WINTER 2015
HOW TO
LIVE UP
TO A
NAME
LIKE
SPEE-DEE
By enlisting Quick Response Manufacturing
(QRM) techniques and honing them to the facility’s unique operational necessities, Spee-Dee
is taking the cellular manufacturing route to
shorter lead times.
A high-speed rotary filler test loop allows for test runs of hundreds of containers. Testing capacity is point of emphasis at Spee-Dee.
BY MATT REYNOLDS, editorial director
T
here’s something to be said for being a mainstay. In
certain powder manufacturing circles, Spee-Dee has
become synonymous with dry product filling systems in
the same way that Kleenex has cornered mindshare on tissues.
The company’s historical old standby—its Spee-Dee volumetric
cup fillers—can be found the world over. Even their competitors’ fillers are often called ‘Spee-Dees,’ for good or for bad.
Jim Navin purchased the Spee-Dee brand name filler in 1981,
and succeeded in cultivating the ubiquitous brand reach the
company now enjoys. That said, very little that the Sturtevant,
Wis. facility has been churning out recently could be considered ‘old standby.’
Even the company’s higher sales volume products, like its
auger fillers, are built to order, so little is off-the-shelf. The
majority of engineering goes into engineered-to-order fillers,
tackling difficult to manage powders and other particulates.
Managing multiple different lines, designed for different granulations, speeds, filler types, and lead times simultaneously pushed
the company to pursue a better way for the team to work.
Adopting and adapting cellular manufacturing
Cognizant that they ought to be optimizing their operation
with lean manufacturing strategies, Navin had kept an ear
to the tracks with new manufacturing models and methods.
His sons, David Navin, president/CEO, Paul Navin, operations
manager, and Mark Navin, strategic accounts manager, picked
up the torch when Jim retired last year. One strategy that
caught the family’s attention nearly three years ago was the
University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Quick Response Manufacturing (QRM) methodology.
The method’s goal is to increase throughput and one of
the outcomes of this is reduced lead times in all phases of
Reprinted from the Winter 2015 issue of
WINTER 2015
SPEE-DEE AT A GLANCE
Established: Spee-Dee copyright purchased 1981
Products: Auger fillers (powders), volumetric cup fillers (particulates)
Headquarters: Sturtevant, Wis.
Leadership: Jim and Sylvia Navin, owners; Dave Navin, president,
CEO; Timm Johnson, VP, sales and marketing; Tony Stefanelli, VP,
business development; Paul Navin, operations manager; Ron Fojtik,
director of electrical engineering; Mark Navin, strategic accounts manager
Production per year: 100 units
Facility size: 48,000 sq. ft.
Employees: 64
Service personnel: 6
OEM/end-user business: 33%/66%
Annual Revenue: $10 to $20 million
Controls:
• Machine control: Allen-Bradley
• Servos and motion control: Bosch Rexroth and Allen-Bradley
• Machine safety platform: Allen-Bradley
manufacturing and office operations. The big-picture idea is to
deliver orders to customers more quickly. It also aims to reduce
cost, enhance delivery performance and improve quality.
A focus on lead time reduction as a guiding management
strategy makes QRM well-suited for companies that engineerto-order (ETO) or build-to-order (BTO) most or all of their
product line while carrying little inventory. This high-mix, lowvolume and custom-engineered product environment was
at the intersection of where Spee-Dee lived and where QRM
shined, so the Navins began attending seminars to learn about
the subject.
A little over a year after beginning QRM, they hired former
professional auto race team member Tony Stefanelli as VP of
business development.
“What was interesting for me coming out of auto racing was
that QRM is roughly how racing is set up. So I looked at some of
the seminars and information, and immediately said, ‘oh, that’s
how we’d run a race team,’” Stefanelli says. “For example, in
NASCAR, Joe Gibbs owns several cars, and he has five different
drivers. Each driver has his own trailer. Each driver has his own
crew chief. Each crew chief has his own staff. They talk to each
other, but they are separate teams within Joe Gibbs Racing. They
have their driver, they work amongst themselves, and what they
do to their car can be completely different than the other guys.
We’re doing the same thing here at Spee-Dee. What we’re trying
to do is, instead of having five cars but a single right front shocks
person, who works on all five different cars, each team here at
Spee-Dee has the equivalent of his own right front shocks guy.”
