Don’t Automate Waste | Lean Built - Manufacturing Freedom E162

0:00You're listening to the Lean Built podcast. I'm Jay and I'm Andrew. In this podcast, we discuss our manufacturing companies, lean principles and the freedom that we're pursuing in life and business. So Jay, I no longer own a lathe. And that's great. Man, you're like your Saunders territory. I love it. Yeah. Marked, say from owning the lathe. Yes. But we also want to talk about AI, AI business for business. Yes. So how have you been using AI recently and what has it brought you? So I've got some tools. First of all, I love using the tools that anyone can use. Like I would say the cloud code that which I've been in and currently employ a full time full stack senior software developer. It's pretty amazing. To build out, obviously, Stoke Forge production and the other suite of products that we're going to be launching over the next year. But really, we have so many projects, software

1:04projects in house, just managing things. I want to be like, I want to see if we can actually push HR issues to some type of AI engine. It's just for general feedback. That type of thing. Like one guy said, well, my new software developer, he said, hey, I'm coming over. I have this paperwork for my old 401k. How do I bring it over? And I said, wow, it's a good question. Let me do some poking around in our particular cases. Two entry points July 1st or January 1st, you know, but that's something that like if they're an AI agent and that's in a document somewhere, it could just surface that. The other thing which has been pretty awesome is, I don't know, have you heard a Groc bot? I've not used it. Okay. All right. So it's fairly new. I'd say it's about a month old. So it's kind of a newborn, but it's really mature. So here's what I've been doing. We get invoices emailed to us. We get invoices mailed to us, which I don't like, but whatever. Some vendors just use snail mail still. And so there's this inbox. It's like a catch all office inbox. And so what Groc bot, I've set it up to

2:08do with the use of like specific bots that you give them a name, you give them a task, and then you give them like credentials. And in this case, it goes into our Gmail administered inbox and it looks for invoices. And the great thing is it strips out all the junk. Like if there's an invoice where it like the invoices on page one, you have terms and conditions on page two through eight, it strips those out. And I've told it, collate all the invoices and put them in one PDF. And it does it every every week. And I have it delivered to, you know, the Groc bot interface for download. And it can then put it in a drop box or, you know, some type of shared folder every Wednesday morning by 8 a.m. And then, you know, accounting can come in or bookkeeper and just bulk in upload it. And it's pretty amazing. I've also said go through and unsubscribe from all the obvious junk. And anything that says survey, we don't do surveys. You know, you can't pay me to do a survey. It's just not my thing. I love surveys. Do you really feel like you get to vent? Well, no, it is a quick change

3:15opportunity to express my real views. Okay. Yeah. I could see that. I do too. I just, I don't know, for me, it's, I think I could use my time better. But if I had free time, I probably would. So I just blank. If I had free time, because that's not something I would spend the Labor Day weekend, are you going to work? Are you going to go in on Monday? Of course. Okay. Good. Yeah. I saw a meme of an aerial photography of a business park where it said every day or every weekday, lots full, every holiday, one card in front of each building. And I'm like, oh, yeah. That's me. That's what I get a lot done. Yeah. Fantastic. Well, I mean, I met the shop. It is Saturday of Labor Day weekend. And I am wearing crocs, walking around in the shop, programming things, and doing ideas that I have. Yeah. And that's really good. Like as an owner, there is no substitute for some days off in the shop in the shop. Totally. Yeah. I'm going to go in and I'm going to do

4:17worse work than that. I'm going to change air filters. I'm going to like wipe off tops of machines like all that little fun stuff because I want to get in places I don't normally go. I think there's opportunities for a newer air conditioning system where we can upgrade, downgrade, change dampers, all that good stuff. So it just gets me my hands sturdy and it gets me thinking. So that's the purpose. But anyways, yeah, rock bots amazing. It's what you do is you fire it up and you give the first spot you call it chief of staff. And then you say, here's the task. This is what I do. I hate doing it. Feel free to create another bot and give it this thing. You know, it'll go back and forth. You'll say collaborate with me. And then yeah, it's really fantastic. It's an easy administrative win. Oh, speaking of AI, this came, you know, you sent me that lume video about the fusion auto desk assistant. It's their attempt to AI. Not great. It has downsides. Your video was awesome. And I think you were presenting the work that it had already done.

