Two machinists, nine CNC machines — that’s the setup at Midway Swiss Turn, a job shop in Wooster, Ohio. Its success requires a delicate balance between careful planning and experimentation. Management meets this balance through two major paths: designing efficient, operator-friendly processes on the shop floor and staying up to date on technology within the industry, experimenting with new ideas to make machinists and customers’ lives simpler. Swiss machines and a five-axis mill are the instantly visible manifestations of the latter strategy on the shop floor, but the shop’s investments in cloud-based software for ERP and quoting, as well as the adoption of the Harmoni manufacturing execution system (MES), have proved equally important to its continued success.

For its confident and sure-footed attitude toward process and machine innovation, Midway Swiss Turn is Modern Machine Shop’s 2025 Top Shops Honoree in Shopfloor Practices.

Nothing Middling About Midway

Midway’s machine lineup includes seven Citizen-Cincom Swiss lathes of various generations, a five-axis Haas UMC-500SS, a larger Miyano BNE-51MYY lathe and several manual machines. The shop works with clients across a wide range of industries, from defense to medical to aerospace. About the only industry the shop doesn’t work with, says CEO Jayme Rahz, is automotive. While Midway appreciates large contracts as much as the next job shop, Rahz also notes that her company fills an important niche taking on complex jobs of smaller size — and that this often helps Midway establish relationships with new customers.

As for the parts, Rahz says that Midway does not stick to typical Swiss parts. Instead, many parts are untraditional enough that customers and Citizen alike are shocked they can be produced on a Swiss machine, but traditional and non-traditional parts alike must stick to a 32-mm maximum diameter. The standard tolerances for these parts is ±0.005 inch, but in a pinch the machines can hold tolerances of 0.0002 inch. The twin-spindle, twin-turret Miyano lathe was freshly installed at the time of Modern Machine Shop’s visit in early July 2025, but Rahz expects similar tolerances and a maximum part diameter of up to 51 mm.

The shop’s lead times for Swiss parts typically fall between four to six weeks, with six to eight weeks on the five-axis mill (General Manager Tyler Beal says this longer lead time comes down to five-axis’ more complex programming and setup requirements). Midway uses three programming suites: Citizen’s WinCNC for simpler Swiss parts, Hexagon Esprit for more complex Swiss and turning jobs and Mastercam for five-axis work.

For all of this, the shop tasks two machinists to keep everything running, with a third person setting up jobs or performing other duties as need be. Midway runs a long, single shift, targeting 12-14 hours of production a day on the lathes (with automation) and long, automated part runs on the robot-equipped five-axis machine.

Aggressively Fostering Better Relationships

If all this seems ambitious for a small company, it’s not something that seems to phase either Rahz or Beal. Both speak confidently about adjusting processes and buying machines as their customers’ needs evolve.

Rahz says she remembers when no customers required material certifications or first article inspection. But as the first of Midway’s customers asked for better documentation, the shop added these steps onto its standard operating procedures — not just for the customers who first needed it, but for all its customers.

Adjusting to customer needs becomes a more expensive proposition with machining capabilities, but Beal says, “We aren’t afraid to buy new equipment” when there’s a demonstrable market for new machine capabilities. This was the case for mill work, as customers had long desired milling capabilities before Midway bought its first five-axis mill in 2024. The shop had doubts about expanding into milling work as it saw automation and done-in-one manufacturing as the keys to its success, but a combination of a customer willing to help Midway find the right machine for its precision mill work and accessible pricing on a five-axis mill integrated with a FANUC robot pushed the shop to add a mill to its lineup. One year later, the five-axis mill has generated enough work (and proved automation-friendly enough) that the shop has its eye on a second five-axis mill.

Similarly, Midway tracked jobs it had to turn away that required capacity for larger bars than its Swiss-type machines could support. After measuring the revenue they had been forced to turn away, the team found that the Miyano lathe would pay for itself swiftly — Beal says that even less than a week after integrating the machine, the shop saw RFQs for jobs involving the new lathe.