Translating QRM’s larger structure to the four walls of the
Spee-Dee facility was a challenge, and Spee-Dee began by creating teams focused on market opportunity. This allowed the
designated teams to focus on one aspect of the business—in
Reprinted from the Winter 2015 issue of
WINTER 2015
The test lab at Spee-Dee’s facility features auger fillers, cup fillers, bulk in-feed systems, and a dust collection system.
this case, the duration and sophistication of each cell’s projects—thus improving the company’s customer service.
Three manufacturing cells were established, “S.E.T.”—an acronym for “sustain, enhance, transform”—to provide a more efficient turnaround on equipment orders. The cells were divided
based on the machines level of customization and includes a
team made up of a sales/project manager, design engineering
staff, machinists, and assemblers.
The S-cell, Sustain, represents the higher volume items that
have been assembled similarly for years, and most components
or subassemblies are either in inventory or readily available. The
E-cell, Enhance, starts to get into the middle range, with about
half of the parts needing to be designed and machined. And the
T-cell, or Transform, are the most custom and lengthy projects,
with low volume and fresh engineering. This cell doubles as the
company’s R&D department—research and new products are
almost exclusively customer-driven, unless an obvious marketplace need presents itself. At Spee-Dee, as is true of many
ETO shops, 90 percent of R&D is a function of customer need.
“The magic of QRM is that each team is focused on a piece
of the business, and they own it and get to stay focused on
it, rather than having their priorities stretched amongst a variety of projects,” Stefanelli says. “The timeline for these T-cell
machines, could be six months. Meanwhile, an S-cell project
is eight weeks. If you’re asking a guy to simultaneously worry
about something that takes six months and worry about something that takes eight weeks, the conflict creates a mind stretch.
What gets what priority? It’s hard to decide.”
By separating the teams according to single project timelines, everything has a similar rhythm, it’s easier for any one
team to stay focused. “Really, QRM is more about the rhythm
of how the projects move through the building as opposed to
the technology differences between,” Stefanelli adds.
Test lab capabilities
Product testing in a devoted test lab, ranging from simple
demos to full-blown Factory Acceptance Tests (FAT), is a key
offering at Spee-Dee.
Reprinted from the Winter 2015 issue of
WINTER 2015
we have take away conveyors and check weighers. We offer
these types of services to all of our customers.”
And, how do you test a rotary filler that’s is running, say, 250
cans a minute? “Well, if you don’t have a conveyor test loop in
your facility, you can’t,” says Timm Johnson, VP of sales and
marketing. “We bring our customers in here and they will see
their products and containers running at production speeds.”
Spee-Dee strategy and culture
Right-sizing with app calculator
Spee-Dee’s new app, free on Apple iOS and Android, allows
users to plug in variables on the go. Operators load target weight and
density, and the app calculates the correct size tooling and fill speed.
“Our bigger customers will almost always come in for a factory acceptance test, especially on the bigger machines.
The test lab, storage and tooling, takes up more than 1,000
sq. ft., with a 400-sq.-ft. mezzanine used to simulate real time
production environment. End users ship their sample products
and machines to Sturtevant, and Spee-Dee will add a filler and
an in-feed to actually run the FAT.
“We have bulk in-feed systems, including a Frazier bucket
elevator. We have PIAB pneumatic conveyors. We can bring up
super sacks and hang them, so however we get the product,
we can move it,” Johnson says. “The trick is whenever you’re
running any kind of volume, you have to have a bulk in-feed
system. You have to keep feeding the filler and the bagger. Then
Roughly 20 years ago, based on then fresh market research,
Spee-Dee made a decision to focus sales efforts primarily
on the largest 10 users of auger fillers. At the time, those 10
companies probably controlled half the auger business in the
U.S., so it made sense to go big game hunting—a single big win
could mean 20 machines sold instead of one. The strategy was
extremely successful, and today, Spee-Dee sells to all but one
of the original 10 targets, though names and ownerships have
shifted in the decades since. Spee-Dee continues to service
these large customers, and has gone full circle to take what it
has learned and applied to all customers’ weather it is one filler
or 10. The QRM process allows Spee-Dee to provide the same
service to all, large and small.