5:20But it's like rock bot auto desk assistant. It's really slow. I don't know if it was just me or I was asking for it to do too much. And it didn't nail it the first or even third time. Yeah. Well, so this is an interesting area where there are things like the rule, fillet command where you can set parameters that choose hundreds, even thousands of selections and apply them versus a plain text description of a thing you want to do or a photo you important say, Hey, I think that fits this. It's not clear how good those tools are going to be, but they are worth playing around with today. Yeah. So this feels like GPC very early on, maybe 2023, 24, something like that, because I tried that example where I made a, like a, a cube. And then I added a pocket in the top of the cube. And I think the cube was,

6:21I call it one inch and the pocket was a quarter inch. And I said, fillet the inside corners of this pocket. And it didn't do it. And so I went back and I said, fillet the ins, the vertical lines of the extruded cut. And then it did it. So you need to be able to speak its language. I don't remember what it did. And of course, I gave it a radius and everything. But yeah, it's one of those things. Whereas, you know, I'm used to claw code. You're so ambiguous. And it figures it out or it does it better than you could have described. So yeah, it's coming along. I would say it's coming along. We are in a weird new world. And I'm excited to be here. For sure. Yeah, these tools. So your video to me said, this might be a way where someone that doesn't have cat skills could easily speak a shape into existence so that they just really print it. 100%. Yes. We have employees who want to learn reading printing. And they have no idea what an extrusion is, what a fillet is, what a champ for

7:26is, what a negative cut is, they just want a thing in their hands. And if they can just talk to a system and say, I want an angled thing that holds a bin that's three by five. And that that can give them a 3D printable file. The ideal state is a quickly voice commanded system. Because if you and I need to snap center lines, set constraints, apply equals, parallels, co-linear, it's like, this is all math. Yeah. I'm not a robot. Don't make me do math. Right. That kind of math, it's relatively simple math. That simple math, parallel, horizontal, vertical, symmetric constraints, not complicated, not human. Yeah. There's, I've been sent a few

8:32different resources where it's easy to speak step files into existence, you know, or type them into existence. I don't type these days. I speak to my keyboard and it types what I say. But you can speak these things into existence. And I think they're all outside of the auto desk ecosystem. And I think they're optimized for it. Because I believe what's going to happen is in, you know, with the auto desk assistant is that you give it a description. And then it builds out like the timeline or the, you know, the items at the bottom, whatever it's called. And it wants a structure as if it were building it. Or I could just go to this third party thing, lots of them are web based. And I could just say, I want a rectangular, you know, box that's x by y by z, with two holes in the front and countersink them at 82 degrees. You know, that that will pop out within, you know, 30 seconds. So I do think it's like the, the back end. And that's, that's why some models perform better. And they're getting better and better like Claude, since our last podcast,

9:33like Claude Fable was okay. Claude Opus 5 was untrustworthy and weird. And now there's 5.1, just one week later. And it's amazing. And yeah, I mean with technology moving so fast, I echo that. It's a great world to live in. Shout out on my end to Brad Talis on YouTube at AutoDesk. I've sent you links this week. And I have watched dozens of his videos on CAD design. And I really appreciate a person going meticulously through all the tools talking about 2D 3D, all the different sweeps and lofts and different things. I cannot watch any of these videos at 1x. Oh, not even 2x. I watch Brad at 3x. Dude, look at you. Well, I mean, in fairness, your clock is a lot faster than other the average person's clomics. Well, I'm on my fourth espresso of the afternoon. So yes,

10:38yes. So you're, you're coming. Yes, overclocked at the start. Yes, I am overclocked all the time. Yeah, but it is fascinating to see. Yeah. How a person who has no particular product commitment looks at the tools inside fusion and says, what can this do? Yeah. Because there is real value in an impartial observer auditing what you're doing on. Why? Yeah. So I have several employees that young guys are in college and they've expressed interest in learning fusion. And so I told one of my other employees, Paul, I said, hey, can you go through YouTube and just find like good stuff. Like the guys, the Saunders back in shout out to Instagram class of 2016, right? So, you know, the guys we grew up with Curtis Chan, John Saunders, who are still around, of course, Lars. And find them. And you know, Paul went through and he said, you know, it's so funny because the

