Vancouver Business Journal

When technology does the dirty work

Today’s manufacturers are innovating by combining office culture and technology with hard hats and steel-toed boots – by analyzing flow charts as well as running heavy equipment. Those in Clark County are no exception, and it is helping them compete in a world market. 

Today’s manufacturers are innovating by combining office culture and technology with hard hats and steel-toed boots – by analyzing flow charts as well as running heavy equipment. Those in Clark County are no exception, and it is helping them compete in a world market. 

In 2005, the Vancouver plant of Switzerland-based Tetra Pak performed in the bottom 19 percent of Tetra Pak facilities. In 2007, it reached the 46th percentile and in 2008 was up to the 55th percentile. This year’s target is the 59th percentile, said Robert Baker, factory manager at the company, which makes food cartons.

Leaders at the local plant made those improvements by adopting ideologies about five years ago to involve employees at all levels in process innovations.

Now, team members from different factory departments prioritize issues and break them into smaller components to determine their root causes and find solutions.

Since then, the plant has had a 65 percent reduction in quality issues, Baker said.

“It really turned heads around the company globally,” he said.   

A new era

“We don’t do much of anything without computers any longer,” said Bryan Goodman, vice president of manufacturing operations at Vancouver-based Columbia Machine Inc., which makes equipment for concrete products and consumer product palletizing.

When Goodman was introduced to manufacturing 23 years ago, personal computers were hardly found anywhere but on engineers’ desks, he said. But in the last seven years, he has seen computer technologies migrate to factory floors, saving manufacturers money while boosting efficiency and employee communication and innovation.

“It’s like the difference between washing clothes by hand and washing them in the machine,” Goodman said. “Anything we can do to have the operator add value to the process more each day allows us to be more competitive in the markets we serve.”

Melanie Jennings is communications manager for Vancouver-based Applied Motion Systems Inc., which designs and builds the computer systems that run manufacturing equipment. She worked previously with high-tech manufacturers, giving her a unique perspective on the work AMS does.

“(It’s) using the highest levels of technology to do the grungiest tasks,” she said. “Manufacturers may not call themselves high-tech but anybody who is surviving is using high-tech principles.”

Improving machinery

Use of high-tech principles starts for many manufacturers with improving designs of their equipment. Today, along with traditional cog-and-wheel systems, workers use computer interfaces to program machinery and fine-tune processes.

Companies such as AMS design the computer systems (also known as human-machine interfaces) that control manufacturers’ equipment. Many of the company’s new HMI systems run on Microsoft Windows. Ethernet connections allow AMS employees to troubleshoot clients’ machines at remote locations, said AMS Chief Executive Officer Ken Brown.

Brown’s clients are mainly paper- and glass-makers, but the motion-control approach his employees use is similar to the approach machinists use to design parts on the Hubble telescope, Jennings said.

About half of AMS’ 32 employees are engineers, and most of them have worked at manufacturing plants in the past.

For in-house manufacturing of Gummy Bear Vitamins, Vancouver-based Nutrition Now Inc. had equipment designed in 2007 specifically for making and packaging gelatin-based nutraceuticals.

It was developed after employees asked for a more automated method for filling bottles with sticky products.

“We had an enormous amount of (design) input because we’d worked with the product all these years,” said Nutrition Now President Kate Jones.

Elsewhere in the Nutrition Now factory, a starch re-conditioner was introduced to keep the factory air clear of cornstarch particles and to recycle cornstarch in such a way that Jones said it could theoretically be reused for 20 years.

Cornstarch, which draws excess moisture from gummy products, created a cloud of particles on the factory floor.

People make the difference

Higher levels of technology in a factory can lead to less of a need for human workers, but local manufacturers said technological advances can mean opportunities for them to do higher-level work.

“Labor is becoming a smaller part of it,” Brown said. “The United States manufactures more today than it ever has, just with fewer people.”

But the hope, Brown said, is that low-level jobs are replaced by more challenging factory work.

“The skill level required now to run the machines goes up astronomically,” Brown said. “The number of people that have that skill that want to work in that (factory) environment is much lower.”

For those who don’t shy away from factory environments, technological improvements make room for workers to learn to do higher-level machine maintenance, Baker said.

“It’s really getting operators of equipment to take ownership of their equipment and become experts on it,” he said.

With the advanced operations can also come increased worker safety, productivity and accuracy.

“Now more high-tech is being brought into play with robotics (in places) where it’s dangerous for humans to go,” Brown said. “It’s basically eliminating the risk.”

“(It’s) not putting people out of jobs, but out of mindless jobs they don’t want to do,” Jennings said.

High-tech thinking

Tetra Pak’s Vancouver plant uses computerized equipment for producing and printing food cartons. But the biggest recent advances are in employee process innovations.

In 2008 workers tackled the plant’s biggest issue – customers occasionally received the wrong products. Within three months, a team of employees from five areas of the plant studied the problem, found seven potential causes and developed new processes as solutions.

“The team was entirely comprised of employees, and they knocked it out,” Baker said. “They’re actively involved in this process to make life better for them(selves).”

Solutions included a new coding system for palates of completed cartons that cut product mix-ups by 90 percent between 2007 and 2008.

“To accomplish that, you have to get everybody on the same wavelength,” said Jeff Bergeson, quality assurance lead. “Once they came up with the countermeasure they implemented it themselves.”

Elsewhere in the Tetra Pak factory, a similar process was used to reduce set-up time for carton offset printing by 15 percent.

“In order to get to the next level it can’t be run just by people in the offices,” said Randy Nein, an offset press operator. “We’ve got to get the knowledge of the people on the floor.”

Analyzing factory processes and finding new solutions at Tetra Pak means creating a bevy of spreadsheets and flowcharts to track processes and decision making in each department – perhaps unexpected in a factory environment.

But floor workers said those charts give the new systems their clout. Without them, decision making wouldn’t be as strategic, and it would be harder to introduce new processes to dozens of workers.

Teams can also refer to the charts when solving future problems, said Bergeson, or share them with global sister plants with similar issues.

Charity Thompson can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .