Technology makes Universal Metal Products more efficient

May 18, 2023

This pick and place machine is helping to make production at Universal Metal Products more efficient.

It's safe to say that people outside of manufacturing might underestimate the work that goes into the products they use everyday.

Take, for example, a particular refrigeration hinge assembled by Universal Metal Products. Right now, putting that product together involves a lot of steps, and it's more physically demanding than one may think. One of those steps includes an operator putting two parts together and kicking a foot-operated press to preassemble them.

Universal Metal finishes together almost 1 million of these parts every year, said director of manufacturing Matt Rossman. It's labor-intensive, and it's a job that a lot of operators dislike because of the physical work involved.

So Universal Metal is looking to change how the process is done, eliminating that step with automation. In our Modernizing Manufacturing series, Crain's is exploring how local manufacturers are using technology to make their work safer, more efficient and more appealing.

Universal Metal Products has three facilities. One in Wickliffe, where the company is headquartered, one in Pemberville, Ohio, near Toledo, and one in Texas. The company offers metal stamping services, but also other value-added processes like assembly to its customers in the automotive, appliance and industrial markets.

Mechanical engineer Nick Stergios has been focused on "improvements" and new machine designs and builds for the company, Rossman said, looking for ways to increase productivity and reduce labor needs. In the case of the hinge above, the company is looking to create a tool that puts the part together all in one process, eliminating the pre-assembly currently done on a kick-press.

In general, Universal Metal is looking for ways to update its technology to make the process more "hands-off," Stergios said. The company has created a list of all the particularly time-consuming jobs at the company, identifying potential machine-based solutions. This work looks at the cost and time differences between having a particular operation done by hand by an employee or automated by a machine.

"We're trying to break free from the guy sitting there, putting one part on a machine at a time," he said.

For example, at Universal Metal's Toledo-area plant, a set of new machines are simplifying the process for an appliance component. Previously, an operator would take each individual part, put it in a machine to get a thread placed and then remove the part.

The company runs about 1.5 million of one of these threaded parts every year, Rossman said; the other is run about 800,000 times a year. That added up to almost 3,000 hours of labor per year, Rossman said.

Stergios designed two new machines for this work, and the team built them in-house. Operators can now place two parts on a table at a time, and they're automatically removed by the machine at the end of the operation by what Stergios called a "pick and place unit." It sounds like a small change, but Rossman said it's one that allows the company to almost double the output on those parts and halve the amount of labor needed for them. The next phase will be to add a way to automate the placing of the products on the table, Stergios said.

Universal Metal is able to make these machine solutions in-house, as it did in the example above, or they can bring in outside assistance, Stergios said.

A lot of the technology available today to manufacturers has been around for a while, Stergios said, but it's "better now." It's easier to operate. And it's more cost-effective, Rossman said, which is particularly important for companies like Universal Metal that might be making a lot of lower-cost parts. The math on how much the machine costs has to make sense against the cost of making the parts as-is.

Ultimately, the need for this kind of transformation became apparent during the pandemic, Rossman said. The company's Toledo-area plant in particular saw labor shortages.

"It became very hard to find staffing for a couple months at our Toledo facility," he said.

The work was still there, Rossman said, but the labor available to hire often wasn't. And the next generation isn't going into manufacturing in big numbers, and those that are, are tech-savvy, he said.

By reducing the hands-on labor needed on some operations, Universal Metal can redeploy employees to other areas of the plant, Rossman said. The goal isn't layoffs — in fact, Rossman said he'd hire more if he could — but to efficiently use the labor the company does have.

Universal Metal Products currently employs about 265, with the majority located in Wickliffe. Its 2022 sales were about $80 million, Rossman said.