Akron entrepreneur aims artificial intelligence at CNC machining

Jan 29, 2024

If America is serious about wrestling a chunk of its manufacturing back from overseas, it just might need Adam Ellis and his new Akron company, Harmoni Solutions.

Because to fulfill such ambitions is going to require a lot of skilled workers, including a lot of highly productive machinists. Ours are getting old.

"You go through most of the shops, and the guy running the CNC machine is usually in his late 50s or 60s," Ellis said.

He's right, too, at least in some places. That's been the case in Northeast Ohio for years, as manufacturers complained that were fewer and fewer machinists, welders and other highly skilled manufacturing workers.

That makes the productivity of the existing machinists more important, along with the ability to pass on knowledge to the next generation. Ellis thinks he has a device that can help with both.

If shops can track their jobs, time, waste, the performance and efficiency of their machinists — and increase workers' skills at the same time — shops can make more money, he contends. His company and its eponymous product, Harmoni, can do just that, he promises.

"It is 'Moneyball,' for machine shops," Ellis said.

If you've seen the movie or read the book, you know how important data is to the "Moneyball" system of management by data — and the data needed to do that is what Ellis said Harmoni aims to provide to its clients.

The Harmoni device looks a bit, perhaps on purpose, like an oversized Nest thermostat, a device Ellis compares it to. Nest represents the Internet of Things for consumers, he said, while Harmoni represents the Industrial Internet of Things, known in manufacturing as Industry 4.0 because acolytes say it represents the fourth industrial revolution.

The Harmoni device mounts to a CNC machine and becomes an information sucking and processing attachment.

Ellis said he took pains to build it so that it can interface with a broad range of CNC machines, from various manufacturers as well as different eras. For example, Harmoni has ports that can take in analog data from older machines.

In addition to information from the machine, the device also gets it from things with RFID chips, which use radio frequencies to transmit data, particularly identification information, over short distances. Those chips, which Ellis said now cost pennies each, go on the pieces of work that the machine will process. The machinists who use the machines have them, even the work orders that accompany each job have them.

Armed with data from the machines and data from the people using them, work documents and the work itself, Ellis says Harmoni can provide machine shops with data that will result in reduced costs, less waste and improved efficiency.

"We're trying to share moments of time in many different places, to create huge revenue savings," Ellis said, while giving a virtual tour of how the system works.

Let's say Bob, a machinist, is about to do a job of some sort. He gets the piece he is working on, the documents that tell him what needs to be done, and he goes to the CNC machine he needs to use — it doesn't matter whether it's a 4-axis milling machine or a lathe.

"It knows Bob just walked up, because of the (RFID) sticker," Ellis said.

It also reads the sticker on the work, so it knows what Bob is about to put into it, and it reads the documentation Bob has for the job. With all of that, it knows which program or programs Bob will need to use, quickly offers and loads them, and even passes along any special instructions he might need.

Then, Harmoni tracks the entire job, generating a report of how long it took Bob to complete it, how long he spent on each process, what tools he used, how often the machine was running and how long it was idle. It does that for every machine with a Harmoni console and for every machinist that uses them.

That enables a shop owner or manager to track the performance of individual employees, identify who is best at which tasks and who might need training in certain areas. It can reveal processes that slow down jobs or create waste, and keep track of how much use has been put on a cutting tool or when the machine needs maintenance.

The system is agnostic when it comes to ERP software that a shop might use, too, and can interface with nearly all of them, Ellis said.

It even gives instructions for specific tasks and processes and allows machinists to enter notes, which can help more quickly train them and improve their performance, Ellis contends.

So far, the folks he's shown it to seem to agree.

"It is a very cool idea and it's needed," said Chandler Fiffick, director of the EVOLVE Technology Entrepreneurship Program at the Youngstown Business Incubator, which has been working with Ellis and seen the Harmoni system. Ellis also gets support in and from Akron, and Harmoni was founded and is based in the city's Bounce Innovation Hub downtown.

Daniel Longo, the Youngstown incubator's engineering project manager for advanced manufacturing, said he is also impressed.

"It's great IOT technology that they're developing. Especially in the world of CNC shops, there's a huge market vertical for what they've developed," Longo said. "It really jumps into the process monitoring of what's causing lag times."

Longo and Fiffick said that Harmoni's pricing model is advantageous to many manufacturers, because it lowers the cost of starting to use the system and takes much of the risk out of the equation for clients.

Ellis said Harmoni doesn't charge clients for the hardware but relies on a monthly subscription fee per machine. Customers can go month-to-month, he said, and if the system isn't saving them enough money, they can simply cancel the subscription.

Fiffick said that's important to many machine shops that are often challenged when it comes to investing in new technology.

"It is a daily grind," said Fiffick. "Our team is going into these facilities to see what they need and how we can help. We have grants to help these manufacturing plants adopt these new technologies, because they're expensive. But it's nerve-racking."

Longo thinks Harmoni will be more accessible.

"It's running off subscriptions for each device that's installed. If a shop only has two CNC machines, they only need a subscription for two machines … so it's really affordable," Longo said.

So far, Ellis said he's getting a strong reaction from the market. Harmoni has already placed its initial run of 50 devices with clients and has orders for more that he said he's now working to fill, including one he just got from a company in Saudi Arabia.

Soon, he said, he'll likely have to expand his production facilities and hire full-time staff rather than doing most of the work himself with some outside help. That's something he said he can likely do without leaving Bounce, which is housed in a former industrial building and offers tenants large spaces.

So far, he's funded Harmoni with only a small amount of private outside investment money and a lot of sweat equity and bootstrapping, Ellis said. But a fundraising round is likely in the future, too, which Ellis said he's confident about, though he hasn't determined how much he'll try to raise.

He knows when to be optimistic, though. This is not his first startup. He previously co-founded Bezlio, a software development platform company, and the IT consulting firm SaberLogic, both of which succeeded and are still in operation.