11:42the content creators that you and I watched to onboard ourselves with fusion, their stuff is obviously still out there, but fusion has come so far. Literally, some of these buttons don't exist. If they do, they look different, they've been reskinned or repositioned. And you know, I'm still trying to get used to fusion's, you know, like, it's not just a blank screen and you know, you open your data panel on the left. It's like a full like welcome screen with icon and tile things. Even at that, I'm like, okay, well, this is why you need to stay up on software because I'm like, how do I find this? How do I open it? And it's been interesting because yeah, when when you have someone like Brad, that's putting out fresh content. I mean, that's that's why, you know, not all educational content is going to be evergreen. And Brad's putting out the latest stuff. So when you are doing CAD, are you talking or typing? Me personally, you. I'll type in numbers. This is more accurate. Like, I could hold down my voice to text button on my keyboard and speak it. Like if I type in security codes, you know, when you get a six digit two factor authentication thing, no one can see this

12:46with Andrews making a nasty face. I will speak those in because I'm like, I'm already speaking it to myself reading my SMS text. And so I'll just like hold the button down and speak it. You know, it's not like they're going to have access to, you know, the thing I already put my, there's like an air gap there. But like it's kind of smart enough where I, if I speak seven digits, it'll format it as a phone number. Other times, you know, five digits, it'll put dashes in between. So it's just so much easier and more accurate to go just to hand type it on the number, number pad. But yeah, I would say CAD is something where I 90% of the time I'm just typing in. So as a business owner, CAD versus CAM is a really interesting space because if you do CAD, you are designing new products normally. But CAM is reserved for how to figure out how to make things other people designed. And any shop that has

13:51outside clients with a do the design and then you get the files. You don't get to CAD those. Like if they send you a step, whatever they send you, if they say this is the thing, can you make it? Oh, okay. In context, if you're a job shop, yeah. Right. Well, even if you're an OEM, not a strictly whoever comes goes job shop. But if you have ongoing clients and they send you a thing, they send you a thing. And you could look at and go, what? Other people's CAD. So we have an onboarding process when we, it's only happened three times when we onboard someone and we say, Hey, I know you can draw anything in fusion. That's why you're here. But we have a very much like detailed way of how we do it. We want to see sketch feature, sketch feature, sketch feature, and then if there's patterns, it'd be better be right after a feature. And we say you do not get to use press pull, don't do move or delete. You go back to the original sketch and you edit

14:56that because we need to see going through naming sketches is I don't do that often, but that's a big one. If it's something that's that a toolpath is going to be driven off of like text or some type of engraving, absolutely. You name that sketch. And then we have rules like you do not get to change the base design. It's only me or maybe one of the engineers like Ian. And then you bring that model you insert into the as a component into the machining file. So then it's linked so that you cannot edit it. And if I go through the list and I find like, I'm going to throw it on the bus. John, throw John in the bus. Oh, John, I see you made a change. What happened? What did you change? Oh, you know what? You specified 125. The default radius for corner rounding end mills is our 156 tool that is standardized in the shop. Yep, I missed it. Thank you. Thank you very much. And then he'll say like, and I made a note kind of a way of like, you didn't need to ask me that. And I just saved you some time to change a simple fillet in this design. Yeah, but when you

16:02get other people's CAD or whatever type of file comes in, yeah, because even like step files that we've seen come in from customers out of like solid works or whatever CAD systems sometimes fusion doesn't pick up edges. I don't know if you've experienced that. I mean, use an OEM. You also can produce for any other holster maker as well. But yeah, it's problematic, but standards kind of help fix that. I mean, you guys still using, are you 100% fusion at this point? Yes. Good. Yeah. But even there fusion changes. What do you update fusion? Don't change. Man. Yeah, they do. Have you found any of the recent changes like helpful legitimate workflow change? Not big improvements, but I just keep progging on. So yeah. So I've always been frustrated that like when I hit R for rectangle, it just opens the corner rectangle tool. And I'm like, there's no way around it. My guy Paul's like, no, I think there is. And there is now I can't recall it now. I set it up once, but it's those types of things where you can hotkey

