Wisconsin Manufacturing: Future, Talent, & Technology (feat. Muza Metal Products)

Introduction

Adam: This is the Wisconsin Lighting
Lab podcast. My name is Adam Rupp, and my guest today is Mike Sellner with Muza
Metal Products. Muza is a 91-year-old metal fabrication business out of
Oshkosh, and Muza serves a variety of markets doing metal fabrication and
electrical/mechanical assembly. Mike, let's dig in. Tell me a little more about
Muza and what you do within the organization.

Mike: Sure. We're located up in
Oshkosh, Wisconsin, been in the industry for 91 years, as you mentioned.
Started by Leo Muza Sr., moved to the current location over on 606 East Murdock
back in the mid-50s, and continued to build the business around stamping primarily.
Throughout the 90s we saw a considerable growth and transition to soft tool
fabrication rather than the hard tool aspect, through additions of lasers,
8-axis press brakes, things of that nature. We also added powder coating, and
at that time, fabrication along the full value-added line.

Adam: Mike, you actually started out
on the shop floor, and you've seen an evolution in manufacturing technology
over your tenure there. You mentioned some of the new machinery and investments
Muza has made — what's a good example of how far metal fabrication has come
over the last few decades?

Mike: To jump right into that — think
about how often you used a shear back 20 years ago. Current state, it runs
maybe five hours out of the day. Everything is processed through laser-turret
combination machines, lasers as well. Full automation, things of that nature.
Really to streamline the velocity process.

Adam: That's awesome. As we were
talking before the podcast, when people think sheet metal, they think in some
cases simple parts that are made, but the manufacturing technology and process
that goes into it — the automation, the robotics — I've been to your facility
many times, it's a pretty impressive process. As far as some of the machines
you've invested in the last couple of years, what types of technologies do
those machines use?

Mike: Again, a lot of automation, a
lot of offline programming — really trying to decrease the indirect time and
increase the green light time of our machines. It helps out with quality, helps
out with production, the velocity, as I mentioned. Also, if you walk through
our shop, it's set up a little different than most fabricators. Our shop is set
up about 50% to batch manufacturing to handle some larger assemblies that we do
in moments, and then also a cellular aspect as well. That's very important to
understand, because we do have those options where you're talking low to high
volumes.

Batch Manufacturing & Automation

Adam: What do you mean by batch
manufacturing?

Mike: If you're taking a product and
running it through one laser turret in the making process, then it would have
to go back up on a shelf. In batch manufacturing, it's brought back down onto a
forming machine, a press brake, over to a Hager, things of that nature — go
through every process individually. Whereas a cellular process is going to be
set up to run right through a blank, then right into a press brake, into a weld
cell, and then straight down to paint. Exactly. So really — give me an example.
We've done projects in the past where, in batch manufacturing, we got 15 or 16
done in a 10-hour shift on a larger assembly. It was kudos — we were doing that
great job years ago. Same business now, we're producing between 60 to 80 in a
10-hour shift, and that's going straight down the paint through our assembly
lines.

Adam: In terms of that kind of
manufacturing automation and innovation, how much of it is driven by your
customers demanding certain technologies over time, and how much of it is the
technology companies — your vendors, your machinery companies? What is that balance,
and what has really propelled you guys over the last few decades to continue to
automate things?

Mike: As you grow, you want to target
customers that are leaders in their industry, so you'll grow with them. That
challenges you to be a better business partner, to make some of those decisions
to bring in automation and new technologies, to sustain that bell curve, if you
will. It's extremely important during your growth. To enter that new technology
is crucial. The lot sizes years ago — you could run five thousand one week and
that was good for a month for the customer at five thousand parts in a general
componentry style. The customer would hold that inventory. Those days are gone.
The customer wants the inventory just-in-time, which is the same process that
we handle their steel and things of that nature. So it makes sense to increase
the velocity and not have that WIP on the floor. From a general standpoint,
it's extremely important to transition your substrate into a sellable product.

Adam: You guys want to go from sheet
metal to finished part as quickly as possible?

Mike: Correct. We've made huge strides
within the 20 years that I've done with Muza, but we're still pushing the
envelope.

Adam: That's important. I'd love to
see that.

Mike: My background's in operations —
I love that business. So jumping into sales five years ago was kind of a hard
decision. I love what I do from the sales side, but I also love the
manufacturing, so it's still interesting to me, still in my blood — getting out
to the floor and understanding how things work, and bringing that out to our
customer base.

Adam: That makes you a great
salesperson, having that ops background and understanding really the full
circle of how you go from sheet metal to finished part.

Manufacturing Processes: Hard Tool vs. Soft Tool

Adam: One of the things I think a lot
about, and one of the things I've enjoyed learning over the last decade being
in manufacturing and engineering, is really how the supply chain works. On one
end of the supply chain you have miners that are literally extracting particles
out of the ground. They get sent to processing plants and turned into metal
blanks or ingot, or it could be sheet metals of some kind. There are a couple
of processors in between, but really when it comes to manufactured goods, you
guys are kind of the first step in the process for a company like us, or
another company that's making an actual finished good. What does that process
in the supply chain look like? You guys are taking steel blanks, aluminum
blanks, sheet metal, and stainless steel, and forming them into parts. You'd
mentioned soft tooling versus different types of tooling — what does that mean?
Is it a more nimble manufacturing process? What is that high-level workflow for
you guys between your suppliers and your customers?

Mike: Yeah. Let's cover hard tool
first, then soft tool. Hard tool is basically your stamping process. If you
have a part that you're going to need 400,000 of, chances are you're going to
end up hard tooling it, because it just makes more sense. You'll pay a higher
tooling cost up front, but you'll be able to keep the part cost down. Soft tool
manufacturing is more interchangeable, more versatile — we can switch out jobs,
and the setup reduction is huge. It makes sense from that aspect. But it's
important to note there's a certain application to understand. The customer,
and us being their partner, we have to go through the application, design, and
understand how it's used. We've had instances where customers will come to us
with a huge quantity demand, and we say, that's great, we can do it, however
you might be able to absorb that tooling cost and have it stamped out at a
cheaper price — maybe we can look at the rest of the assembly that goes into
it, if it's a welding or such.

Adam: As you've gotten much better in
the automation side, or as the industry has, do you see that dynamic shifting?
You can actually start to compete with some of the stamping processes or other
hard tool processes? I'm sure there's some type of quantity intersect where
it's six of one, half dozen of the other — you could go hard tool or go soft
tool. But as you guys have become more automated, do you see that curve
shifting at all?

Mike: It has, over the years. There's
always going to be competition from the stamping side where they're just going
to need a part that's not going to change. Where we are effective and we can
compete pretty hard is with design changes. If you know something's going to
get tooled up on a first rev and then spit out, and it has a high probability
of changing, now you definitely won't go hard tool — it makes sense to go soft.
You can change a setup rather than spending another 40, 50 thousand dollars on
a hard tool.

Adam: One thing that's awesome about
you guys, from a product development and engineering standpoint, is very often
when you launch a product, that's not the final configuration. There's going to
be changes, and I think as fast as technology changes over in different markets
now, you really want to have some flexibility in the first few months of
launching that. We've always tried to be really nimble with our product
development. We get information from the end markets, from our resellers — it's
really nice to be able to incorporate that in the design process. So back to
that value-added engineering, the soft tooling process is huge.

Mike: That's right. It's all about
sitting down with the end customer and engineers. Oftentimes the sales
function, my function, makes the connection with the two engineering teams from
both sides, and we'll be the liaison, if you will. Get the teams talking. Engineers
don't care to talk to salespeople. I totally respect that. I think it's
important to get the teams talking. It can take the waste out of the process.
You even have to look further past the design application and see how they're
actually assembling it in their product line. Oftentimes what an engineer would
like to see, they might be building it out of a substrate that's hard to find.
So you have to give those options to them to understand: hey, this is a
substrate that's hard to find — here's another option that's half the cost and
readily available.

