2022 FAB 40: Custom metal fabricator moves away from batch-and-queue

Within two fabrication cells—one in the foreground and the other in the background—jobs make their way through profiling, deburring, forming, and hardware insertion. In the distance on the far right are two cells in which turret punch presses are the primary cutting process.

Humanetics Precision Metal Works, No. 22 on the The FABRICATOR’s 2022 FAB 40 list, might be the only custom metal fabricator in the world to have a lipstick room. No surprise, the room has nothing to do with lipstick. The space houses a fabrication cell with two turret punch presses, a laser cutting machine, along with a few brakes and a machining center. A decade ago, though, that room had everything to do with lipstick.

“That’s what the room was called when Mary Kay’s manufacturing operation was here, and the name just stuck.”

That was Robert Hasty, Humanetics president, who spearheaded the fabricator’s move to the Mary Kay plant in Dallas. The company purchased the facility four years ago and leased it back to Mary Kay for several years before moving in during the spring of 2021.

The building is the keystone of the fabricator’s growth strategy, both from an operational and personnel perspective. The facility represents a consolidation of two facilities in Texas, one in Carrollton (near Dallas) and another in McAllen. More than this, the 250,000-sq.-ft. plant gave Humanetics a blank slate on which to build a new way of operating, away from the traditional batch-and-queue and toward a kind of hybrid cellular manufacturing adapted for the job shop environment.

The place doesn’t look anything like the sheet metal job shop stereotype, though. The new facility has a sleek lobby; employee break rooms full of amenities; and a spacious, clean, well-lit shop floor. According to Hasty, the company aimed to create a tour-ready facility clean and bright enough for Fortune 100 clients.

“I wanted our customers [including contract manufacturers] to be proud to bring their customers into our facility,” Hasty said.

From a personnel perspective, the plant acts as a kind of recruitment tool that supports the company culture and new way of thinking. Excess clutter—be it a workstation in need of 5S or excess work-in-process (WIP) from overproduction—blemishes an otherwise orderly environment.

Core to it all is Humanetics’ new focus on workflow, where jobs move from cutting to deburring, bending, and hardware insertion, spending little to no time as WIP between processes. As Hasty succinctly put it, “Any time something starts, it never stops.”

Reimagining a Business

“When we toured the plant with Mary Kay still here manufacturing its products, we saw automated equipment and big stainless vessels everywhere,” Hasty said. “To be able to see through all that was a challenge.”

Humanetics has a long history of seeing through the present and reimagining what’s possible. The organization’s roots go back to Hasty’s grandfather, who, with his business partner, designed intensive care hospital beds and specialty medical equipment in the 1950s and 1960s. By the early 1970s, Hasty’s father, after a fellowship at Stanford and a handful of years at IBM, came back to Texas and carried on the family’s ICU bed business. “He created Humanetics and took the company to a whole new level,” Hasty said.

Humanetics makes use of robotic welding, but not every job is suitable for automation.

Humanetics of the 1970s was a vertically integrated designer and manufacturer of medical equipment with excess sheet metal fabrication capacity. “So in 1972 he hired someone to sell that excess capacity,” Hasty said. “That developed into a business called Humanetics II, a division of the company that was essentially a sheet metal job shop.”

The hospital bed and medical equipment product lines eventually were sold to a competitor (today owned by Hill-Rom), which allowed Humanetics to focus on the custom metal fabrication business—just in time for the telecom and broadband boom of the 1990s. “In Dallas, we were sitting here right in the telecom corridor,” Hasty said. “Back then it wasn’t about how much something cost, it was, ‘How quickly can I get it?’ There was a great land grab for broadband.”

When the telecom and tech bubble burst, so did Humanetics’ business. Orders fell 90%, and Humanetics again needed to reimagine its business through diversification. Nearly a decade later, the housing bubble popped and Humanetics’ sales dropped again, but not nearly as far. In 2009 business declined about 35%. As Hasty recalled, “At that point we had made an effort not to build speculative inventory and diversify our customer base as much as we could.”

Between then and now the company grew into its current form. Today the 390-employee organization has its main plant in Dallas along with two more plants—one in Austin and another in Wuxi, China—that both support local customers.

Attracting Talent

Planning for the move into the old Mary Kay facility in Dallas, Hasty had two goals: to improve flow and attract talent who could operate both new and old equipment. The shop has robotic welding, but not every job is suitable for welding automation. Similarly, the company has a collection of newer press brakes perfectly capable of precision air bending. Even so, some tight-radius jobs still require bottom bending, and so the shop needs to attract people who either know or can learn to perform the process on older machines.

In an ideal world, Hasty said, these jobs would be redesigned with radii achievable via modern air bending, but in many cases, asking for part redesigns just isn’t an option. Besides, Humanetics sells its ability to tackle difficult work, such as parts with high cosmetic standards and tight tolerances. So the shop really needs people who can pursue all avenues to achieve those tolerances, be it bottoming, precision air bending, an unusual manual welding setup, or anything else.

“There’s a place for robotics,” Hasty said, “but there’s also a place for craft and artistry that comes with the finessing some of our projects require. And this building is perfect for attracting people who appreciate that. We have updated break spaces, common spaces, a gym with a recreation room, including foosball and ping pong, even a library. I figured we had plenty of space, so why not differentiate ourselves?”

Simplifying Through Cellular Manufacturing

Before moving to the new facility, Humanetics had a typical departmental layout and took a traditional “push” approach to part flow. When observing plant operations, Hasty saw how WIP piled up between operations. The more that pile of WIP grew, the longer a job’s lead time became.

Hasty also saw just how inefficient some operations really were. “I did an extensive study on the true production time in our brake department, back in our batch-and-queue days. We observed 120 hours—three weeks of an operator’s time—and realized that only 18% of that was the true time the client was paying for. The operator spent the rest of his time looking for tooling, retrieving parts, perhaps looking for a fork truck. We needed to eliminate all that waste.”

The process-specific plant layout (cutting department here, bending department there, etc.) created waste in severalways. The most obvious was the need to move batches of parts between processes. Moving the processes together into cells simplified or altogether eliminated those part transfers.

Robert Hasty became president of Humanetics Precision Metal Works in February 2009, not long after the housing bubble popped.

The departmental layout incentivized productivity, but only at a process-specific level. Laser operators might cut a large batch of parts, but after a while the beam focus isn’t quite as dialed in. They sent cut blanks with excessive dross downstream to deburring, which spent extra time cleaning up parts. Poor-quality parts led to extra setup time at the press brake, and the problems snowballed from there.

“The foundation of most sheet metal processing includes profiling, deburring, forming, and hardware insertion,” Hasty said, explaining that each of Humanetics’ five fabrication cells has all the equipment operators need to complete every one of these foundational processes. The cells that start with turret punching are linear while the laser cells are U-shape.

“We have two leaders in each cell,” Hasty explained. “One is our profiling leader and the other is our forming leader. The remaining people on the cell team are cross-trained operators. They can insert hardware, debur, and push the pedal on one of our newer press brakes. Within that group of five or six people, we not only have expertise in profiling and forming, but we have leaders who help maintain and direct flow. It leads to a higher level of quality because they’re all building parts together.”

How has Humanetics made the cellular arrangement work in such a high-product-mix environment? After all, the shop’s average job quantity is 60, not 60,000. Some fab shops that have attempted cellular manufacturing revert to the departmental layout because of a lack of flexibility, such as a certain job that needs to run on a brake with a certain bed size. How has Humanetics avoided this?

Hasty attributed the shop’s success to three factors. First, operators have all the common tools they need in one place. They never need to walk away to find a digital caliper or other measurement tools. “No one looks for tooling,” Hasty said. “Quality is at the source.” All brake tooling is near the point-of-use as well, though punch tooling does come from a central toolroom, close to the tool grinder.

Second, everything operators need to move parts through the cell is delivered and staged. Operators aren’t waiting for material to arrive or parts or scrap to be removed. At this writing, in fact, the company is developing a system where everything that moves in and out of a cell has a so-called “WIP location.” Material handlers scan a barcode on job travelers, which update the WIP location in the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. (Humanetics uses an ERP with a module that allows for customization, incorporating dispatch lists based on WIP locations and other applications the Humanetics’ IT team writes in-house.)

