A commercial Powder Coaters became a Steelhead Strong customer in late November 2022. Their team is well positioned for success with enthusiasm for the industry they serve matched with leading-edge technology. Here is the article written by Tim Pennington with Finishing and Coating. For more on finishing and coating news and insights, visit FinishingAndCoating.com.
As general manager of a fabricating company, the owner was always pleased with the job his powder coating vendor did on the parts he sent them.
So happy, in fact, that when he learned that the powder coating company in Oregon, was for sale in 2022, he stepped in and bought the company.
“I was a customer for eight years and became good, personal friends with the owner,” says of former owner, who stayed on as a salesman after the sale.
Adjusting to a Big Learning Curve
The new owner says he had been looking for career advancement for some time, and when the previous owner learned that was the case, he offered to sell the business to his customer. The new owner took over in July 2022, and his previous background as a heavy equipment mechanic put him around a lot of parts and machinery that needed coatings.
“But this was a big learning curve,” he said. “I’m certainly learning a lot, especially on the business side of things, but I have been lucky in having the right people in the right place already.”
This commercial powder coater has served the Northwest area for over two decades, operating in a facility that is over 25,000 sq. ft., which allows them to offer powder coating, sandblasting, stripping, pretreatment, packaging, and shipping.
“I knew coming into it, I was nervous about not knowing much about powder coating,” the new owner said. “But at the same time, I didn’t have to know it because of the people that were here and in the right place. I can learn as I go, and I get the time to do it.”
Transforming to Digital Operations
One thing that the new owner saw as an immediate need — and something that had been recommended when he purchased the business — was to transform the company into more digital operations, including ridding itself of handwritten notes and job orders that often led to confusion and errors.
The new owner noticed right away that the General Manager— who was also in charge of scheduling jobs and workflows— was spending almost five hours each day working on the daily schedule of when parts were to be coated and in which part of the facility.
In addition to the time spent on job shop scheduling, the General Manager was also having to print those schedules and rearrange work orders, plus print and get them to the right department to handle the part when it came in.
The issue with manually doing this process, was that his team wasn’t able to recognize issues that were cropping up on the plant floor until the work orders and printouts came back to the office at the end of the day, and they could finally see where bottlenecks and problems were occurring.
“And then hopefully you can read the person’s handwriting about time and processes, and hopefully they didn’t spill their coffee on it or put it through the oven. I knew this needed to be a problem we solved right away. When you have over 180 pending work orders, sometimes, we need to get organized.”
Finding Software Specific to Powder Coating
This powder coater sought their solution by attending a trade show late last year, where they searched the vendor floor in hopes of finding an integrator to help them go paperless and improve efficiencies. They say they saw a few that attracted their attention, but none had a specific program that worked specifically with — and was designed for — a finishing and coating operation until they met the reps at Steelhead Technologies.
A relatively new supplier to the coatings market, Steelhead offers a cloud-based platform tailored to drive data-based management that offers intuitive features, measurable impact, and custom-engineered deployments.
They said they were cautious not to force the paperless system onto the company’s existing workforce.
“There’s been a lot of changes, but they were all driven from feedback. And being a new owner, I didn’t want to be that guy that says, ‘I want to do it my way,” and I don’t. I really care about their input.”
But with all the changes made since the new owner took over, the paperless system with Steelhead was going to be the biggest one by far. One of the biggest improvements that became apparent after the system was installed late last year was the ability to see where jobs were in the workflow process and the red flags that went off if coating projects were not making progress through the facility.
For example, the team can quickly look and see that a job has been in this queue for three days.
“With the paper system we had, the only way we might know something was wrong was when the customer calls and asks where their job is. Often, it got pushed to the side. So it really helps us to identify when we dropped the ball on projects.”
Capturing Data Permanently for Future Projects
When the original owner first started at the company with the original owner more than 20 years ago, the process was to photograph the jobs that came in and write notes on the images to help keep track of the process, which was smart at the time but also very time-consuming.
With the new software tracking system, they can do that inside the system, and it is captured permanently. “Plus, instead of recreating a work order over and over again because we have a lot of repeat customers, but it’s that fine data that really turns me on to this,” Huettl says. “And that’s also our success: pay attention to those details.”
Every operator and supervisor has access to a computer or a tablet on the job shop floor, where they can review the coating specification, see an image of the part, and read any additional notes that may have been used the last time the parts came through the line.
“We had a job this morning where we needed to call upon the historical data and tribal knowledge. We had an instance where the night shift hung something differently than what the day shift would normally do. So we went out to the shop floor, snapped our photos, documented it, and so now it’s repeatable, regardless of day or night shift. That, to me, is key to this whole thing, efficiency. And by having these photographs, it increases efficiency.”
Coating Wheels, Airframes, Dental Equipment, and Automotive
This powder coater spends a great majority of its coating hours putting a powder coat on wheel rims for a major West Coast retailer, Les Schwab Tires. They coat about 5,000 wheels a year for the 600-outlet store.
Their customer base is also diversified in working with local fabricators, some aircraft engine frames for a regional manufacturer, and handrails for custom homes. Work has been picking up for coating dental equipment, as well as some structural steel, suspension components, and even automotive components.
They have several manual conveyor lines and calls them “push-pull lines” — and an automated 3-stage washer and pretreatment system to facilitate the shop’s three large batch powder coating booths.
Their long-term goal is to hopefully add a second location since they are maxed space-wise at their current spot at 25,000 SF. They realize there is more work to be had in the region, but he wants to focus on turning the work around quickly for any new customers they bring on.
“We just can’t do it in a quick enough time. There are a few other powder coaters around — and we’re definitely the largest — but I do know people will go elsewhere. A second location would give us more capacity and maybe have the space to do an automated low-temp line.”
They worry that if they can’t handle all the new work in the area, another powder coater might come into the area to pick up the slack. “I just want to make sure that we can take care of all the powder coating needs in the area and not give anyone a reason to look elsewhere,” he says.