How has this impacted our operators? It's made it a lot easier to train them. They don't have to remember nearly as much as they used to. We have an operator that joined right before we got onto Steelhead, and an operator wasn't paying attention. They didn't look at their job or part of what that load was, and they were just auto-piloting to what the standard process was, but it was a nonstandard process. He looked at the scanner and realized, "Wait, I'm not supposed to go in this tank." He came and talked to me and said, "There's something weird about this load." For some reason, he hadn't picked up on what that load was. It saved us thousands of dollars that day because it was a nonstandard load. It went into a tank that most of our processes don't use. We would've had to redo that.
It makes life easy for them. They know where they need to go. It tells them how long they can stay, how much longer they have before it has to come out of that tank. All they have to do is make sure they're looking at the right load. If they're not and they try to select the wrong load, the scanner will alert them: "You're not on the right load. This is not the correct tank you need to go to." It limits failure with new employees on Steelhead.
We had an operator that started with us just before the rollout. He learned a little bit on the old system, which used manual timers and required remembering everything. After Steelhead, I didn't really have to focus on tanks anymore. You still needed to learn the standard times, but the scanner did most of the teaching for me.
Deploying the scanner line wasn't too difficult. Once you had the QR codes up on your tanks, it was relatively easy with a slightly different mindset—you've got to scan into every tank and make sure your timer is running. Outside of that, it wasn't a difficult transition for us. Sometimes we find that temperature sensors will go out, so we do a manual check daily to ensure our sensors are fine.
If you have a spec attached to a part in Steelhead and you're moving them through production, Steelhead will indicate when spec input is required. For example, if we look at this work order with 20 parts in production ready for anodizing, we'll move these parts forward into the anodizing station. Once parts are done being worked, operators move them forward in production. At this point, Steelhead will indicate additional spec measurements are required for these parts and will not allow operators to move them forward without entering the spec input.
Scrolling down reveals a sensor with a spec field attached and parameterizations listed. Operators simply hit the tape measure icon, input their spec value or add comments if necessary, then apply this to their parts. Afterward, Steelhead allows them to move parts forward.
If we want to see historical sensor data accumulation, we go to the home screen, click on the maintenance tile, select the sensor dashboard, and view data for different sensor types and locations. We can see last measurements taken, comments written, status updates, and historical values for all sensor data.
For water break tests on non-blasted parts like smooth ones, we're looking for clean water runoff as it comes out of the tank—no droplets or oil residue left on parts. Operators check how water runs off large plates like these; if it's smooth across all sides without oil residue, it's clean.
Steelhead brings consistency between operators by ensuring all processes are followed uniformly—for example, ensuring rinse tanks are used correctly without skipping steps.
The scanner line helps manage special processes like nickel acetate seals by stopping operators if extra steps are required before proceeding into tanks. Steelhead makes it hard to do something wrong—it’s essentially idiot-proof.
Steelhead simplifies tracking loads with different processes like etching or zero etching by breaking apart flight bars automatically when needed. This eliminates errors from manually flipping through paperwork stacks and ensures accuracy even during busy times.
Overall, Steelhead has drastically reduced user errors and improved efficiency in our operations while being intuitive and easy to use.
One of my main things was zero etch and parts that get etched. It’s super common for us to run type two bars that'll have some parts go into this tank for 50 seconds or so while others won't go into that tank at all.
Previously, what we've done to make sure we don't etch zero-etch parts or vice versa is visually checking through a big stack of paperwork—we have customers who send us seven parts in an order but they're small parts—and we want a big flight bar full of parts. So we'd cram a stack of paper this thick sometimes and flip through all those pages manually.
With Steelhead, if we have zero-etch bars or multiple zero-etch bars on a bar that normally gets etched—as soon as I get to this tank—I'll see on my scanner those individual flight bars break apart immediately so I know what needs pulling off.
That was a pretty common error we had in the past because it's easy when flipping through stacks of paperwork during busy times to miss one page where it says certain parts don’t get etched.
This was one of our big points of contention regarding user error and mistakes on parts—and that's drastically gone down since then.
So it's been good. It was pretty intuitive overall.