17:06specific like center point rectangles. I'd use that more often than corner to corner. But yeah, on the cam side, I do very little hardly any camp programming. Maybe under 10 hours per year. And most of the time it's just poking through other people's toolpaths. Even at that, I'm like, whoa, this change dramatically. Like I don't think I could turn take a part that requires turning and program it. Still got the mill chop set hasn't really changed much. But I don't know. We'll see where it goes. You know, I mentioned 2016 class of 2016. We have shirts that say Instagram class of 2016. And I will be on the floor at IMTS with instant machinist. Yes. IMTS class of 2016 shirts. And if you were there, get a shirt. Dude, I wasn't. I had a newborn child. That's does that feel like is that a legit excuse? Yes. Okay. Okay. Fair game. Yes. Yep. And so Miss John Saunders Open House,

18:08one of his first ones felt bad about that. I went to the 2017 one though. For our team, 2018 was a big IMTS. You were there. John and John were there. Dylan was there. A bunch of folks were there. Yep. But the 2016 IMTS journey is still absolutely core memory for me going to Chicago on short notice and walking around the corner place and going, what is this? Okay. So to take me back, where were you? Did you have that four by four router? I did. Okay. In 2015, I bought my first speedio. Oh, so 2016 IMTS, I had a legit VMC, but was barely doing probing. There were a bunch of things we weren't using yet. And I was basically alone in a garage with a brother. And so I got in the car and drove to Chicago and looked at everything. Primarily Okuma. I had this idea that I really

19:15wanted Okuma. And no, never bought no Kuma. Would you? But to say, well, we don't do, we don't do a lot of heavy machining. Yeah. I was thinking like classic, classic injection molds, that type of thing. Yeah. The Okuma 560, 480. I forget numbers. But those kinds of heavy duty vertical mills are gorgeous. When you see them at a show, I stood in front of the Okuma booth and just drooled. And yet, it's not what we do. I don't need that. I know. Wants versus need. The first Okuma, like I spent good time in front of at an actual shop, not a trade show, I would travel to country every few years and I just go to places to just poke my head around, see what life would be like in those areas. Because I would like to open a second location,

20:17most likely on the east coast. So I dropped into a shop. I have a, and I just go to the app that our e-commerce system provides. And I just type in as zip code. And oh, there's three shops in this area. Let me just spam them. And I just walk in the door, hey, I don't know if you know me, but present in this company. So you use our products to stop in and say hi. I'm traveling, you know, from California. And one guy's like, oh, yeah, yeah, we watch the channel. Come on back. You know, give me a full tour. It's really fun. But he had an Okuma and it was pretty darn amazing. And I went, oh, I could see how this want could be a need. I just need to make the product so that we have an actual need, like not a need for it, but such well-built machines. I actually got a message, I got several messages since our discussion on five-axis products that you could buy. And one of them was like, you need to look at the Okuma five-axis machines. I'm like, oh, yeah, they're on the radar. Do sound, of course, brother. Yeah, I see what you're saying about brother. It might be tricky with the U500 to automate possible, but not easily perfectly integrated. I get that too.

21:21But we'll see. We'll see what they do at the show. But yeah, the Okuma, I went, okay, I can see why people fall in love with these machines. I love this. So another one to add to the list. Okay, so you're Lave, gone. Yeah, what did it look like on Departure Day? Pretty quick, painless. Done by Tentary. Yeah, nice. And then Lave tooling, everything. Yeah, a lot. Everything. Big question. What are you going to put there? I don't know yet. It's just space. It is a thing that was not producing for us that's now gone. And I don't have to fill it immediately. So I can wait. I like free space. That's potential. It's at least room to shuffle. Yeah, there you go. Is it near the other mills? Same Bay. Yeah, same Bay. So it could be, yeah, all the machine needs done in that bay. Saw space, tooling space, racking space, all those things

