Guide Arleigh MacNeill, of VMAC’s continuous improvement team, briefs his group before plant tour. From left to right, they are Anna Mosolov of Canadian Western Bank, Malcolm Hargrave of RM Business Solutions, and Nanaimo city councillors Tyler Brown and Erin Hemmens
To celebrate its selection as one of Canada’s Best Managed Companies, compressor manufacturer VMAC hosted a celebration in September that included tours of the company’s plant in Nanaimo, B.C.
Among those leading the tours was Arleigh MacNeill, who’s in charge of VMAC’s continuous improvement team. MacNeill’s tour began in VMAC’s custom shop, where tooling is made for production, such as fixtures for hold machine parts.
“They can do amazing things in here,” MacNeill said, explaining how a pair of 3D printers enable VMAC to get new innovations to market much faster than previously. The innovation, though, comes from the “many brilliant minds” who design the prototypes, he said. “Basically it starts with a dream,” MacNeill said. “The dream begins in there — in the engineering room.”
The dream then becomes a prototype, which undergoes testings “and all sorts of quality control in here before we release it out to the manufacturer,” he said.
Before getting too far into that, though, MacNeill described some of VMAC’s products, such as a gasoline-driven compressor that “can go on the back of any service truck” and produces 30 cubic feet of continuous air. Equipment from VMAC — which stands for Vehicle Mounted Air Compressor — can be found on such familiar brands as Knapheide, Iowa Mold Tooling, and Reading.
3D printing makes molds
Next stop was the 3D printing room where a Fusion 3 machine was creating a mold that will end up in VMAC’s foundry. “This particular print is about 24 hours to complete,” MacNeill said. That speed has enabled VMAC to shrink the time it takes to make a prototype down to a week from eight to 12 weeks when the molds had to be machined out of metal.
In an adjoining room, senior product program lead Michael Hildebrand described his department as the place where VMAC’s products are developed and supported.
“We’ve got a couple different groups here,” Hildebrand explained. “We’ve got the electrical engineering team in the back corner there — they design and develop our two control systems for our air compressor products. We’ve got our vehicle integrated team here, who design our underhood air compressor systems that go in the vehicle engine compartment. And then we’ve got our package product engineering team.”
Hildebrand then pointed out that the object being 3D printed next door was a mold for a crank pulley for a VMAC underhood unit before explaining how his colleague Brennan Granville used SolidWorks, a computer-assisted design program, to design the part.
Once the design is complete, a mold is created with the 3D printer, then it goes to the foundry where a casting is made, and from there it’s machined into a prototype.
At the foundry
Next stop was the foundry, where “the dream comes to fruition.” The foundry is a relatively new addition to the plant, having begun operation in November 2016.
Murray Ash, foundry supervisor, explains how VMAC casts its prototypes
“Previously, if you develop a prototype pulley for a Ram truck, say for instance, sometimes it would be months before we saw our first casting. Now it’s three days max,” said foundry supervisor Murray Ash.
The foundry takes the 3D-printed object, like one seen during its creation earlier in the tour, and makes a sand mold into which molten metal is poured.
The foundry will also do very light production of up to 20 pieces. For most production, VMAC uses various vendors on the B.C. mainland as well as in Washington state, Winnipeg, and Taiwan.
“Another side benefit of having Murray here is he speaks the same language as other foundries,” MacNeill said. “He knows exactly what we want.”
Before leaving that area to enter an adjoining room, MacNeill warned, “It can get pretty noisy when we come through the door here.” Then shortly after entering that room, and passing by a big saw, blanks for rotors, and some legacy equipment, he uttered another warning: “CNC machines, moving parts. Try not to touch anything. All of our pieces have sharp edges generally.”
Machinist at work
In the manual machining area, with a hum of those machines on the background, he introduced manual machinist Kevin Murphy: “I believe he could make anything that you could dream up in your head,” MacNeill said.
Machinist Kevin Murphy stands by his lathe
While Murphy worked on a lathe, a nearby a vertical computer numerical control (CNC) mill — one of several CNC machines — would eventually discharge one of the Ram pulleys.
Over in the production machine shop, machinist Tyler Dyke explained over the whirring din that his job is to remove metal from parts, such as castings, “to make them fit what we need them to do.” In doing so, the machinist maintains tolerances of 6/10ths of a thousandth of an inch.
He credited MacNeill with devising some really unique tools to use, such as a machine shop metric that’s pass-rated by part number. “Ten months ago we had considerably lower pass rates; with root-cause analysis we were actually able to bring that rate up to almost 100 percent for most of our parts,” Murphy said.
Trigger card warning
En route to the quality assurance department, MacNeill led the tour past more CNC machines, including one that can be programmed to run overnight on its own. Over the din he also introduced his charges to Kanban, a lean concept developed by Toyota. It’s a term meaning “trigger card,” he said. In VMAC’s case, the company uses a trigger bin. “It’s a visual control. We are able to see what is available for our assembly,” MacNeill said.
Inside the quality assurance department, manager Terry Kephart was updating the department’s
Terry Kephart manages VMAC’s quality assurance department
new huddle board, another lean visual tool of which several are in use throughout the plant.
“It’s a little messy at the moment,” Kephart said. “But what you’ve got here is our metrics for our processes.”
Eventually, he said, the huddle board, or white board, will be used for week-to-week actions and everything will be electronically controlled and displayed on a large screen.
Inside CMM
Next door is the CMM room, which houses a robotic device called a coordinate measuring machine along with other members of the quality assurance team.
The CMM machine can accurately measure parts to within five decimal places, although certain parts only require three or four decimal places of accuracy.
“If you’re making parts at four decimal places you need to be able to go the next level to measure them,” said Al Gregory, quality inspector and programmer, who is affectionally known as The Professor.
The time required to measure a part depends on the part, he said. The crank pulley, for example, only takes about half an hour. “And that’s not a full measurement. It’s only the critical parts,” Gregory said.
Next stop on the tour was the VMAC rotor production area, or VRP for short, to meet machining
Machining supervisor Jason Weber has been with VMAC for 26 years and was the company’s third employee
supervisor Jason Weber. He runs the VRP and CNC machines, “anything with a really tight tolerance,” MacNeill said.
The company’s third employee, Weber has been with VMAC for 26 years. VMAC had only recently moved into its current location in a former highways maintenance facility after having operated out of the basement of the local Boys and Girls Club when founder Tony Menard first brought the company to Nanaimo. The company has grown to about 130 employees. And it has thrived despite the tragic death of Menard in a hunting accident in 2010.
“The loss of a founder is difficult for any company and VMAC was no exception,” notes a posting on the VMAC website. “But Tony built a strong company with employees who shared his family values, innovative spirit, and unrelenting perseverance. Standing together, VMAC’s employees found the way forward.”
Big bang queries
The tour itself proceeded forward to the fabrication shop. “You might hear a very loud bang,” MacNeill warned.
Standing at the controls of a six-foot 60-ton brake press, welding shop supervisor Adam St. Armour, described the rest of the shop’s machinery, which includes high-speed drill presses, and a plasma table for cutting rough shapes and placing the bend lines, or form lines, on the material.
“It also marks where our holes need to be drilled,” St. Armour said as the hiss of machinery drowned out much of what he was saying. “If we need a threaded hole rather than just a through hole, we can screw hole parts with this within pretty tight tolerances.”
St. Armour then turned his attention to the welding side of the department, which includes three steel MIG (metal inert gas) welding shelves or booths. “And we’ve got two aluminum cells now. We got TIG (tungsten inert gas) and MIG capabilities over here. We can weld stainless steel or aluminum.”
Welding fixtures are graded by kits so the welders don’t waste time looking for things. “They know exactly where to go.” Vending machines that dispense welding consumables as well as safety glasses and gloves also enhance efficiency.
Kata example
In the powder-coating shop, MacNeill explained that VMAC has leveraged Toyota’s SMED methodology to increase capacity by 33 percent. SMED, which stands for single minute exchange of die, involves such techniques as performing processes in parallel.
As with the foundry, the powder coating is for prototypes with the production work usually going to a contractor on the mainland.
“All right. Let’s keep on keepin’ on,” MacNeill said before leading the group to where they could see an example of VMAC using Toyota’s kata methodology on a project. “Toyota kata” is a term that lean manufacturing guru Mike Rother coined for Toyota’s problem-solving processes that emulate the routines, or kata, of martial arts training.
In the VMAC example, the first part of the kata is a question card posted at a work station. “This way everybody knows the questions that we’re going to ask when we come and interview them about the particular project they’re working on,” MacNeill said.
Loving her job
Amanda Pohl has worked at VMAC for two-and-a-half years. "I'll be here until they kick me out at retirement age," she says with a laugh.
In the prio department — prio stands for priority — parts controller Amanda Pohl greeted visitors
MacNeill then led his charges past the compressor cell, where all of VMAC’s underhood compressors are put together, through the warehouse to the final assembly cell and the main huddle board, past the first-aid room, the server room, and the domain of the finance and human resources staff, to the marketing department.
En route, MacNeill admitted that in his three years with the company he has gotten to know every VMAC employee by name and “one or two things about them usually,” he said. “It’s my job to know and encourage everybody to be problem solvers.”
Marketing manager Mike Pettigrew explained that he oversees a staff of six whose aim is to be completely self-sufficient. “We don’t want to outsource anything if we can help it,” Pettigrew said. The group’s responsibilities include VMAC’s brand strategy, which manifests through such efforts as trade shows and corporate events like this tour, as well as search engine optimization, content generation, communications, website and graphic design, media relations, print and online advertising, market research, “and, of course social media, which we’ve got to take a selfie, everybody.”
Lean suggestions
Next door to marketing is the inside sales department. “This is where the magic happens,” said Pam Henselin, who leads the team of four.
“Since 1997, we’ve shipped over 40,000 systems, and we have over 10,000 active parts,” Henselin said.
Meanwhile VMAC’s outside sales team of seven travelled “to the moon and back twice last year” while driving all over North America, Henselin said.
Next stop on the tour was the plant’s packaged products area, where MacNeill pointed out a lean suggestions board. Once suggestions are validated and approved, those making the suggestions are asked how they would to implement them. “They get ownership of it which makes them maintain it, whatever has changed,” he said.
The packaged products area is where the larger compressors and multifunction units are assembled on two lines — one for gasoline-powered units and the other for diesel.
“We’ll take a plate, a mounting plate, put it on the build cart, lift the engine onto it, and then start working the magic into it,” MacNeill said.
Moments later, the tour ended and participants convened for a luncheon under a tent in the parking lot where various dignitaries spoke about VMAC’s recent selection as one of Canada’s Best Managed Companies and for having earned Great Place to Work Canada certification. Those speakers included Todd Ponzini of Deloitte, a sponsor of the Best Managed Companies program, VMAC president Tod Gilbert, Nanaimo Mayor Leonard Krog, and local members of the B.C. legislature and the Canadian parliament.
— Keith Norbury