Value-Added Development & Design

Adam: In your role, aside from the
sales side of it, there's a business development component and really an
application engineering component as well, where you're sorting out design
processes and product development processes pretty early in the process. I know
with volume manufacturers, ideally they want to produce one SKU as much as
possible. But as I mentioned, the way the world is going, customization is key.
So aside from the manufacturing value add, what other types of development and
design value add or prototyping — or even on the quotation side, being able to
get people quotes back quickly — are you guys doing from a support standpoint?

Mike: Years ago we ran, like I said,
5,000 components a week. That business has changed. Twenty years ago when I
joined Muza, we were running components left and right — a little bit of
value-added. Now we're more interested in taking a look at that component.
Great, we can do that, but what does that component go into? Whether it's
welded into it, whether it's fastened into it, how can we help provide a
solution that's going to be the quickest transition for our customer, putting
their technology into it and shipping that out, for them to collect the sale?
From the support side, we have a prototype division that supports our
customers' needs as well. That's 100% separate from the rest of production,
which is the beauty of it. It's engineer-to-engineer contact after sales makes
the contact. They discussed the project. Oftentimes it could be a web-based
platform that they're going back and forth on, sharing designs through
SolidWorks models, things of that nature. But it's really about increasing the
velocity — so we can get a prototype in their hands and they can tear it apart,
analyze it, and then go through a second iteration. If we know it's going to go
into production at that time, we'll put the resources behind it to develop
fixturing for welding or whatever the process might be. That's something we
added back in about 2008. We did it for one specific industry, and the rest of
our customer base found out about it, which was great — we weren't really
marketing it. Now within the last year, we're starting to push a little bit
more marketing on that prototype division.

Adam: You said it was separate from
production — do you do small runs of production parts out of that if needed?

Mike: Yeah. You're looking at the
machines in our area being utilized for that prototype area, along with the
engineer. Those engineers are dedicated for that area; they also do the costing
of any projects that come in, the planning, and the programming for that
department alone. There's three or four individuals that work out of there. Our
folks at Muza are craftspeople; they're key in what they do in each process.
They're able to program on the fly if need be. If it's something complex, we
can shift it right downstairs to our offline programmer for the press brakes or
for robotic weld as well. So we have those options. From a prototype
standpoint, if we need to run a virtual model of, say, a forming application —
if it's going to collide with our machines, or what tooling options we could
use — we can do that at the napkin stage. We don't necessarily have to form a
sheet of metal and waste material in that aspect. We can do it virtually before
it even hits a machine.

Growing Talent in Manufacturing

Adam: From a design and engineering
skill set, when you guys are doing recruiting or looking for new members for
your engineering team, it sounds like it's similar to us — you really want kind
of a Swiss Army knife of skill sets. People that are hands-on, people that can
build things but also can use SolidWorks and other design programs. I don't
know how many details you can get into, but what type of software do you expect
people to be familiar with when you bring on or expand your engineering team?

Mike: First of all, I want to back up
a little, because we want to look at the culture and make sure that we're
hiring for culture — absolutely — people in the right spots. We want somebody
who's going to advance throughout the company. In the current position that we
want them to be in, we want them to be able to put their all in and do the best
job at their current position, to put them in the next light. 75% of our
current support staff came from the shop floor.

Adam: Wow, that's awesome.

Mike: We have folks from 20 years to
myself, five years, up in the support staff. They understand the nuts and
bolts.

Adam: Exactly. That's really key,
especially in your industry — understanding what we can do with our technology,
but even more importantly, what we can't. When you guys are developing your
culture and your skill set, you need to plan out several years ahead. There's
always a certain percentage of people that might transition into the office.
But if you want to maintain that pipeline, you've got to be thinking out
usually pretty far in advance.

