TOP SHOPS

Published 10/2/2017

Top Shops Profile: Richards Industries

Richards Industries was 2017's Top Shops Honors Program winner in the category of shopfloor practices.

topshops

Derek Korn

Executive Editor, Modern Machine Shop

Richards Industries’ in-house capabilities include CNC machining, painting, assembly and testing with extensive quality procedures.

Richards Industries is the parent company of six distinct industrial product lines, including regulators and control valves from Jordan Valve.

The company says it recognizes employees for what they do in ways that matter: through opportunities for growth and development, experiences in an inclusive, diverse culture, and compensation package and benefits programs.

To Richards Industries, machine monitoring provides a window into the performance of its machine tools. According to the company, overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), which factors in productivity, performance and quality of output, is at least 20 percent higher than before machine monitoring was in place.

Company Description

Richards Industries is 2017’s Top Shops Honors Program winner in the shopfloor practices category. This Cincinnati, Ohio, industrial valve manufacturer has taken extensive strides to implement lean strategies to improve flow and throughput in its more than 100,000-square-foot facility. In some cases, it has moved away from multitasking-type equipment to create lean, multiple-machine cells to achieve higher production.

In addition, Richards Industries has recently installed a machine-monitoring system that enables shopfloor personnel to track activities and record the performance of its machine tools. The data gathered and analyzed by this system is making the company more aware of how well machine time and manpower count toward productivity. Although it is still in the early stages of implementing this system, the results are encouraging. Machine uptime has increased significantly; a pallet-changing system is getting better usage; CNC programs are running more efficiently; and setup procedures have been further streamlined.