GFX: Inside Valspar Confidence
Adam Grubb:
We're Inside Valspar. 250 drums of High Performance Coatings leave this facility in Bowling Green, Kentucky, everyday. With their coatings on businesses buildings and products all around the world, nothing is more important than the confidence they instill in their product.
GFX: Rick Afton Global Technical Director
Rick:
I look at our innovations and their all around speed, cycle time improvement to, from the beginning of the process of developing a product to selling a product and providing a product. I believe our edge in the market, and we're going to continue to expand that edge, is the speed that we used to do these sorts of things.
Channing:
When you talk about speed that's really where automation comes in. It's a way to shorten the lead times and increase the quality and consistency.
GFX: Channing Beaudry Technical Manager
That's really been our focus for the better part of the last decade was driving down the cycle times while increasing the consistency, the quality, that we can deliver to our customers.
GFX: Michelle Brownlee Technical Lead
Michelle:
Our process can be extremely fast. Sometimes we are as fast as half a day. Sometimes we get rush color matches in and we get it in at 10:00 in the morning and we have to have the right to ship out by 4:00p.m. in the afternoon.
Channing:
What we've done with our customer base is allowed them to lower their inventories, allow them to make more changes and be more flexible in their manufacturing process because we can get paint there in three to five days.
Adam:
Todd, you've been here about six years, you had your hand in a lot of the collaboration with the automation systems here. How has that helped efficiencies internally for Valspar?
GFX: Todd Meunier Plant Manager
Todd:
Yes sure, this system we designed it about two years ago from the ground up internally. It's helped significantly. It's cut down our cycle times from 12 to 14 hours, down to four hours for a typical batch. The other thing that it's done is it's helped consistency.
When we make a batch one time and we repeat that, we're getting consistent color and gloss. Each one of these valves represents a resin that is transferred from the bulk system and all computer control. So if we needed 500 pounds or 600 pounds or 1500 pounds of one particular resin, the computer system automatically takes control of that and measures precisely with the mass flow meter directly into the batch. And this system here is discrete passes for each particular resin, so you're not getting any cross contamination. The other thing that it does is it allows us to be able to add these materials in parallel at the same time and that's what we're getting a lot of the productivity gains and shrinking the cycle time of these products.
Channing:
We look at how can we make a product that's going to be robust and it's going to be consistent through our process and not only our process but when the drum of paint gets to our customer and runs on their line, how can we make sure every drum of paint we ship out runs the exact same. That's built into the very front end of our development process.
Todd:
On these dispense systems we've got upwards of 75 raw materials that go into making paint. We need to make sure that each one of those components get put into the drum at the exact same amount every single time. Is that what this is here? That's correct. This is one of our automated dispense machines so this machine here what you're seeing is a drum of paint. Robert's about to scan the barcode label. That's going to tell the computer system what product, the batch size, the customer and the customer location. And then the machine will dispense all those liquids and at the end we'll end up with a batch of paint, finished good, in the drum that's going to run online for that customer. Those recipes which are specific to the customer in the line, are stored in a database so that when that barcode is scanned it's going to pick up that exact formula and make it the same every single time.
Adam:
So in an automated facility like this, obviously safety is a top concern anywhere in any manufacturing plant, but for Valspar it is a very high priority.
Todd:
That's correct. Safety is number one. It is for every employee. As a matter of fact, every meeting that we do starts out with safety. Every shift, before every production shift starts, we talk about safety. The last thing that we want to have in that person's mind when they hit the production floor is thinking about the well-being of themselves and their team members.
Channing:
We have over 200 years of formulating coatings. And as a result of that we have a high level of confidence and if a problem comes to us we can solve. And we work, the closer we work with our end users and with our customers, the easier it is for that solution to come. And ultimately the more satisfied everybody is in the process.
Adam:
The process of watching anything being manufactured is remarkable. But 75 raw materials creating a color and formed as the facade of a building, is truly fascinating. We took a look at the color match technology, the collaboration within the marketplace and their confidence in the product and process, this was truly a remarkable look inside Valspar.
GFX: Inside Valspar