Mike: Right. If you would ask me 18,
19 years ago if I'd be doing sales, I was a true-blue fabricator. I loved that.
But you take hold of every opportunity that you have. That's something that we
look for — those folks that want to continue learning, accept a challenge, and
come to work every single day putting in a solid effort and really just
growing. That's a huge point of it. From an engineering standpoint, our
engineering manager has 20-plus years with us. He was actually my supervisor.
So you look at those transitions and those folks that are willing to go back
for more training, additional schooling. You build your culture on folks like
that.

Software & Integration

Adam: Back to the software side of
things — if you can get into that. Are you guys all-in with SolidWorks? Do you
use other design programs, or primarily SolidWorks?

Mike: From the design side, the most
current platform — however, we do use some vendor-based programming for our
technology that's on the floor.

Adam: Vendor-based — is that your
machines?

Mike: Yeah. We have a modern
equipment. We brought in a piece of equipment, our panel-bender, Prima Power,
in 2020 this year. So those all have offline programming capabilities. We're
able to do some of those more complex forming operations on our floor.

Adam: Do those get programmed on the
floor, or do they start in the office?

Mike: Yep. Gone are the days where
we'd have 14 press brakes lined up. We have three of them trucking away on new
product development or revisions, things of that nature. Everything is going to
be redone on a revision or laid out from the start standpoint before it even
hits the floor. So that's our end goal, obviously — to keep your green light
time up, keep those machines moving. We had a lot of waste back in the day
before that technology came out in the early 2000s. When it came out, we
grabbed it and kept rolling with it.

Manufacturing Skill Sets

Adam: One of the things we wanted to
get into was some of the skill sets on the shop floor, not necessarily a
recruiting process, but there seems to be a trend in manufacturing where
there's not as many people getting into it as there used to be. My dad talks a
lot about this. In his generation, looking at all my uncles and aunts and
extended family members, everybody was a machinist or a metal fabricator, a
mechanic, a contractor. Wisconsin is very hands-on in general, but there seems
to have been kind of a retreat from some of that. Do you see that coming back?
What are some of the trends you see, just culturally in Wisconsin, with people
getting involved in manufacturing?

Mike: It's important to understand
that as the generation has changed, young expectations do, right? When I was
growing up, it was always a four-year education — you have to go get your
four-year degree. That worked for my sister. I wasn't one of those guys; I was
hands-on. So it's important to understand how you learn. You're versed in
learning a manual and understanding how to operate a machine. As a region, we
invest with our Fox Valley Technical College — it's an extremely important
Marine park. They have some great programs for welding as well as press brake —
running through those programs from a one-year to a two-year degree, and even
some of the boot camps that they hold. That's a huge stake. As a
non-traditional student myself, moving through those programs — you can still
earn a really good living going through those programs and come out with
on-the-job experience. I'm a graduate from Fox Valley Tech myself. I went
through a supervisor management course at the ripe age of 30. I had no
intention necessarily when I started years ago to go back to school. But those
opportunities that were out there helped me close that skill gap from the
supervision and operations management side. That translates into the sales
side. But when you're talking about building your next manufacturers, you
almost want to start — and we do a pretty darn good job of it — start out even
at the middle school level. Getting into those middle schools and talking about
manufacturing, then having them come through and tour a shop floor and
understand that manufacturing isn't down and dirty and dingy like it used to
be. It's important for the younger generation. I have an eighth grader, and
she's already working with a vendor on a 3D platform through their tech program
at a middle school. So that introduction to technology that we're going to use
in the manufacturing sector is already being done at that level. It makes sense
to partner with some of these school systems and bring them in to let them know
that there are options — it might be starting out as a welder and then
transitioning into an engineer and working through our CWI process, things of
that nature. But really giving them opportunities and making them realize that
manufacturing doesn't have to be as we considered it. It's very
technical-based, and technology is prevalent within our industry.

