Eagle Elastomer incorporates automation to improve efficiency

PENINSULA, Ohio—Eagle Elastomer Inc. is constantly looking for ways to improve its efficiency.

The Peninsula-based custom mixer has found success by employing automation in a variety of areas throughout its operation, which also includes an extrusion and sheet products business.

Eagle operates out of a 41,200-sq.-ft. site with 47 full-time employees. Its business is focused on fluoroelastomer products with more than 600 formulations in its library.

"We also do a lot of different batches," President Regan McHale said during a tour of the firm's facility for the Association for Rubber Products Manufacturers. "There could be five or six different compounds in a given day that are running through the mixer."

Which is one of the reasons why the firm looks so closely at how often its lines—both on the mixing and extrusion side—change compounds. Eagle tries to minimize those changeovers to be as efficient as possible, grouping as many like-compounded jobs together so they can run continuously.

"You lose your efficiency if you're trying to do a lot of different compounds," said Neil McHale, vice president of operations. "We try to make sure we minimize the amount of compound changes. If we have work orders all for one compound, we try to run those at the same time before we go to the next one. Otherwise you're going back and forth, and you lose efficiency."

The way it keeps tabs on those changeovers is through its daily operations monitoring reports—which are designed for the tooling and production staffs to monitor and plan Eagle's production process. Neil McHale said that previously, this process was tedious and required multiple reports to be compiled together. It was limited in its ability, not user friendly and information often wasn't readily available.

So Eagle decided to enhance and automate it.

The program now runs after hours and doesn't require any printing, saving paper. It generates one report in an easy-to-use format that outlines the firm's key operational metrics—efficiency and utilization of production lines, status of production work orders, late deliveries from vendors, supplies and raw materials, and daily scrap.

"Automatic daily reports were much timelier," Neil McHale said. "It consolidated information from all databases into one report that's easy to use and improved the production staff's visibility of attentions."

For its mixing business, the report also includes the number of batches run, the amount of compound produced in pounds, time it takes to run/daily machine time and number of compound changes.

Its extrusion report tracks the number of work orders run, number of parts run, quantity/unit of measure of pans extruded, the average time per pan that was run in feet per minute, daily total runtime in hours and the number of compound changes.

"If we have too many orders on one specific extrusion line, it gives us the opportunity to re-balance those lines," Neil McHale said.

The firm also applied automation to its invoicing process. Neil McHale said that the firm's old method required invoices to be printed manually at the end of the day, and then mailed to customers. The automated system would generate a report invoice and email it directly to the customer, completing the task instantly and saving money on supplies and postage.

Eagle's manufacturing process also integrated automation to enhance efficiencies, namely in its extrusion capabilities. Brian Chandler, process development manager for extruded products, outlined a project where the firm was able to reduce the amount of labor on its extruded products lines.

The firm made sure that the operators performing the work were involved with the project from the beginning. The first generation of its automated machines was built in 2011; it's now on a third generation and looking to enhance the process further for future generations.

The old process involved an operator spinning a tray to line up the cord as it came out of the extruder, and if it were a multi-part line the process would need to include a second operator. The new machine fully automates the process and replaces the tray when the line is finished.

Chandler stressed, however, that even though the project created a labor savings for Eagle, the firm did not implement it with the intent of reducing its work force.

"What we found that was very successful was to just be upfront with them," Chandler said. "We were crystal clear with what our intentions were. We didn't have any intentions of replacing people. When we started this project, we had people in line for retirement over the next few years, so our plan was not to have to replace those people."