark their processes against a peer, identify best practices, discover new ideas and form connections that could help their bottom line.

This year, Dramco officials showed off their operation, which was expanded and reconfigured in 2021 to increase workflow capacity. The focus on the shop floor yielded several observations about improving efficiency.

"We basically reset the entire shop," said Justin Pfenning, one of the co-owners along with Larry Patton, Todd Jacobsen and Bill Koch.

The virtual tour focused on how Dramco found efficiencies and put the added space in their first facility to work for them.

Dramco has cameras installed in its shop that the owners said they rarely check, but when they did, they noticed a lot of employees walking around.

"That really shaped our mindset," Pfenning said. "We adopted a philosophy that we wanted to keep the things the toolmakers need the most the closest. That's a basic rule of lean."

Company officials challenged themselves to have everything — even the restrooms and coffee — within a 30-second walk for the toolmakers. They assembled a small group of owners, supervisors and toolmakers to collectively develop a floor plan to set machines in places to hit the goal.

"I think it has worked out really well. ... We've dramatically reduced the walking, probably an 80 percent reduction in moving around the shop," Pfenning said.

Dramco owners also thought the computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) programming was disconnected from the shop floor. To remedy this, the staff came up with a plan to build mobile programming stations. That work was then moved from two to three programmers to the toolmakers at the machines.

The company now has five mobile programming stations, Patton said.

"While their machines are running a longer program, they can be right next to it programming the next thing," he said, adding a significant number of Dramco toolmakers are also programmers.

A lot of shops lose time in computer numerically controlled (CNC) mill machine setup, so Dramco officials took aim at that, too, with a modular system called Wow Workholding by Brantford, Ontario-based Rian Solutions Inc.

The setup system uses bore positions on a tooling plate to lock down small or obscurely-shaped parts that would be hard to clamp to a table or hold in a vice for machining purposes.

The modular system reduces setup errors, offers repeatable setups from part to part and improves turnaround times.

"We feel our accuracy has increased moving between machines, especially in mold building, where you do machining in three- or five-axis mills and then we head over to the sinker EDM [electrical discharge machining]," Pfenning said. "It's a supersmooth transition between machines, and it's extremely accurate. We feel we've taken our mold building up a notch just in that aspect."

Another virtual tour stop was to Dramco's EDM, which was relocated to a larger space to make room for another machine.

"We wanted to keep everything in close proximity to each other, and it helps with flow and efficiency with everything we run through here on a daily basis," Jacobson said.

Dramco recently added a sixth EDM machine to make tools from steel. Two operators staff the EDM department and are responsible for all programming, setup, cutting, inspecting and scheduling.

"Our focus has always been to keep these machines running as much as possible. Having everything in the same area helps that out," Jacobson said. "We're always trying to capture unintended time or the night runs as well. Once again, having two operators with these abilities helps complete that process."

The large space is also closer to the supervisor's area for faster input.

To make material handling easier and safer for machinists, Dramco installed jib cranes around all the machines. This eliminated several problems and resulted in a significant reduction in forklift use and footsteps, Koch said.

The jib cranes have magnets and vacuum lifters to move the parts from pallets to machines. In a video, a machinist used a jib crane to position a 150-pound block to mill a flat bottom.

"We used to move everything that couldn't be lifted by hand with forklifts," Koch said. "That caused a huge jam up in forklift traffic. Or, the forklifts were being used when someone else needed it and that resulted in stand-around time waiting for one to open."

The use of manpower was another forklift drawback, Koch said, pointing to the need for two people — one to drive the forklift and other to position the block.

"This really presented itself as a need when we got Wow [Workholding]," he added. "We were so excited to have a reduction in setup time, but we realized it still took two guys to put the heavier blocks in the machine. So, we moved to a jib crane system around all over of our machines."

Dramco is also in the rollout phase of having dedicated tool holders and coolant delivery for employees.

The owners and staff identified specific tool holder sets for the mold builders, die builders and precision part builders to keep at their shop carts. This reduces tool search times and footsteps.

Also, a coolant delivery system was installed. Coolant stations with hose reels have two different percentages of solutions.

"Our old system was a 55-gallon barrel of coolant," Pfenning said. "The guys wheeled it over to their machine, hooked up an air line, pumped it in and then unhooked it and put it back. And, if they used more than a third of the barrel, we wanted them to stay there and refill it."

The coolant delivery system provides "a reduction in irritation and nonvalue-added time," he added.