Adam: That's a great perspective. What
would you guys consider kind of the entry-level position on the shop floor? Is
that an assembler? What's the progression that somebody goes through — could be
welding and actually programming, into engineering?

Mike: I'll relate it to myself,
because that's the easiest. I came in as a press brake operator, had very
little press brake experience coming into Muza, and worked my way through and
ended up leading one of our second shift groups for about eight years. So if
you put forth the effort, you can start anywhere within the shop in advance.
I've seen people come through — when I was in operations management — come
through early on and start off at our laser sort table, then transition into a
press brake, and then transition into supervisor roles. Of course there's going
to be training on the material, internal as well as external, that's going to
have to happen. But really, you can start anywhere within manufacturing, and
your endgame is what you make it. So it's the effort, and you have a goal in
place. It might not necessarily be, okay, I want to be in sales or I want to be
an engineer — just take forth every opportunity and make the most out of it to
grow. From a skills gap standpoint, when you're talking about growing your own
welders, having technical-based training within a facility like we do, it's so
important.

Adam: It sounds like it's creating
that path for opportunity, and also finding people that want to progress within
that. That's huge.

Mike: You know, with 3% unemployment
around in this region, it's definitely a constraint to grow a business. So
oftentimes you're taking those culture-fit folks that are rockstars in an area,
and they have ambition to grow their skill set, and then investing time in
those folks and helping them with a roadmap to get to where they want to be.

Muza's Markets Served

Adam: That sounds great. You guys
serve a vast array of end markets — power generation, power distribution,
military, automotive...

Mike: Don't forget lighting.

Adam: Lighting, yeah — you've got some
lighting customers. What are some of the cool things that you guys see
happening in those different end markets, and some of the different things that
you've incorporated into your manufacturing processes to serve some of those
markets?

Mike: A lot of things over the years —
the 20-plus years that I've been in the business — like I said, talking about
that full value-add side. Gone are the days where customers are vertically
integrated. Some of them still are, and they choose to stay there, and that's
perfect. But you see a lot of a shift of folks thinking about that, and they're
hurting for folks as well — the employee standpoint. So you see a lot of that
value-added coming into our doors, which makes sense. We brought on, in the
mid-2000s, a machining division, then robotic welding, so it made sense to grow
the value-added transition there. Fast-forward to current state, where we also
have that full value-added assembly. So we're not just making one part for a
certain organization and shipping; they're putting it into a full assembly.
We're making that entire assembly, painting and assembling and putting
additional technology into it, and then it ships out their walls. So it's
actually drop-shipping?

Adam: In some cases, it will drop ship
right into the end-user's hand, which is pretty awesome.

Mike: Pretty remarkable. I sit back
and look at some of our operations that we do now compared to 18, 19 years ago,
and it's pretty outstanding. I get pretty excited about seeing that transition,
because it opens up the door and provokes thought for the future. What else can
we do? Hey, we're this far — why can't we take it even a couple steps further?

Adam: One of the perspectives we have
is, we work with electronics vendors, we work with metal fabrication vendors,
casting companies, stamping companies. One of the big differences I see between
the electronics and some of the metal vendors is the electronics folks are used
to vendor-managed inventory. So it's one of the value-added services they had
to implement many years ago. Do you guys see getting into that or having stock
— more or less becoming a warehouse of some kind for certain customers, just to
eliminate that shipping time, unpacking, reship, assemble? You know, a more
efficient path to the end market. Have you done any of that?