Beyond capabilities, Rahz and Beal say a large part of Midway’s success comes down to its work fostering relationships with customers and vendors. Rahz says the shop tries to have positive enough relationships with customers that Midway can be forthright about features or dimensions that would make parts cost-prohibitive or susceptible to quality issues, giving customers plenty of runway to optimize their designs before production. This effort to forge cross-business trust also applies to the shop’s material vendors. The shop only stocks what it needs for specific jobs, making disruptions particularly dangerous — but their long-running relationships add some stability. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when several competitors tried to buy out the material stock from Midway’s supplier, that supplier refused to sell the stock it had set aside for Midway.

Leading the Swiss Way in Wayne County

Lean operations apply to Midway’s shop floor as much as to its material policies. This is one reason the shop has maintained a heavy focus on Swiss machines, as these machines bear many live tools and can run parts complete in a single setup. The simplicity of setup on these machines — load the program, load the automatic bar feeder, set it to work on the proper stock size, set tools and go — keeps setup times short for both long part runs and prototype part runs. To further support its lean staff, Midway tries to organize its Swiss work so that each batch on the machine runs for at least an hour.

Rahz believes Midway is still the only shop in the county to use Swiss machines for job shop work — and certainly the first to use all three modes of Citizen’s low-frequency vibration (LFV) functionality on its machines. This technology makes the machine’s servo axes vibrate and interrupt cuts, causing chips to break off. It provides an alternative to chipbreakers for preventing long chips that can break tools, damage parts or get caught in the machine, minimizing these causes of downtime. Only the two newest of Midway’s machines have this functionality at present, but it has already helped the shop automate roughing for 316 stainless steel and other difficult materials.

At the end of a batch, the shop uses a two-pan quality check system. In this system, the “good” parts in a batch go to an interim pan before joining the rest of the completed parts. While an extra step, it simplifies inspection when a bad part inevitably gets incorrectly sorted. Operators only need to check the interim batch for any other bad parts that got through, rather than the whole stock. As Beal puts it, this “prevents contamination of a lot more parts than just 50, or whatever that batch size is.”

Finding the Flexibility in Five-Axis

This same system is in play for the shop’s five-axis Haas UMC-500SS. Just like the Swiss machines, Midway wants to run these machines with as lean a process as possible. While low-volume jobs may not enable long run times, the shop generally tries to ensure all the tooling on the machine can cover extended runs. At the time of our visit, the shop had loaded this machine with its current longest configuration: a 48-piece, 32-hour job. The tooling matches this full load, and an in-machine Renishaw probe performs broken tool detection. When a tool breaks, the machine can switch to redundant tooling — but if none remain, the machine can automatically switch off.

As mentioned earlier, Midway bought its five-axis mill because it came integrated with a FANUC robot. The robotic programming is directly integrated through the Haas control, which Beal says simplifies programming so that any of Midway’s programmers can use the same control features for the robot as for the Haas mill. This robot performs part loading, turning and unloading, but this is the time-saver that made the machine itself compatible with Midway’s process.

Midway designs most of its workholding for this machine, aiming to make it so the robot can flip parts into the same fixture. This enables the shop to machine batches of parts complete after only a single manual setup, rather than worry about multiple setups and operations on a three-axis mill. Like for the Swiss machines, Midway has high standards for precision on parts produced via the mill, regularly holding to ±0.0005 inch.

A Lean Paper Trail through Software

“Setting up a machine really starts in the office,” Rahz says, and the shop has three major cloud-based software tools powering its manufacturing process.

Paperless Parts is the first of these, handling the shop’s quoting. Beal says most quoting software options on the market are rigid, and even experimenting with round stock versus hex stock took more effort with the shop’s previous quoting software than desired. Paperless Parts made this experimentation much simpler, while also proving able to get real-time material quotes from its usual distributors, track the jobs the shop had to turn away because it lacked the necessary capability (which helped lead to the Miyano lathe), and improve communication between setup folks, programmers, front office staff and customers. This last function has had a particularly strong impact on Midway. Beal says that the communication and notes functions within Paperless Parts have helped track negotiations with customers and vendors while also capturing notes about setup and key reminders that operators and programmers can consult. Rahz adds that she hopes a recently hired quality manager for the shop will be able to inspect jobs quoted within Paperless Parts and anticipate where quality issues are likely to occur — that way, Midway’s programmers can adjust the program, tooling, speeds and feeds to mitigate problem spots before the part ever reaches a machine.