22:23can move around. The more I think about it, it's like so, Peacola Tiny Homes needs more space. We're so dense here in Seamy Valley. The rule is if your neighbor moves out and you're in industrial condo, you just take it, you'll figure it out. And I've done that. I've done that two other times in business and I have grown into it. Or if anything, it just gives you that opportunity to, it's just kind of like it, it feels like downward pressure saying, hey, you got to cover the cost of this, this overhead causes me to invent and it causes me to like, you know, I don't believe in like cutting to cover expenses, like just grow. But yeah, I mean, that potential, man, that's almost for me. That's even more exciting than a new machine. Like, we're filled to the walls that are current, you know, location, Pearson industries and Peacola. When we have sold machines, it's like, you walk there, you know, there's this dusty patch, little coolant, you know, old, coolant, junk. And you're like, oh, it's dirty, but man, this is a fresh start here. It just gives you that opportunity to move stuff around because I've done two shop, shop floor reorganizations since we've

23:28been there. We've been there about four years, I think. And then it just causes to like restructure and move and get even more efficient and like really streamline the value stream. So I'm excited for you. It feels really good. Did, did the, yeah, space. Yeah, did the buyer finance it? Or can it? Okay. Yeah. So you're not waiting for anything. That's cool. No, love it. And at IMDS, I'm looking at work holding, identity, fixed ring, or five access meds, or and CMMs. Okay. Not today. We're not going to talk about it, but CMMs. Okay. It is an open category. And wow, there is a lot of stuff in that category. Yeah. Like I said before, I think top of my list would be a Zyce Duramax shop floor CMM does not need climate controlled. It's pretty hardy, pretty durable. Zyce calipso is, it's not, it's

24:30probably the most user friendly of the things that I've demoed. I've demoed the miditoio. I've demoed some other one and it felt most cohesive and understandable. I would say all across a board, like CMM software is not as simple as any CAM system that we've ever worked with or CAD. But yeah, I would say this Zyce calipso is probably top of mind. You got me all excited about that. So can we talk about the latest developments with your messura? Is it so so a month from now, we will have the Madsura team in to lift the machine, scrape the concrete, reset the pads, re-level and reinstall our palipule down for how many days? Three days, probably. Okay. Okay. Not big deal. Yeah. And from now until then, we are still running. And the machine works. Everything's great, but we can't go full speed. Okay. And we have to get that fixed.

25:36Give me real numbers. Like if you run it 500 inches a minute or 12, 15,000 RPM, what changes? I don't have those numbers because I don't program that machine. Nice. That's the sound of delegation. But Chris is able to, he knows the numbers. He's able to, so basically things like we have detuned tool changes so that the carousel doesn't run when we're doing finishing operations. Okay. And every time you slow down or detune your pool changes, you are sacrificing cycle time every part. But it doesn't matter. Like there is no point in making bad parts faster. Amen to that. No one cares about out of respect parts in the last time. We care about accurate, boars, surfaces in a time we can predict because a lot of what actual machining

26:43requires is not the fastest possible time, but a consistent time. Yeah. We follow the poll acres. I believe I'm just going to attribute it to him, but the safety quality, simplicity, speed. You might know better if that came from could be toy to, you know, I don't know. But yeah, oftentimes it's the speed thing. And that's, I don't know if you've gotten this pushback, but we get pushback all the time. Oh, you say you don't care about speed. No, we absolutely care about speed. We push things. We're always trying to make things faster. But not at the expense of safety quality or simplicity. That's the order. Then once those things are checked off, yeah, we're pushing speeds. And I told you, you know, I've shared several times where I was in that one shop, which is about a mile away, where I would have to feed hold during times where I knew the trains. You know, there's Amtrak scheduled trains that come through. And that was, it kind of sounds like it's the same situation. Your tool changer was moving everything enough while it's

27:46staging a tool. Right. That's okay. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess like you, like how do you do you think Chris is macaroon that or is he? Well, so we're just tuning it down. But speed matters, the goal is reset the machine so that that tool change pre position doesn't matter as much. Yeah, there you go. But speaks to the quality. Speed does matter. Like nobody ever wants slower. If faster could be done with the same quality, the same safety, the same accuracy, slower is not a benefit. Yeah. So I got another email saying, you know, hey, I'm either going to buy two more VMCs. And he said maybe a third one, a smaller one, or I'm going to buy like a haze EC 400. What do you suggest? And for me, I mean, I would probably go with three spindles. If you have the manpower, he