The concept resembles the idea behind a traditional Kanban square—where WIP is retrieved and replenished from a designated area (often identified with a taped square on the floor)—but it’s more conceptual and flexible. “Work” in WIP isn’t limited to fabricated parts. Instead, it’s anything that needs to be moved into and out of a cell. This can include actual parts, but it also can include the pallets needed to hold those parts or scrap that needs to be removed.

A WIP location also can include outside services like plating. Say managers want to know where a certain assembly job is. Every component has been scanned in and staged, ready for assembly, except several components that are out for plating. In the company’s production management system, the components show its “WIP location” as being at that outside service provider. When all components are in-house, the system flags the job, signifying it’s ready to start, at which point a designated person moves to the cell to start the job. This system, Hasty said, mitigates one the greatest wastes many job shop shops are all too familiar with: looking and waiting for work.

“Our IT group has developed a live dispatch list for every department, and it’s updating in real time,” Hasty said. “When someone moves parts from one department to another, [the job] will show up on that department’s dispatch list.”

The third factor that makes Humanetics’ cellular approach effective involves how jobs are sequenced. The company converts its product-specific, engineering bill of materials (BOMs) to manufacturing BOMs, which groups like parts and components together, be they from the same job or other jobs being prepped for release to the floor. The fabricator’s method incorporates the benefits of grouping different jobs with like material, helpful for material utilization, along with similar or identical routings.

Humanetics’ new facility, with its sleek lobby and specious plant floor, is designed to be customer-tour-ready at all times.

“For instance, we might take all the 16-ga. parts that need to go to welding and nest them together,” Hasty said. “That way, we can cut and form them together, then have them flow to welding at the same time … It’s far from a one-piece-flow system, but it is a way for us to keep people from waiting for jobs.”

Beyond this, jobs are sequenced within the cells in such a way as to optimize throughput, which is especially critical when jobs require certain machines. To do this, the shop relies on a project management software (similar to Microsoft Visio) that the IT team uses as a kind of bottleneck simulator.

After conducting detailed time studies, Hasty and his team input average setup and run times for jobs with characteristics that represent the majority of Humanetics’ job mix. This information gave managers a powerful simulation tool. Hasty added that the simulation tool is still being perfected; as more data is entered into the system, the more intelligent it becomes. Even so, the software has revealed many nonintuitive job-sequencing scenarios.

For instance, a job or group of jobs might involve some parts that need to be air formed on the company’s modern press brakes, but a few bottomed parts are processed on older machines. Because those bottomed parts require lengthy setups in forming, a few parts are cut first on the laser along with a group of air-formed parts. Those few parts destined for bottoming flow to the older press brake, where the brake operator can begin the setup. Meanwhile, the parts destined for air forming are nested on subsequent sheets and flow to the newer press brakes, which are set up quickly and formed. After that, bottomed parts are cut, denested, and delivered to the older brake, at which point the operator at the older brake is ready to form. Sequenced correctly, the bottomed parts and the air-formed parts are completed at nearly the same time, ready to be moved downstream.

“When it comes to the success of our hybrid cellular layout,” Hasty said, “sequencing is everything.”

Hasty calls it a “hybrid” cellular layout simply because not every machine or process resides in a cell. For instance, several cells share a flat-part deburring machine. Powder coating, a state-of-the-art line placed near the middle of the process flow, remains a shared resource.

Even so, the current layout focuses on constraints and sequencing for optimum flow. Hasty admits the system isn’t perfect yet, but the flow continues to improve over time.

About Response

Perhaps most important, the approach makes the workday less hectic and more predictable. If people can avoid those frustrating shifts when they’re forever looking for materials and tools, they’re happier at the end of the day. Humanetics offers plenty of incentives, including a wage access app (Spentra) that gives workers access to 50% of their net wages at the time of request between pay periods. As Hasty explained, this wage access app, along with the opportunity to work in a clean facility with plenty of amenities, does set the shop apart. But if chaos reigned, be it within order processing in the office or within part flow on the floor, frustration would mount, company culture would suffer, and more employees would be looking for the door.

“The word’s getting out,” Hasty said. “We continue to recruit the right people and promote the right culture.”

Everyone works toward the same goal. It’s not to run a machine to attain maximum utilization; it’s to optimize flow, focus on quality, and move work forward. After all, if work isn’t progressing and quality parts aren’t shipping, the operation isn’t making money.

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