For ERP, Midway uses JobBoss². Its accounting and QA models are staples of Midway’s front-office work, and its ability to handle job travelers and house prints have kept the shop streamlined. Rahz says the shop has used this software for almost 15 years, so it’s hard to compare the before-and-after for its effects. Easier to track is the impact of upgrading it from an on-premise version to a cloud-based version: She did so just before the COVID-19 pandemic, making management simpler during the lockdown period, and the cloud-based version also helped the shop meet most of the security requirements for CMMC.

Information now flows into JobBoss² from the newest of Midway’s software tools: Harmoni. While the shop has only been using this system since the start of 2025, it is already realizing benefits.

Harmoni has two main components: edge devices connected to machines and cloud-based software running on these devices and company computers. This system replaced a machine monitoring system Midway had struggled to make useful, substituting its own machine monitoring and a wide variety of other features.

Beal says that if Harmoni had only been a spindle uptime monitoring system, Midway likely would not have invested in it. Instead, it monitors spindle uptime, quality, scrap, downtime and OEE. Harmoni also monitors both the main spindle and the subspindle of Midway’s Swiss machines, which Beal says is a rarity.

The edge devices also provide a way for the shop to deliver work instructions and check sheets to each machine. Rahz says this was a large factor for why the shop adopted this system, as she views technology through the lens of, “How does it make my machinists’ jobs easier?” Automatically delivering check sheets makes performing quality checks easier to perform, which Rahz says should encourage the machinists to perform these checks as often as they should. Further improving machinists’ jobs is Harmoni’s program revision control module. Jobs and their programs can be tied to individual part numbers, and the system keeps previous versions of the program while delivering the most up-to-date version to machinists. As Beal says he had never seen a shop that hadn’t had some issues with revision tracking, and Rahz confirms that machinists would sometimes accidentally use an old version of a program missing crucial refinements, this has the potential to improve on scrap and rework for the shop.

To further improve on scrap and rework, Midway has developed ways to use Harmoni to track tool life. On the Swiss machines, the Midway team keeps the last part of each batch on the subspindle to inspect and log it. Based on the inspection, they see if they need to make offsets to the machine, entering that information into the Harmoni system. By tracking offsets, they can track tool wear and respond proactively to replace tools.

Seeking out Partners in CMMC and More

Rahz says the primary barrier to implementing new technology or processes is cost. As such, the company has relied on MAGNET, the Northeast Ohio partner of the Ohio Manufacturing Extension Partnership, to help fund Harmoni. MAGNET has guided Midway to government grants that enabled the shop to implement Harmoni, as well as grants that helped defray the cost of pursuing CMMC-compliance, which Rahz estimates at about $60,000.

While the cost for Harmoni was easily justifiable to the Midway team on account of its immediately apparent practical benefits, Rahz says that she was initially skeptical of the value in implementing CMMC. While the DoD has been a valuable client for the shop, the cost was a sticking point. It wasn’t until she started seeing stories about other job shops being taken down by malware and hacking that the full impact of CMMC set in: It wasn’t just to protect government data, but also her staff’s personal information. Rahz has since become an advocate for CMMC, investing in it (check out a 2023 article from Derek Korn for more detail) and using its implementation as a chance to streamline the shop’s data pipeline. Now, employees only have access to the data they need to complete their tasks, which is both more secure for the organization and more efficient for employees. The shop hopes to achieve CMMC 2.0 implementation by the end of 2025, but Rahz and Beal acknowledge that as the shop is not a prime supplier, Midway does not have first-priority for auditors’ time, and full certification could come later.

CMMC, like the adoption of Swiss machines, five-axis machining, machine monitoring and other advanced manufacturing technologies and processes, has required the shop to meet a learning curve with sharp planning and open-minded experimentation. But Midway is a shop for which experimentation is the norm. Beal says his catchphrase on the shop floor is “embrace the struggle,” such that the team can come out of each learning curve better equipped for the next challenge. Rahz is also direct about the shop’s philosophy, saying that the alternative to experimentation is stagnation, and “stagnant is just a layover to going out of business.” She notes that a learning curve may be painful in the moment, but it will lead to higher skills and capabilities.