Mike: We do work on programs with some
of our customers in the electrical and electronic distribution field. Where it
makes sense, if we can work out a program where it takes off inventory from our
shoulders and also alleviates it from their docks as well, it's a win-win, then
we'll take a look at that stuff. It makes perfect sense to align with those
options. As you're looking at the volume of a product, if you're talking large
volume, or we can always have stuff in process, it makes sense to talk about that.
We're really willing to talk about solutions-based. It doesn't just revolve
around that one part — it revolves around the entire solution, supply chain as
well. So we're really talking about what's needed on a weekly demand, then a
daily demand, and how can we best fit the solution around that.

Adam: Cool. Geographically, do you
serve primarily customers in Wisconsin and the Midwest, or do you guys reach
out to the entire US?

Mike: We have customers California,
southeast, throughout. We do have a strong customer base in Wisconsin as well,
and I don't think we'll ever get away from that, just because of the
face-to-face — that's important sales process. But with our customers that are
further out of reach, we can instantly hop on a plane and be down there. Right
now the nationwide and global market is huge. There's no problem with hopping
out and getting in front of people.

Mike's Role: Sales & Business Development

Adam: What do you enjoy most about
your sales and business development role?

Mike: I enjoy connecting with people.
I've always been a people person. When I was first talked to about moving into
a sales role, I kind of thought they were nuts.

Adam: You had to be sold on it?

Mike: Ironically, yeah. But Chuck
Alipore, a senior director at a facility on our campus — one of our great
mentors that we have — he sat me down and we talked a little bit, and he said,
well, you can talk to a wall. More importantly, you know what we're doing, you
know what we can do, and you know what doesn't fit us. So I enjoyed the
problem-solving aspect of it as well. Taking a look at an actual part and
assembly and understanding, okay, how can we do it and how can we add value,
making the product better at the end customer through their assembly process,
things of that nature. I love that problem-solving aspect. I don't think that's
anything that will ever go away from me. It's something that's in my blood and
what I do on the weekends. It serves you well as an operations manager, or
press brake operator, or a salesperson.

Adam: That's awesome.

Modern Manufacturing

Adam: I know you had a few other
topics you wanted to run through — some of the challenges that Wisconsin
manufacturers are going through, and also some of the career opportunities and
partnerships with some of the schools. Anything else we want to touch on on
those topics?

Mike: From an operations standpoint,
it's important for the younger generation to understand that manufacturing
isn't already grimy, like I mentioned. You get into fabrication, and there's
plenty of different roles in that area — press brake operators, laser operators
— and then from the support roles you're talking about engineers and
programmers, things of that nature. It goes past that even to the support roles
— accounting and all those logistical aspects. There's a lot — just in the
metal fab arena, any business has a lot of different needs.

Adam: There's a lot of opportunities
for people that, as you mentioned, want to get involved with a company that has
a path for progression, and has a tight-knit culture. Those are important. Have
you guys done much with 3D printing? Do you see that as a complementary
technology or a competing technology? We have some vendors that are 3D printing
plastic tools for stamping processes. I know it's a bit of a buzzword and it's
kind of misunderstood within a manufacturing setting, but how do you view 3D
printing over the next decade?

Mike: I would love to have one in our
prototype lab. I think that would be the next — well, the future is here,
right? You look at the technology, and if you can make a trinket that goes in
an application to replicate a metal product in half the time, why not? Things
of that nature, I think it's great technology. I could see us getting into it
at some point. It's just going to aid — especially in that prototype world,
it's going to aid our process there.

Adam: So that's probably the first
place that it'll enter, in the prototyping stage, correct? It's great for us.
From a spec standpoint, a lot of the alloys and the components that you
purchase, or that we purchased, they have to meet a certain alloy and spec. I
wonder how that's going to play out — you go from powdered metal to...

Mike: You mean annealizes? Yeah.

Adam: Well, Mike, anything else you
want to touch on? We covered a few different things.

Mike: I think we're good. Thank you
for the opportunity, coming down to have a discussion with you.

Adam: Yeah, we want to have you back.

Mike: Great.

Adam: Alright, awesome. Thank you.

Mike: Thank you.