28:51was in the south where I think in his neck of the woods, I think labor would probably be a little bit cheaper. Certainly, he doesn't have the regulations or obligations that we do in California. So I said, you know, if you've got good guys and hard workers and you got a pipeline where you can hire from and there's two technical colleges, trade schools nearby. So he's like, no, it's not a problem in our area. I said, yeah, I'd probably go with more machines, more spindles over over a horizontal because a horizontal, yes, it is the same speed as a VF2. Okay. But it you take out the part load and unload time or it's significantly reduced and then it continually works. You know, it goes 24 hours, ideally, if you need to. Yeah. And that's that whole thing. It's like that, that's not a speed play. It's a consistency play. But again, automation is one of the last things you want to do. So yeah, automate waste. Yeah, you sure can. Oh, man, you really can. It's easy to do. It is super easy to automate wasteful processes totally. You know, and Paul Acres is very much

29:55against automation and robots because of that. I'm for that. I think the next step would be that you automate so that you take away the monotonous, really low, dumb work that humans have been doing or could be doing. But bad automation, if it's not program, right, you'll make really bad parts and you will make a lot of them if you're not watching it. So yeah, I'm excited, excited to see what grabs your attention. Well, we will have a very fun time on the shop floor on the use day at IMTS. And if you are part of the InstaMachineist class of 2016, come see us because I have some t-shirts. Yeah, come find us. Yeah, you and I are going to be walking the floor Tuesday at probably 10 AM. You think that feels 10 or 11 depending on the drive time. Okay. Yeah. But if you are on the shop floor and IMTS on Tuesday, you can find us. Yeah. Where are you staying, by the way? No idea. Oh,

30:56wait a minute. Wait a minute. You're driving up Tuesday. Yeah. We have a hotel. I don't remember the details somewhere. This is the first year I'm staying at the closest hotel. I don't remember which one, but there's a walking bridge. Didn't you stay at the one? Yeah. No. Someone I talked to. Super bougie. That is the most expensive hotel. Dude, here's the trick. I booked it through IMTS's promo emails and I think per night it was something like 500 and then I got the email. I'm like, oh, it's almost half something like that. So nice. Yeah. Well, I mean, a walking distance hotel is the dream, but you're flying. We're driving. So being in walking distance isn't as valuable. If you are within driving distance of the show because outdoor parking lots. Pretty cheap. Yes, true. Last IMTS 24. I don't like waiting. It's one of the eight ways. It's ingrained in me. So I go to my, you know, I get out of my hotel. I walk to the nearest IMTS bus stop because they

32:00do charter buses and there's this line that's literally wrapped around the building. And I'm like, yeah, I ain't doing this. So if you walked just two blocks down, there's another IMTS bus with 15 people in mind. That was fantastic. Next morning, same thing. I'm not doing my local bus. Go to the next one. It wasn't there. I look over. There's a bird scooter stand. So I birded it from River North to the convention center. Here's the lesson I learned there. When you get there, you need to find bird scooter parking like designated bird scooter parking or whatever it was. Oh, it was like a lift bike. That's what it was. And I had to like ride a few blocks away just to drop it off. And then I had to walk and had I just been a little bit more patient. I would have just caught the IMTS bus and probably networked and sat back and enjoyed the view. So this is the lesson, just a lesson to myself. But this won't happen because I'm being bougie this year and staying home more bird

33:03scooters for Jane. No. Unless I want to do something fun. No. But a lot of the fun social stuff happens like River North, like North, far North. So I'm going to be doing some traveling via lift or bus or whatever. I don't think I should be riding a scooter through Chicago at night. It's pretty fun depending on your depending on your pen portman. Yeah. Definition of fun. Cool. Yeah. Sounds good. Thanks, Jane. So we have one more podcast, right? Before I am DS. Okay. We'll come in with some last minute updates. Where will be and stuff like that? Cool. All right, Andrew. Sounds good. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Lean Built Podcast. J and I are very grateful for you taking the time to listen in. And we hope that it was helpful to you. Please leave us a review on your podcast platform of choice. And don't forget to subscribe and share the episode with somebody you know who would enjoy it. Thanks.