How Klever Innovations Scales Global Production with Real-Time Scheduling

Here at Clever, we make safety box cutters. We're the biggest manufacturer of safety box cutters in the world if we include all three of our brands. Our products help people stay safe. It reduces cuts, lacerations, damage to products, completely concealed blade. Over the course of the last sixteen years, we've experienced all of this growth. And going from a very small shop with just a handful of people to where we are now, we didn't necessarily have real visibility of downtime until it was kind of after the fact we'd run reports and that kind of So more reactive than proactive. The visibility of real time data is very important because our customer base has expanded tremendously worldwide in fact. So we need to kind of have our finger on the pulse of what's happening on the production floor and the shipping and receiving to really understand where we're at, how we're doing, and how we're meeting customer demands. What really brought us to Machinmetrics is two of our three companies had already moved over to one ERP system, but we at Clever specifically needed something that showed manufacturing, an application that worked with scheduling, with tracking, uptime, downtime, how much product we're using, the time it's taking, the labor that's being consumed during that. We needed it on the finance side because that's how all of our costing was set up. Our warehouse management partners, Moog3, actually brought us to Machinmetrics. And I think we were sold when we saw the dispatch schedule. That was kind of the moment from manufacturing operations to get their buy in. So in April 2024, we implemented our ERP system, our warehouse management system, then MachineMetrix for our manufacturing. They're all fully integrated, we have that easy continuous line of information that's flowing back and forth because of the integration that was built during implementation. Prior to machine metric, we were using a system called RealIQMS, but it wasn't reliable enough. We knew that the data was collecting there, but it wasn't something that we could use and assess how efficient we are, like how much units are we producing. The data was there, but we could never really create analysis out of it. So machine metrics really help us with that. We have started putting it in dashboards. We now know our efficiency. We now know our downtime. So all of that together made us so much better, I Machine metrics gives us daily real time information. So you can look on the floor, you can look on a computer, and you can tell exactly what is running, what cycle time we're running, how many more parts we need to understand our schedule, which then allows us to ship on time to our customer and maintain the correct amount of inventory. We sell all over the world, so our demand is very dynamic. You need real time information that's telling you where you are, what you're running, and where you're gonna get to. Without real time data, you have no ability to satisfy customer, so therefore it's extremely important to understand the day to day operation. The schedule for machine metrics is very helpful and you can see everything at the same exact time. You don't have to dig into each press itself to see what's coming up next. Everyone's able to get prepared and set up. If there's a mold change, we're able to pre stage everything. If we didn't have a machine schedule like that, we'd have no idea what we were running. The techs on the floor wouldn't know what to be prepared for. So this is what makes everything run and tick on the shop floor. We use Machinmetrics Max AI function to help see production numbers from shift to shift, finding out which shift is having the most problems running production. We also did some major scrap reductions with, MachineMetrix. We ran some reports finding out what our biggest scrap problem was here. It's a great tool. Usually, we were doing tick sheets. Well, after about six of those, you get tired of counting what the actual problem is. With Machinmetrics, we can actually go in there, select the data we wanna see, and then it pulls all the data for us, which just makes everything so much quicker when you're trying to problem solve daily, especially shift to shift problems. We have a great organization. People care about the customer and want to help customers be successful. So we continue to grow, and the machine metric is helping us understand costs, helps us understand our capacity so we know what our growth rate is. We're going to grow 30 to 40% in this plant this year, so it's great to have a system that will predict as we go through the process. We know how long it's going to take to get the next order done and then ship on time to the customer and satisfy their needs.