As a leading global manufacturer of advanced plasma, laser and water jet cutting systems, Hypertherm owns a large market share in their space, with majority market share in the plasma market. The company is a recognized leader, with Hypertherm’s products being used for cutting any type of metal, for applications in a variety of industries including shipbuilding, manufacturing, and automotive repair. With nearly 50 years of experience in cutting, and maintaining 1,300 associates, the company’s client list boasts of brands including Ford, Volvo, Harley Davidson and Caterpillar.
Loftware Cloud offers a single labeling system to meet all of our needs, throughout all of our locations, across all of our suppliers worldwide.
Robert Kay
IT Operations Support
With operations and partners worldwide, Hypertherm was experiencing significant growth. However, their existing consumables product label printing system was not sufficiently accommodating this growth, and was presenting considerable risks to their operations in this lean manufacturing environment. The company’s existing “home-grown” system was complex and customized with layers of third-party applications, which posed connectivity issues for suppliers, and represented a single point of production failure. Additional software licenses were no longer available to enable them to grow or upgrade their existing deployment, and there were inherent issues with mislabeling.
Further, the system was prone to breaking, ultimately causing significant downtime issues representing a loss of productivity, with five to ten hours of troubleshooting and fixing the label system each week. All of this resulted in customer dissatisfaction, brand integrity issues, and lost revenues, equaling $25,000 – $100,000 worth of productivity each week due to labeling issues.
If labeling goes down, our production process stops because it’s part of our quality system to make sure that the products are completely together before they go out the door. If labeling goes down we’re dead in the water.
Isaac Carty
System Administrator
With their customized “home grown” labeling system, Hypertherm found itself in the midst of production down situations all too often. Additionally, there were a variety of connectivity issues, which caused synching errors when trying to replicate data to local stations, resulting in more downtime.
Inability to print represented a critical issue, because when Hypertherm’s labeling process stopped, production stopped, and they were unable to get product out the door. Unfortunately, due to complexity of the legacy labeling system, it would take excessive amounts of time to figure out where the problem resided to get the system back up and running. This resulted in orders being delayed and credibility being lost.
The existing system required a reliable network connection because it was synching information from an FTP server to a local database that resided on each workstation. If a failure occurred, there was no notification to the user and the labeling process continued, producing labels with incorrect data. Mislabeling or printing with the wrong data resulted in missed delivery deadlines, customers receiving incorrect parts, and costly returns. Incorrect labels had a downstream impact on customers, which could ultimately cause brand credibility issues and dissatisfaction.
Additionally, when a user selected a wrong printer and the job went to print, they would need to start the print process over, resulting in lost time and productivity. Hypertherm realized that they needed to establish a good technology foundation to eliminate, or at least reduce the role of human error in the occurrence of mislabeling. The company wanted to simplify their labeling approach so they could configure a single enterprise application, rather than having layers of third party solutions and custom code. Hypertherm wanted a solution, which was automated and allowed them to simply scan a part number to automatically pick the appropriate label template, the printer and the media, rather than requiring manual entry which added more failure points. They also wanted a system that was “poke-yoke” compliant, meaning workers could simply scan a tray to establish the appropriate part number rather than manually typing in part numbers to avoid mislabeling.
As a growing company, Hypertherm was expanding their production capacity by enabling relationships with third-party manufacturers to supplement production when demand was high. That meant they needed a labeling system that could grow with the company, so that external suppliers could access their system and seamlessly print labels for successful “dock-to-stock” shipping. The existing system depended heavily on network connectivity. However, the lack of a reliable connection, especially for suppliers in Europe and Asia, resulted in unreliable access to the system, dramatically affecting the supplier’s ability to produce labels.
Many suppliers were experiencing syncing errors when attempting to pull data from Hypertherm’s labeling database which resulted in production down-time. In some cases suppliers needed to ship computers back to Hypertherm to be reconfigured, which required a full-day get them back up and running. As they continued to grow and add to their network of suppliers, Hypertherm needed to have these external suppliers access the same labeling solution that they utilized to ensure consistency and enable continuous operations.
Hypertherm’s custom labeling application was primarily developed and managed by one IT person which represented a single point of knowledge and failure for this complex, multi layered printing system. Hypertherm recognized the risk and inefficiency of having a single resource responsible for their mission critical labeling. Considering the amount of system downtime and the system intricacies, they needed a more streamlined, automated system to address this significant risk point.
Maintaining their complex labeling system, which included 35 printer stations, was a daunting task. Setting up each label station entailed a complex process. Each station required nearly one full day to prep in order to put in the base applications and all the customizations on top. It involved installing the license, adding layers of off the shelf software, the custom interface was installed, and they needed to ensure the correct templates were at the right stations or they wouldn’t be able to print. Often when there was an issue, there was no clear way to determine where the problem originated due to the complexity of the system. This represented a very clear challenge to the IS Operations Team who spent significant time troubleshooting and routinely rebuilding labeling stations.
