Scaling Up Without Starting From Scratch

Sometimes, building a new department from scratch isn’t the answer. GTR Manufacturing is a Massachusetts-based sheet manufacturer that started in production sheet metal fabrication and now seeks to be a single-source supplier for its customers. Over the years the company has added prototyping, wire harness assembly and box-build capabilities. Machining was a natural next step for GTR, which was sending out hundreds of thousands of dollars of this work to machine shops. But with no background in machining (particularly in the challenges of machining sheet metal), and two facilities that were already at capacity, building up its own machining department wasn’t an option. GTR had to find another way to add these capabilities.

GTR is a Massachusetts-based manufacturer that got its start as a sheet metal fabrication shop. Over the years, the company has not only diversified its customers, but its manufacturing capabilities as well, adding quick-turn prototyping, wire harness assembly and box builds to the business. Photo provided by GTR Manufacturing. 

From Production to Prototyping

GTR got its start as a sheet metal fabrication business in 1973 with three founders — one worked the machines, one handled sales and the other dealt with the money — and a few pieces of machinery in a garage. The company grew from there, eventually filling up a 30,000 square foot space in Brockton, Massachusetts.

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In 2000, when the last of the original owners retired, three employees, including King, purchased the business. They added 20,000 square feet to the Brockton facility and expanded its sheet metal fabrication capabilities. The new owners also diversified the company’s portfolio to include the medical, robotics, semiconductor and life sciences industries. “None of our customers exceed 20% of our business, and no one industry exceeds 40% of our business,” King explains.

More recently, GTR saw an increase in customers looking for quick-turn prototyping. “They didn't want to take it to a prototype shop,” King explains. “They wanted to keep it with us, but it was like begging and borrowing favors to get it through the plant.” The company established a business unit specifically for prototyping work. This move enabled the company to grow despite its sheet metal capabilities operating at capacity. “Our salespeople started focusing on cables and harnesses and prototypes because the sheet metal work had long lead times due to capacity issues with COVID and all of that,” King says. In 2022, GTR moved its prototyping business, along with its cable, harness, and box-building work and testing capabilities, to a new facility in Taunton, Massachusetts.

 Still searching for new opportunities for expansion, the company looked at the work it was sending out. “We were subcontracting out hundreds of thousands of dollars of machining,” King explains. GTR had long considered bringing machining capabilities in-house, but it lacked floor space and expertise. “So, we decided we would purchase a machine shop,” she says. In 2023, GTR acquired Nashua, New Hampshire-based Sweeney Metal Fabricators, which specialized in parts that combine sheet metal fabrication and machining.

GTR saw an opportunity to further expand in the hundreds of thousands of dollars of machining work it was subcontracting out annually but lacked the space and knowledge to bring machining in house. It finally found a solution by acquiring Sweeney Metal Fabricators, a Nashua, New Hampshire-based manufacturer that specializes in machining sheet metal parts. Photo by MMS. 

(Not So) Good Vibrations

Chris Sweeney says his dad “left his job on Friday without any plans at all, and on Monday morning he started Sweeney Metal Fabricators.” Like GTR, Sweeney Metal Fabricators (now called GTR Nashua) started with sheet metal fabrication, and also like GTR, it’s no stranger to growing its business by expanding its capabilities. When Sweeney joined the business, he started building up its machining capabilities. “We were subbing all the machining out, so my father was looking at it as an opportunity,” he remembers. This was in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when he says, “CAD really wasn't where it needed to be and where it is now. Customers were buying all their machined parts from a machine shop, and they're buying all their sheet metal parts from us. Everything was made to print, but nothing's fitting together.” By providing both sheet metal fabrication and machining in house, the shop could check assemblies, ensuring components fit together properly. This proved to be a profitable niche. “One of our larger customers at the time did a decent amount of sheet metal, and every square inch of space was just critical to them,” he explains. “So, if they had a panel and they could hog out some pockets in it, they wanted that done. Simple sheet metal parts turned into very expensive machined parts.”

Sweeney says machining sheet metal is, by nature, a difficult task. “Sheet metal is a lot of air. It's a big part. It's a lot of vibrations. There are a lot of things machinists are not used to having to combat,” he explains. He describes one early job the shop took on, a bracket for HP. “This job came to us on a napkin at lunch. They were putting basically PCs on coffee machines at the time, and these brackets held these PCs. It turned into tens of thousands of these brackets. It was a sheet metal bracket with a big bend in it. And they wanted a flange to be milled down thinner than the rest of the sheet. That thing would just bounce and vibrate.”

But, over time, the shop developed strategies to deal with vibration. “That's not in the Machinery’s Handbook,” he says. “We had to learn that along the way.” Ultimately, he says, the best strategy to manage part vibration depends on the part and the operation. “If we're turning something and we get some vibrations, it's usually a tooling issue. We can change angles or add a center in, or something like that,” he explains. Vibrations in milling operations can be trickier to deal with, he adds. Turning operations usually take place close to the chuck, which provides stability, while milling operations can take place far from the workholding device, especially on larger parts. “If we have a large chassis that we're trying to add a hole or pocket into, it's sitting up in the air,” he says. “We've got it on some plates so it looks like it's held down, but that tool touches it and you can hear it a mile away.” He adds that anything that can reduce sound will damp the vibration and improve part quality — vise grips or even rags can help. “You get creative,” he says. This has resulted in some interesting part setups. “This one job I used to do, when I’d run it, I used to say, ‘God, I hope a real machinist doesn't walk in. This does not look good.’ But we got the parts.”

Managing vibrations can be a challenge when machining sheet metal parts. But over time, Sweeney Metal Fabricators (now GTR Nashua) developed strategies to damp vibrations, often using vise grips or even rags. Photo by MMS. 

