Redefining Shop Floor Communication at AccuRounds

AccuRounds is a second-generation, family-owned, advanced manufacturer based in Avon, Massachusetts. Established in 1976, they provide custom, precision-machined components to industries including medical, aerospace, and emerging technologies.

The company is led by President and CEO, Mika Tamasi, who has continued to develop and strengthen the culture of the organization as part of their organizational alignment strategy, “The Path to Perfection.”

However, AccuRounds was still maintaining and attempting to improve their process by manually recording and documenting things with pen and paper. This resulted in information getting lost and the company was in need of a digital transformation.

Within a year of implementing MachineMetrics, Mike and his team had connected twenty-three machines and were driving process improvements and greater collaboration between engineers and machinists. Because of AccuRounds’ history of building a strong culture from the front office to the shop floor, the team worked to deliberately manage the tensions that came to the surface during their first few months after installation.

“Everything was done by paper and pen”

The Problem

Measuring the efficiency of processes by hand resulted in a number of problems for AccuRounds including delayed data, inaccurate information, and the large amounts of time it took for teams to collect the data. AccuRounds was struggling with manually collected data, unable to see the performance of production in real-time and often only discovering problems days after they had occurred.

The Solution

Though met with some hesitation from operators based on the fear that they were “being watched,” the culture at AccuRounds enabled a successful MachineMetrics implementation. By removing the paper-based system, both the shop floor and management had visibility across both individual machines and the entire operation. This allowed AccuRounds to push its continuous improvement program to the next level, helping them to identify process inefficiencies, problems, jobs, downtime reasons, etc. With problems identified and prioritized, the team can begin rolling out solutions.

“MachineMetrics is another vehicle to have a discussion, a dialogue. It’s a tool to help keep spindles running, and that’s what we’re paid to do.”

Rolling Out MachineMetrics