DN Solutions
Published

All Top Shops Are Winners

Standing out in one category is not enough to earn a spot among the highest-performing CNC machining businesses.

Share

The 2019 Top Shops CNC machining benchmarking program Honors Program winners appear in a panel discussion at the most recent Top Shops Conference

The 2019 Honors Program winners appeared in a panel discussion at the most recent Top Shops Conference. This years’ event is virtual.

I was halfway through writing the third of four profile articles on the 2020 Top Shops Honors Program winners when I began to panic. The story I was writing was about machining technology, but it was supposed to be about shopfloor practices and performance. Meanwhile, the machining technology award-winner seemed to have a lot to say about human resources, and the human resources award-winner seemed particularly knowledgeable about business strategy and performance. Had we picked the wrong companies for the wrong awards?

Upon reflection, I don’t think so. However subjective it might seem to let editors help determine which shops are contenders for awards, the quality of the dataset driving the choice makes it virtually impossible to go wrong. The honors program is reserved for top shops, and becoming a top shop requires excelling in all four categories.

Not that this occurred to me after spending hours staring at a spreadsheet of benchmarking data, trying to determine which pre-selected shops stood out the most in each of the four categories. With deadlines looming, my struggles with the third article made it easy to feel as though we had made some mistake. As much as I thought the data had pointed to Pacon Mfg Inc. as the shopfloor process winner, I couldn’t help but pivot repeatedly to the shop’s automated five-axis machining systems, which are the first of their type to be installed in North America. 

The same thing had happened with the second article. The business strategies winner, Rimeco Products, might have been the shop-floor process winner. Inventing products that could provide an extra revenue stream while focusing on a single market niche makes for a good business story. However, I could have instead focused more on the kind of process standardization that the product embodies, and how that product helped drive standardization throughout the shop’s operation. 

Meanwhile, the human resources category winner, Tier One Machining and Assembly, specializes in “transition sourcing:” that is, managing the manufacturing of entire product lines in some cases for biomedical and life sciences industry customers. However, the article I planned to write would barely mention this, focusing instead on the shop’s culture. Although I had a solid case to make for a human resources win, what better candidate for the business strategy award than a company that specializes in essentially managing large portions of customers’ businesses for them? 

Then I realized that the machining technology honoree might well have something to say about human resources.  Like the other winners, we chose this shop based on what stood out about its survey responses without knowing its identity. In this case, however, associating the data with the shop revealed that I had already visited Advanced Precision Engineering (APE). I’d also been floored by the extent and pace of its investments in five-axis machines, palletized HMCs, turn-mills, collaborative robots and more. With Top Shops data backing my initial impressions, I saw no reason not to hold APE up as a model of a technologically sophisticated machine shop. But upon reflection, my mind kept returning to the first thing CEO Alan Soucy told me about what drives APE’s success: people. “We hire for good hearts,” as he put it. Perhaps I should have tried to learn more about that?

Understanding the error in my thinking about these articles required another conversation. I’d asked Steve McClure, CEO of Pacon Mfg., for a second phone interview to help refocus the article I was struggling to write about the shop’s process rather than its technology. He made my task easy. The article ended up being about how lean manufacturing principles drive the shop’s choice of technology, as well as how five-axis machining is inherently lean.

This revelation triggered another: The fact that I could have profiled any of these four winners in the context of any of the four categories was not a problem, but rather an indicator of the strength of the underlying Top Shops data. By virtue of being top shops — that is, by ranking in the top 20th percentile of survey respondents based on an aggregate of differently weighted metrics — these businesses excelled in all four areas. The reality is that Top Shops honorees are not “winners” so much as ambassadors: representatives chosen to exemplify one narrow subset of characteristics that make CNC machining businesses successful.

This is worth keeping in mind as you peruse our coverage of the four honors program winners, all of which have multiple stories to tell. It is also worth keeping in mind as you develop your own company’s story, ideally by building on the specific processes and practices that our data and articles continually reveal to be characteristic of North America’s top shops.

Koma Precision
benchmark international advanced manufacturing trade show
Kennametal
Gardner Business Intelligence
IMTS 2024
DN Solutions
MMS Made in the USA
IMTS 2024
Techspex
CHIRON Group, one stop solution for manufacturing.
High Accuracy Linear Encoders
Mazak - Innovative manufacturing for medical

Related Content

Reinventing a Precision Shop With a Data-Driven Mindset

When this machine shop lost 90% of its business within three months, a reinvention was in order. Here's how it survived after quickly falling on hard times.

Read More
Automation

AI Chip Flushing Keeps the Lights Out

Swiveling, camera-guided coolant nozzles solve a CNC machining automation problem that is ideal for artificial intelligence (AI).

Read More
Aerospace

Machine Monitoring Boosts Aerospace Manufacturer's Utilization

Once it had a bird’s eye view of various data points across its shops, this aerospace manufacturer raised its utilization by 27% in nine months.

Read More
SPONSORED

How to Grow the Business with Real-Time Job Status Data

ERP systems that focus on making data more accessible can improve communication within a shop, reducing wasteful errors and improving capacity.

Read More

Read Next

topshops

When Machining Lights Out Leaves Nothing Out

A Top Shops honors program winner strives to ensure every part crosses paths with a robot, cobot or pallet changer.

Read More
Automation

Standardization Leans the Way to High-Mix Automation

An increasingly digitalized, lean manufacturing process begins with a common selection of cutting tools and five-axis machining fixtures.  

Read More
topshops

Top-Tier Culture Keeps Top Shop Staffed

Interpersonal harmony, personal accountability, peace of mind, and an inner drive to improve help this shop compete in a tight market for CNC machining talent.

Read More
Paperless Parts