Company Visit with Bruno

Today we had our first company visit with Bruno Independent Living Aids in Oconomowoc, WI. We arrived around 9:00 am. We got ready for the presentation and got some nice notebooks from Bill Belson, who is the director of engineering for Bruno. He then jumped into a company overview. Bruno is a manufacturer of stair lifts, vertical platform lifts, and scooter and power chair lifts. He had some very interesting insights on things like their testing procedures, their inventory turnover, and their manufacturing process.

Bill spoke about their goals on inventory turnover and said that they have accomplished this goal for 4 years now. They follow the LEAN manufacturing process. This process essentially attempts to eliminate waste within the manufacturing process without sacrificing productivity. Another process they use is the Kanban process. If you have ever used Tableau, this is a very similar process. This process is personally something that I really like. I use a similar process in planning out my own work. The testing procedures the Bruno uses were especially interesting. They us PDCA Testing, which stands for Plan, Do, Check, Adjust. This testing has allowed them to reduce errors and get their timeline down.

After this, we went out on a tour of the manufacturing and quality control facilities that they have. These are actually in 2 seperate buildings, 3 if you count where our day started. We first entered the CNC area, where they have very large machines (majority of which were Haas brand) that are doing CNC machining. I really liked how their plant was layed out. They had certain areas for each thing (CNC, Welding, Fabrication, Lazer Cutting) and had clearly marked walkways between each of these areas. Next we saw the lazer cutter, which was cutting out dozens of the same part over. Mr. Belson showed us a few examples of this. Next, we walked back further into the area past the fabrication area, where one of the employees was testing a stair lift. We also saw them find something they were not happy with and promptly find a tool to correct the error. We continued back and while we were waiting for some forklifts to pass us, Mr. Belson took the moment to explain the use of vending machines. These were filled with things that the employees would need to go their jobs like grinding wheels. They appeared to have log-ins that they would use to get the product. I imagine this would help them track where stuff is and would also make it possible to talk to employees who use a lot of products. Next, we saw one of their robotic welders. They talked about how they were even working on a way to lessen the downtime that this robotic welder has as the changeover process from one job to another might take only 2 minutes, but 2 minutes 30 times a day adds up quick.

We then walked over to another one of their facilities and saw some of the final products being packaged up. They also utilized an interesting packing method. For things that were standardized, they used a projector cast down onto a sheet so that workers would be able to line up the product where it goes on the packing sheet along with all of it’s necessary labels.

After this, we walked back to where we started and began to wrap up the day. Bruno had organized lunch for us so we ate and chatted with Mr. Belson and a few members of Bruno’s staff. At the very end, JJ (our professor) asked Mr. Belson if he had any tips for us. He said that we need to pay ourselves first and stay curious.

I sincerely enjoyed my visit. Seeing an actual manufacturing area was really interesting. I had never been on a plant floor like that before this morning. While it was an early morning (about 6 so I could get my car), it was worth it. A sincere thank you goes to Bill Belson and Bruno for letting us visit.