"Made Your Way," Feature Article, October 2005

made your way

Manufacturers bank on giving customers exactly what they want.

by Jean Thilmany, Associate Editor

Manufacturing jobs may be moving out of the United States these days, but U.S. manufacturers have identified
a competitive opportunity in the important and growing area of customization.

Consultants in the field say that it's a route more manufacturers are taking.

"In the U.S., there will always be a place for mass production. We're never going to customize a screw," said Farrokh Mistree of the Georgia Institute of Technology. "But already you can see customization in everyday life." Mistree, associate chair of Georgia Tech's G.W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering in Savannah, has long been at the forefront of customized manufacturing innovation.

Custom manufacturers are not offering customers a limited choice among already-produced varieties, Mistree said. They are using flexible computer-aided manufacturing systems to make products exactly as a customer specifies.

Companies that buy engineered goods are looking for products tailored to meet their needs. So Mistree predicts that more suppliers will begin customizing their products, as competition makes it necessary and advances in engineering technology make it practical for even small companies to do so.

"Think of the manufacturer of big industrial chillers, say 300 to 1,300 tons," Mistree said. "In that business, you can't tell your customer to take what you have or leave it, because they're going to want something that's just right for them."

In such a case, the chiller manufacturer might decide to produce tubes—a fundamental part of the chiller—in several standard lengths. With the fundamental piece standardized, the company could tweak other parts of the design—according to customer specifications—around the tube length a customer requires.

That's an example of customized, yet cost-effective manufacturing that combines standard manufacturing practices (having tubes on hand in a variety of sizes) with flexible design practices. Engineers should expect to see this marriage of standard and customized practices become the norm, Mistree said.

Your Actuator Is Ready

Nook Industries Inc. of Cleveland makes linear motion components and linear actuators for medical machinery, military equipment, and packaging equipment.

"Everything we sell is customized," said vice president Chris Nook. "We have a standard catalog of items we sell, but every customer orders a modified version of an item. The challenge is to get it in the customer's hand as fast as you can," he added.

In the past, salespeople held meetings with customers to determine their exact needs. Then, an engineer created each specialized part with computer-aided design software. Designing a part took about two weeks, Nook said. The engineer would spend part of the time in meetings with the customer, tweaking the design, then repeating the process.

About three years ago, all of that changed. Nook Industries brought in software that helped the company build an online, interactive catalog of parts. Customers now can design their own actuators at the Nook Industries Web site. Design takes only a few minutes. The customer's engineer can download the drawing and incorporate it into a system design.

On its end, Nook manufactures and ships the part, Chris Nook said.

The new catalog software, 3D Partstream.Net, is from SolidWorks of Concord, Mass.

Customers can design parts online because Nook's engineers have put in their time behind the scenes, creating the CAD drawings to be modified.

"We have the base model," Nook said. "The customer just tells us which modifications they want and then we have the CAD drawings for all those.

"It's like if you have a base Honda Accord, then one guy specifies he wants it with a CD player and with certain wheels," he added. "We have all the bills of material and the drawings needed to make it that way."

Nook Industries' engineers spent about a year creating the CAD drawings. The time spent on that project was nothing compared to devoting an average of two weeks to design every individual part, Chris Nook said.

He estimates that the move cut sales costs by about $426,400 each year, while sales increased by about 35 percent.

The move toward customization can require a change in fundamental thinking. Tim Simpson finds that many manufacturers are unable to figure out how to take a first step.

As an associate professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at the Pennsylvania State University in State College, Pa., he often consults with manufacturers looking to make the transition. In those situations, his first goal is to help manufacturers come up with a basic product design that can be readily adapted to satisfy a variety of customer needs, he said.

"Rather than help a company come up with single products or one-offs they can make, we help them think about the range of options they'd like to provide to the customer," he said. "Then, we look at creating the core technology modules and subassemblies that are common across all those products. That way, you can mix and match modules, reconfigure, and scale things to go after different groups of customers."

A manufacturer maintains a standard library of linear actuators, which buyers can customize to their liking online before ordering.

In recent years, many CAD vendors have upgraded their offerings to incorporate earlier decision-making and planning features needed for this style of manufacturing, Simpson said. Yet even with technology advances, many manufacturers still operate in what Simpson termed "reactive mode." They put out a basic product, then tweak it after the fact according to customers' requests. That's how Nook Industries operated before it set up its online catalog.

"We're trying to get companies to be more proactive," Simpson said. "We want them to give more thought up front to a range of products their customers will want. That way, they'll operate more cost effectively."

But how do manufacturers and their design engineers know up front exactly what their customers will want? How do they design the basic module? How many specialized CAD models do they create?

For answers to those common questions, Simpson points to work he's done with a company that makes flow-control valves for utilities. For that type of customer, each job is essentially a custom job, he said. Every installation differs in terms of pressure rating, pipe size, and safety requirements.

The manufacturer's first job was to look at the range of valves it produced and determine the best-selling models. The most-used served as the base model.

"Then we looked at historical data and tried to forecast needs based on trends they've seen," Simpson said.

The trend and forecast information told the manufacturer how its customers would most commonly outfit their valves. From there, the manufacturer went to work creating a CAD model for each potential valve.

While the company sells its valves through its Web site, salespeople also go out into the field to see customers and help them gauge their needs. Because all the CAD designs are online, the salespeople can run what-if scenarios in front of customers to show the effect of changing a design parameter. Models in today's parametric CAD systems allow the salespeople to run those scenarios, Simpson said.

"Then, up pops a visual and it has a cost estimate associated with it," he added. "You can increase or lower your specifics and see right there what it does with the cost."

Manufacturing proves the tricky part, Simpson said. Companies often benefit by creating a common model that can be easily tweaked on the manufacturing floor to meet custom requests.

Some custom manufacturers take a type of job-shop approach—creating small runs for each customer order. Others take advantage of digital machining and tooling equipment that responds quickly to changed inputs and that can be preprogrammed to machine oft-requested parts.

Easier Said Than Done

The seeming simplicity of such a manufacturing process—just create a number of CAD drawings ahead of time—belies the challenge to most manufacturers, Simpson added.

Many companies don't understand how to map customer specifications to design parameters—that is, how to create CAD files in which parameters like size, volume, and material are related and in which a change of one parameter ripples to affect others.

Say a manufacturer makes large, industrial mixers.

"A mature company has an understanding of how, if a customer wants a mixer of a certain capacity, that relates to the type of material, the size of the machine they need," Simpson said. "Other companies struggle with that concept."

Though today's CAD software eases customization woes, it means engineers have to design parts, like this linear actuator, up front.

But implementing such a program might be easier for small companies than for their larger counterparts, he said. Small companies are good at responding to customer needs; they have to be, to win business. They're more nimble than their larger counterparts and can often implement customization more easily.

According to Simpson, the trick for these companies is to avoid merely producing a variety of products from which a customer must choose. (Think how daunting it is merely choosing among the many varieties of Oreo cookies on the shelf today.)

Customized products can be made at less cost than can a plethora of products, and they don't sit in warehouses waiting to be purchased. "If the customer isn't involved, variety for the sake of variety is worthless," Simpson said.

Both big and small companies can be intimidated at the beginning of any move toward customization. It's like clearing out that cluttered room in the basement. Mapping out where to start, then actually starting, are the most intimidating aspects of the project.

And for most companies, actually starting requires reorganizing the product development process, from early-stage planning right through manufacturing and shipping. And then, of course, coming up with the necessary number of CAD model. And possibly retrofitting the manufacturing floor.
All that is a tall order. But, according to Nook Industries, a 35 percent sales increase makes it worthwhile.