Smart Machine Monitoring Guides Management Decisions

The Freeman Company has evolved and grown significantly since opening in 1892. The company first started in the shoe business in southern Ohio and has since moved into the mold business with a high-end CNC machine shop. Part of the company’s evolution was the investment in FactoryWiz Machine Monitoring to collect machine data on its thermaform tooling that produces red solo cups, thin gage type containers other products for the food and beverage industry.

On investing in smart machine monitoring technology, Freeman’s Owner Mike Mullholland explains, “What we’re trying to do is invest not only in the equipment, but the people and the software upfront to program the equipment so that when we turn it loose, it runs unattended, and you can see the tool and pallet changers on these big machines. We do a lot of things to keep that spindle running so we’re making chips, which is how we make money at the end of the day. So we really need to understand the impediment, or what’s keeping us from making those chips.”

Mullholland landed on FactoryWiz as its monitoring system of choice because it tracks the reasons why the company is not making chips. As Mullholland says, “It might be because of a bad program, lack of material or often times there’s just not enough man power to do it. The beauty is we’re not making an assumption, and it’s not based on a manager saying ‘It’s not running right now, someone must be doing something wrong.’” Mullholland has found that often times that’s not really the case. He says, “It’s the situation, somebody upstream [or] we don’t have a person available to actually run the machine, and the data makes additional investments or focused efforts on things really easy. If we’re losing a lot of run time because we don’t have a person, we hire another person and then we look for the data to change.” FactoryWiz Smart Machine Monitoring helps guide management decisions and investments, which facilitates continued growth and evolution for the Freeman Company.