Manufacturing Analytics Case Study

© SensrTrx 2019 2

Versatech:AData-DrivenManufacturer

Versatech is a full-service engineering, manufacturing, and consulting company. The company offers a broad range of product offerings which fit into several service categorizes. This diverse service base provides clients with a single supply source - saving their customers time and money. Their mission is to provide services and products that are innovative, versatile, and reliable. In late 2016, Versatech sought to improve their ability to impact and improve manufacturing quality, efficiency, and performance. The company knew that their paper tracking system and reliance on manual monitoring left room for improvement across the board. They hoped these improvements would allow them to cut costs and improve manufacturing performance. Versatech chose to partner with manufacturing analytics technology provider, SensrTrx. SensrTrx specializes in helping manufacturers easily and affordably capture their most

important data and turn it into actionable insights in simple, easy to use dashboards.

“We wanted to get off our paper system. We hoped that SensrTrx could help us collect data into a central database to improve the way we worked and that’s exactly what SensrTrx did.” Chad Hill, CEO

Versatech CEO, Chad Hill, believed that by giving quality, engineering, maintenance, production, and other departments real-time data, they could enhance the efficiency of their operations. Specifically, they could improve the ability to reduce overtime, decrease downtime, and improve machine utilization. “We wanted to get the data into one location and have a single-tracking system that looked at data in real-time,” said Hill.

© SensrTrx 2019 3

GettingStarted

Versatech believed that a successful implementation of manufacturing analytics would require every department easily accessing the data. Often, this can be cumbersome and difficult with manufacturing technology. Implementations and cross-department adoption can take a long time, and failure rates are often above 50%. Fortunately, one of the chief benefits of SensrTrx is that it doesn’t require a lengthy implementation or complex integration. Despite a few internal staffing changes, SensrTrx was successfully implemented across the organization, and producing measurable results in less than 3 months.

“The process was really very easy. There’s no reason why anyone couldn’t do it (implement SensrTrx) and start getting good results in 3 months”, Hill shared. The organization went live in January and it wasn’t long before the SensrTrx Manufacturing Analytics application was successfully being used

by all necessary departments across the entire organization.

“SensrTrx is so much easier to use… it is almost dummy-proof.” Matt Perry, Production Manager

WidespreadAdoption&EarlySuccess

Versatech leaders from across departments were quick to adopt the SensrTrx dashboards. Nichole Walters was a Continuous Improvement Engineer at Versatech during implementation and quickly saw the benefits that the new system was bringing her department. “There was much less data entry following implementation. Tooling used to be pulled from production reports and values had to be summed. The new dashboards made this a big time-saver…. This helped us reduce errors and work more efficiently”, said Walters. Versatech Manufacturing Engineer, Scott Strutner, saw far-reaching benefits for his department just as quickly. His department used SensrTrx to look at downtime in real-time so that they could fix issues as they happened; not down the line when the opportunity for savings and improvements were lost. “This really helped us focus on - and improve - uptime”, said Strutner.

© SensrTrx 2019 4

TheHighlightsofUsingSensrTrx

Versatech credits the success of their SensrTrx implementation - both directly and indirectly - to several major improvements over the course of the case study. “One of the highlights was our ability to really look at downtime”, said Strutner. Using SensrTrx, Versatech could now see dashboards that illuminated trends in downtime. This allowed the organization to see issues and solve them quickly; as well as recognize negative trends in scrap

rates in real-time - preventing several major “cost-killers” - resulting in significant savings for the business. “The biggest benefit of SensrTrx to me was the ability to easily dig out whatever data I needed… I feel like this really helped us focus on specific problems, and helped our entire business work more efficiently”, said Matt Perry, a production manager, that used SensrTrx daily at Versatech. “It took less than a minute to change scrap codes (in SensrTrx), and on older systems, that was a 2-hour ordeal”, Perry continued. All the leaders that leveraged SensrTrx in this study believed that the simplicity and access to data likely covered any costs associated with technology almost instantly. This led to widespread improvements across the entire organization, including a reduction in the amount of overtime that was worked by multiple departments. This was one of the primary goals behind the SensrTrx project at Versatech.

SensrTrx Provided a

31% Boost In OEE

In Less Than 3 Months

(two different production cells)

© SensrTrx 2019 5

“My advice to other manufacturers considering SensrTrx is to use it and integrate it into your daily/weekly/monthly processes. It saved us a ton of time.” Scott Strutner, Manufacturing Engineer

TheNextStepswithSensrTrx

Versatech department leaders all were in agreement that they were just scratching the surface of the types of insights and improvements they could begin making by leveraging all of the data that was easily accessible inside of SensrTrx. Future projects include:

• Tracking machines in Job Shop

• Email subscriptions for shift end reports

• Collect additional machine data • Inventory – Implementing a QC • And more!

These projects will continue the efforts Versatech set out to achieve when implementing SensrTrx. They are expected to further increase the savings that Versatech has experienced in reduced overtime work.

“A reduction in overtime was exactly what we were looking to do with this project, and that’s exactly what we have achieved”, Hill declared in his final statement regarding the implementation of SensrTrx.

Contact Us

SensrTrx 7777 Bonhomme Ave. St. Louis, MO 63015

(888) 394-1043

www.SensrTrx.com