Aerospace Shop Thrives with Five-Axis, AI and a New ERP

“Don’t confuse good luck for good tactics,” says Johnny Goode, owner and president of MSP Manufacturing, a job shop in Bloomington, Indiana. The shop has a long history of aviation and defense work, but when Goode left his career in law enforcement and stepped into the vice-president role in 2020, much of the shop’s equipment was aging, and its milling capabilities were limited to three-axis work.

Goode introduced a new wave of adaptability to the shop’s leadership and a willingness to brainstorm and try new technologies and production processes. By the time he succeeded his father as president in 2023, the shop had taken its first steps into five-axis work, and by the time of my visit in 2025, MSP Manufacturing had adopted new ERP, AI systems and a new shop paradigm, with cobots and 3D printers planned for the near future.

Foundations and Resets

The company was founded as MSP Aviation in 1943, when it made tachometers for fighter planes in World War II. After 59 years and some slow growth, Goode’s father purchased the aviation manufacturing company in 2002 to fill an industrial park he owned. Goode says that his father grew the business 1000% in revenue over a ten-year span, buying many of the core product lines that make up half of the shop’s usual production mix.

Goode himself started at MSP the end of 2019 as a business consultant, and the turmoil of the COVID pandemic caused Goode to suggest the shop expand its offerings to other fields like medical and woodworking. While the former is no longer a significant market for the shop, work in the latter persists, as does the shop’s rebranding to MSP Manufacturing.

Now, Goode estimates that at least 50% of the shop’s work is aviation-related, with an almost equally large share being defense work (or crossing between the two) and a much smaller portion of work for the firearm industry. The shop averages about 50% of its work being on parts where MSP is the only FAA-approved manufacturer, with the other half of this work going toward job shop work for defense and aerospace companies—although this balance can shift alongside aerospace production.

The shop primarily works with aluminum alloys like 6061 and 7075, but also does a fair amount of work in brass, titanium, copper, plastics, nylon and the occasional exotic alloy. It maintains a strong assembly department, as well as a department for secondary and finishing operations. But despite all this, when Goode first started with the company, it had been in technological holding pattern for several years, and was ripe for new equipment and processes.

The Technological See-Saw

MSP Manufacturing’s modernization journey began with Haas UMC 750 and UMC 500 SS machines, which brought five-axis milling capability to a shop that historically only had three-axis capability. The UMC 500 SS also came with a 20-station pallet pool, giving the shop automation capacity, and a heat shrink machine for toolholder preparation. Goode also took a hard look at the shop’s old waterjet machine, finding that the shop only used half of its space. As such, he bought a new waterjet half as large, opening room on the 9,000 square foot shop floor for new equipment. The company would also soon invest in a Nakamura-Tome twin-spindle lathe with a bar feeder from Edge Technologies, which enabled it to run lights out.

Adding these capabilities to the shop floor was not the same as using them, however. Goode says it took about a year for the team to become comfortable programming for five-axis work and really start to use it — and then the potential to condense production schedules from some parts from six operations to two became apparent. The team quickly acclimated to the machine after that, putting enough jobs on the machine to justify the purchase of the second Haas five-axis machine.

This change in mindset, from doing things the way they’ve traditionally been done to being open to new possibilities, also helped smooth over the adoption of automation in the shop. Goode says it took a few months to really have the pallets sufficiently busy for lights-out automation, but that between buying the Nakamura-Tome lathe and its arrival, the team had developed a jury-rigged bar feeder. While that in-house bar feeder could not run full lights-out production, it did extend uptime on one of the shop’s lathes until the Nakamura-Tome and its Edge Technologies bar feeder arrived.

MSP has also updated its existing three-axis lathes with rotary tables to make them fourth axis-capable, and is updated all its workholding to common workholding from 5th Axis. Goode says that this should improve repeatability when moving parts between setups or machines, as the workholding is accurate to 0.0002 inch. He also hopes to equip a CMM with 5th Axis workholding to bring these same benefits to MSP’s quality department.

Goode describes the shop’s quality department as centrally important to the shop’s overall workflow, as it handles first article inspections, incoming and outgoing inspections for parts that require outside processing, and regular checks to ensure production is not trending toward errors. At the time of my visit, the shop’s quality department included a Faro arm, a Keyence image comparator suitable for small parts, a comparator, a manual CMM and many gages for specific measurements on the shop’s wide catalog of aviation parts.

This lineup can meet most of MSP’s needs, but Goode says that machining department’s capabilities have outstripped the quality department’s, making some jobs it could otherwise complete impossible to quote and sometimes causing a bottleneck with the increased volume of parts coming through the shop. As such, Goode hopes to add a Hexagon CMM to this lineup soon, increasing the machine shop’s capability. He foresees this and other potential improvements in the quality department surpassing the machine shop’s capabilities, with the future improvements alternating between the machine shop and quality as each requires new capabilities to operate to its highest effect. This will soon include 3D printers, which Goode hopes to use for fixtures on machine tools and CMMs, as well as for printing demonstration and proof-of-concept parts.

Solving Programming’s Delays

MSP has also taken steps to update the software it uses and improve the efficiency of its operations. This has primarily played out in the adoption of two software programs: CloudNC’s CAM Assist and ProShop’s eponymous ERP software.

CAM Assist is an AI-powered programming software that, when provided with a model, tooling list and stock material, generates a suitable tool path and cutting parameters. CloudNC acknowledges that the end result is currently only compatible with three-axis or 3+2-axis work and that skilled programmers can often find optimizations, so CAM Assist tends to get about 80% of the way to a complete part program, but 80% of the way there can save hours of programming time. Goode says that during tests, his lead programmer manually programmed a demo part in about two hours. When his programmer used CAM Assist for the same part, the software generated a program in 15 minutes, with the programmer taking 10 minutes to optimize the result.

These time savings have held firm for MSP’s other compatible parts. Goode estimates that, on the low end, the software saves about 70% of programming time, and even the unoptimized results are useful for quoting and estimation. The cutting parameters the software provides have similarly proved a useful baseline for the shop, even as its programmers do need to spend time optimizing them. As Goode puts it, “It accelerates you . . . let’s say you’re running a 20-lap race. It almost takes you to that 19^th lap where you can just sprint one lap instead of having to run 20 laps.”

The benefits of this software also grow as manual part programming time grows. One mission-critical five-axis aerospace part MSP recently worked on required 14 hours of machining, and programming efforts were projected to take weeks, if not months. By automating the 3+2-axis programming for this part and only manually optimizing and programming the operations requiring simultaneous five-axis work, MSP was able to cut this time significantly and provide a much shorter delivery time in its bid. Even with a higher bid than some of its competitors, this delivery time won MSP the job. The shop completed the part months ahead of schedule, with Goode going so far as to say they programmed, machined, and post-processed the part faster than it would have taken them to program the part manually.

While CAM Assist has only been in place at MSP since mid-2024, the shop implemented ProShop as its ERP system in 2022. Goode says of the shop’s old ERP that its modules did not communicate between one another, making it difficult to get a high-level view of the shop’s production to schedule jobs and order materials. By contrast, Goode says ProShop links between different documents and views, makes revision changes obvious and simplifies cross-referencing inventory and work orders. He says he has paired the software with real-time analysis from Microsoft PowerBI, and MSP’s new visibility into order trends and core product availability has enabled the shop to schedule runs of these core parts in advance rather than interrupting other jobs to perform them.

A New Operational Paradigm

This last change with ProShop has led to several knock-on effects for the shop, directly changing how it operates and helping spur changes in shop culture. The machine shop is now often ahead of schedule, and between the benefits of CAM Assist and ProShop, Goode says MSP can avoid time crunches while maintaining a 97% on-time delivery rate — with Goode attributing most of that remaining 3% to delays in supplier deliveries.

Under Goode’s leadership, MSP is also pursuing more grants to modernize its shop. Goode says his father already had a good relationship with the Indiana Small Business Development Center, and the center’s RESTART Grant during the COVID-19 pandemic was one of the first Goode applied for. Despite some nerves about doing so, he ultimately found it simpler than some proposals he needed to make while working in law enforcement. This has held true to other grants as well, with Goode saying he spent four hours working on the grant application for the shop’s UMC 500 SS, and came away with $170,000 for it. While he admits that requirements for state grants have often been less stringent than the requirements for federal grants, both have been useful for the shop. In addition to the UMC 500, MSP has used grants to help pay for several in-development shopfloor AI projects, as well as CMMC certification and a broad spectrum of training.

Most of this training comes from the Purdue Manufacturing Extension Partnership, on whose board Goode sits. Goode polls his employees on which aspects of manufacturing they feel they need to improve, and most of the training uses MSP’s own parts as examples. In the last few years, the shop has undergone internal audit, CAD/CAM programming, blueprint reading, GD&T and light print training.

Goode has built a culture where this level of honesty from staff is rewarded, not punished. Doing so (especially as he entered with no previous manufacturing experience) required him to work in most areas across the shop to understand them better and make an effort to listen to MSP staff about what they perceive as inefficiencies in the shop. It also required a mindset of accountability for staff at all levels of the company, and Goode notes that he has tried to uphold this even for himself. This has led to a culture where hearing someone complain about difficulties finding Allen wrenches led to MSP standardizing its work stations, and where Goode strives to be upfront about supplier delays to customers. As he puts it, “bad news up front is better than bad news the day the part’s supposed to be there,” and the shop maintains a lot of repeat business.

Planning for Tomorrow

MSP plans to maintain this business for a long time, and has developed an apprenticeship program to ensure it will have staff for the foreseeable future. Goode hires local teenagers for their last two years of high school, observing their willingness to learn, ability to learn and work ethic. If the apprentice shows promise and the shop looks to be doing well enough to hire new employees, MSP will pay for their trade school programs, with the apprentice agreeing to work for MSP for at least three years afterward. Goode says MSP is just starting to see the first beneficiaries of this program return to MSP, but the program itself has been extremely useful for handling the influx of work from MSP’s efficiency gains. The shop also offers tuition assistance for bachelor’s degrees in related fields, with Goode citing the examples of two current employees, one of whom is pursuing a degree in business administration while the other pursues a degree in mechanical engineering.

These programs — and the new equipment and software MSP has purchased and implemented — can look costly on the surface, but Goode says the last few years have hammered home that the cost of not making changes or investments can be much greater. The shop has become more innovative as a result of its new familiarity with advanced manufacturing technology, its parts have become much simpler to run, and it is more prepared to build out processes for repeat work than individual parts.

MSP has grown considerably in the last few years, and Johnny Goode says that the skills which enable machining success bear more similarity to the success skills he needed in the military and law enforcement than he expected. Adaptability to difficult circumstances and a willingness to brainstorm new solutions have been highly necessary — as well as his old standby, “don’t confuse good luck for good tactics.” After all, good luck is temporary, while good tactics make their own luck.