Adding Machining to the Mix

When Sweeney’s dad retired several years ago, Sweeney didn’t want to buy him out, so they started searching for a buyer. As a shop that was already combining sheet metal fabrication and machining, Sweeney Metal Fabricators was a perfect match for a sheet metal fabricator looking to get into machining. And not only does the acquisition give GTR machining capabilities, it also adds sheet metal fabrication capacity. “We didn't need to reinvent anything. We didn’t need to change anything. We just were able to offer more,” King says.

“The first time I set foot in GTR before the acquisition, I didn't know what to expect,” Sweeney says. But as he toured the facilities, he noticed similarities between his machine shop and the sheet metal fabrication shop. “I recognize the parts they're making. I recognize the assemblies they're working on. I recognize even the things that I don't do — the wire assemblies and the box builds that they’re doing. I see all these drawings. I know I'm making this stuff, and I know everything I'm doing fits into this world.” However, this crossover of types of work didn’t apply to the shops’ clients. When King and Sweeney sat down to compare customer lists, they were both surprised to realize the two shops didn’t have much crossover. “It was surprising!” Sweeney says. “After 20-something years in the industry up here, I was thinking that everyone I talked to, GTR is going be talking to them too. But it was the opposite.”

Sweeney Metal Fabricators was a longtime user of Paperless Parts’ quoting platform, and when GTR acquired the shop, it began implementing the software at its other facilities. When this implementation is complete, this will give GTR a better way to track quotes across its three facilities, ensuring none fall through the cracks. Photo provided by GTR Manufacturing.

Pulse Check

Combining businesses means getting on the same page, software-wise. Sweeney Metal Fabricators was an early user of Paperless Parts’ quoting platform. In fact, the shop helped Paperless Parts develop quoting capabilities for sheet metal parts. Sweeney points out that sheet metal parts have wider variables that affect part cost than machining. For example, a 90-degree bend in a part is easy to accomplish, but an 80-degree bend is more difficult. Difficulty can also change depending on how thick and wide the part is. And sometimes larger welded parts need a second set of hands to lift the part, which needs to be accounted for in the quote. According to Sweeney, the platform can be a game-changer once shops understand how to use it and tailor it to their needs. “Any other software you're getting out of the box software, and you're very limited in what you can actually customize,” he says. “Paperless is the opposite — it’s almost all custom.”

GTR didn’t use Paperless Parts until it acquired Sweeney Metal Fabricators. It was using different quoting software, but only in its prototyping division. “We had long-time seasoned quoters who were doing the estimating pretty quick in the full production shop and in the prototyping shop, we wanted everything to be about speed,” King explains. But it was open to switching to Paperless Parts. “If we could all get on the same platform, that would make sense. We didn't want to take something away, and it was easy to get rid of the other software at the other facility because we'd only been using it a year or maybe two, and it had a lot of little quirks about it we weren't happy with,” she says. “So, we made the transition to go to Paperless at the prototyping stage and that went very smoothly.” Its next step is to roll out Paperless Parts at its Brockton facility, “which is much, much, much more complex. There are 3,000 jobs on the floor at any given time,” as opposed to the 50 to 60 jobs Sweeney runs per week. Integration into the company’s ERP system (Epicor Kinetics) is also ongoing.

King believes Paperless Parts will help manage operations across GTR’s three facilities. “I'm VP of Sales and Marketing, so I have to be focused all the time on what's coming in, how we're quoting it and how quickly we're quoting it.” With Paperless Parts, she can see all of the quotes that have come in, along with which facility a quote is assigned to and its progress. “I literally ran around to people's desks looking at what they were doing before,” she says. Ultimately, both Sweeney and King agree it could help ensure quotes don’t fall through the cracks. “Paperless Parts is a great source of truth,” Sweeney says. “It’s the pulse of the company.”

Becoming a Single-Source Solution

With the new machining and additional sheet metal fabrication capabilities of GTR Nashua, along with a software platform to help manage quoting across all facilities, King sees opportunities for expansion, particularly in subassembly work. Now, she says, “We're a single-source solution, so a buyer can write one PO and they can get their sheet metal, they can get their wire harnesses, they get their machining, they can get everything that they need.”

Sweeney Metal Fabricators has long used conversational programming to produce parts on its Mazak machines. The shop found that CAM programming introduced a disconnect between the programmer and the machinist, and conversational programming was more efficient. Photo by MMS.

A Conversation About Conversational Programming

GTR Nashua primarily programs its parts at the control using Mazak’s conversational programming capabilities. The shop is a longtime proponent of conversational programming, starting with the its first Hurco machines.

Even though this adds to setup time, Sweeney argues that it gives machinists a better understanding of the machines and gives them more control of their work. “They're taking charge of their part,” he says. “They're making that part, they're getting it through quality.”

Although the shop has experimented with CAM programming,“Somewhere along the line, we feel like we lost a little bit of connection between the program and the machinist,” Sweeney says. Separating the program from the machinist was resulting in too much back-and-forth between the office and the shop floor.

Conversational programming also works well with the shop’s lower part volumes, where the main concern is getting the part done accurately. Fewer parts means less time and opportunity to focus on efficiency. “Once we get a 100-piece job set up and running, that's when I want them make it better,” Sweeney says. And if that job reappears, the machinist has already worked out an efficient setup. However, jobs don’t always play out like this. In those cases, Sweeney encourages machinists to focus on what they’ve learned from the job.

Sweeney says another key to making conversational programming work on the shop floor is eliminating potential bottlenecks in setup, particularly issues that are easy to resolve. This includes ensuring machinists have easy access to tools and stock, so they don’t need to spend time looking for them.