Factory of the Future: Your Company's Story

Speakers: Bruce Ellsworth , Automation Engineering Manager. Jason Marr, Engineer, DMI Companies

Bruce Ellsworth : Hello, my name is Bruce Ellsworth. I'm the automation engineering manager at the Monongahela facility of DMI Companies. DMI is one of the leading manufacturers of industrial and residential HVAC connectors, components, and accessories in North America, with facilities located in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Oklahoma, and California, ranging around 500 employees and counting. Uh, we're continuously growing and expanding to become one of the largest manufacturers of HVAC parts to keep full stock of all of our national distributors.

Jason Marr: Welcome to DMI Companies. My name is Jason Marr. I've been with the company 27 years. We are located in southwestern Pennsylvania. We're about 45 minutes to an hour south of Pittsburgh. DMI Companies was founded as Ductmate Industries in 1978. Peter Arnold and to this day it's still a family owned company. like I said, I've been here 27 years. I am one of the engineers here in one of the divisions in GreenSeam Industries. As you can see here, this is some of the products that we make here in GreenSeam. This is round HVAC pipe and welcome to the company.

Bruce Ellsworth : Our future goals for modernization mainly stem from updating our equipment. Some of our processes and equipment have not changed in the 40+ years of the company's existence. By introducing newer and more advanced manufacturing technologies, we can continue to grow and expand our horizon and production, safety, and data management throughout all of our facilities. Currently we are in the middle stages of introducing step 4, which is defined by a plan for connectivity, lean manufacturing, and data monitoring and assessment. We've already implemented aspects of lean into our facilities and we are now shifting our focus toward the connective plan for and data collections, laying the foundation for a system that can record different levels of production, shipment, maintenance, sustainability, gives us the ability to become more productive as we possibly can, giving us clean data that can help us become as productive and also gives us the ability to monitor our consumption.

Jason Marr: Our goals are to reduce labor but still keep the highest quality product that we can. If we're going to talk about what steps that I feel that we're in, I feel we're somewhere between step 3 and 4, and why I feel that way is we are still in the process of gathering all the data and building our lean team to analyze all that data, and I think once we have all that, it's just going to be super powerful for us to use.

Bruce Ellsworth : My personal advice would be not to rush. Make sure that you have a clear and well defined objective and plan, plan, plan. It's better to take the time and do the research, train your personnel, and get everybody's input from top to bottom. That way you can lay a solid foundation and build on top of that, rather than using a quick implementation and then backtracking to make adjustments if that doesn't pan out.

Jason Marr: So some advice that I would give you is do it right the first time and what I mean by that is throughout my career. I can't tell you how many times that I've had something break or had a problem and I put a band-aid on it, and I'm coming back to it at some point. I, I know that, where now you know after 27 years in the business I've learned to just fix it right, take time, do the right job, fix it right the first time. and typically you don't have to come back. Do it and you save yourself a lot of time in in the end. The second piece of advice I would give someone is, is put the right people in the right spots and what I mean by that is if, if not everyone's suited for every position, so if you find the right guys and you get them right guys or girls and you get them in the right spots, you guys can go to the moon. It it's, you know, it's, it's endless what you can do.