Having earned the industry equivalent of a household name,
and developed established relationships with the Fortune 500sized food and beverage manufacturers, Spee-Dee remains family
owned and operated. Johnson says that the ability to stay flexible
is one of the greatest strengths of Spee-Dee’s family atmosphere.
“We can change on a dime. If we want to build a freshly
designed filler, we can do it, and we don’t have to go to a board
of directors or stockholders,” Johnson says. “If I want to do a
marketing program I can just do it. Well, I probably ought to tell
people I’m spending money, but Dave’s office is right next-door
to mine. Decisions can be made in the hallway.”
He believes the culture and family-owned status also helps
Spee-Dee in the service department, as they can react quickly
to customers’ service requirements. “We do a lot of that, so our
customers know we’ll support them, and therefore I think we
get good repeat purchases,” he says.
Cellular manufacturing, using QRM format, tailors the team to the task
Spee-Dee’s take on Quick Response Manufacturing (QRM) results in three cells, which together comprise its S.E.T. system.
S
-cell: “Sustain.” The delivery and timing is very critical with the standardized product line that goes into the “S” cell,
E
-cell: “Enhance.” This cell’s process takes the standard product and enhances its features with more customization. The
T
-cell: “Transform.” This cell performs highly customizable jobs that often become the first of its kind in the industry. The
projects in this cell can take up to eight weeks to complete. These products sustain today’s more standard products
(though nothing is standard) and account for 60 percent of the total units (not hours) in the Spee-Dee plant.
“E” cell modifies the standard product by using 30 to 70 percent new parts.
“T” cell produces cutting edge machinery by using 70 to100 percent new parts, which can take up to six months
to complete.
Reprinted from the Winter 2015 issue of
WINTER 2015
Fresh rotary technology and
finding the right fit
The latest technologies at Spee-Dee
come in the form of newly designed
rotary fillers that eliminate the 6- by 6-ft.
steel square base in favor of a roughly
2- by 4-ft. stainless steel base. By cutting
the fat and focusing on “the only three
things that really matter, the relationship between the center turret and the
two star wheels,” the new design allows
for easier access to the interior of the
machine, lighter overall weight, a smaller
footprint, less surface area to clean, and
taken together, cost savings.
“After discussions with the customer, I
went to engineering and told them I need
a rotary filler that costs “X,” has updated
features and industrial design, and is
still able to hit these certain speeds,”
says Johnson. “The rotaries are all servo
driven, so the motors, star wheels, timing
screws, and the augers themselves are
all talking to one another, so there is no
mechanical timing. The customer comes
in with a set of performance metrics to
hit, and our engineers hit them so the
customer gets just what they need.”
Johnson and the sales team, works
closely with the Cezary Mroz, SpeeDee’s rotary engineering technical
expert, to ensure sizing is correct for the
customer and the machine’s designated
task in order to optimize OEE.
“What goes into sizing of a rotary is
more than just the size of the container;
it’s the desired flow of the product,” Mroz
says. “There’s a lot of mumbo jumbo
that can get fed to customers to persuade them to buy a
machine that’s already in the
OEM’s or the supplier’s repertoire, instead of giving the customer exactly what they need.”
years ago was a stepper motor and one
motor with a VFD,” says Ron Fojtik, director of electrical engineering. “Today we
have systems that synchronize 13 axes
of motion.”
In another necessary leap forward,
made possible by mechatronic advancements, the company now designs and
build check weighers to give Spee-Dee
fillers check weigh feedback should the
product change density during the run.
Evolution of
electrical engineering
Over the past 34 years, SpeeDee has evolved its controls
from simple relay logic and
basic PLCs to a process where
teams design a machine’s controls to meet customer specifications. “A complex system 25
Above: Model 4600 Net Weigh bag clamp accurately fills and weighs 50-lb. bags.
Right: Drevon Moore, mechanical assembler, S-cell, works on a dual cup filler system.
Uniquely, the company uses one PLC
and touch screen to control both the
filler and the checkweigher.
“One of our customers had an issue
with his product changing size during
processing. When filling by weight,
they found volume to be inconsistent,” Johnson says. “So, we created
a volumetric cup fill that can verify
and correct both volume and weight.
Many of our customers ask us to build
to their specific electrical specifications requesting a certain PLC, touch
screen, servo motion, and other electrical components. We make every
effort to meet their needs.”
Reprinted from the Winter 2015 issue of