Family-Owned Hydraulics Manufacturing Company Maximizes Efficiency with Tech
CEO Larry Davis on how Mishawaka-based Daman Products uses technology and fresh business processes to stay ahead.
The hydraulics industry.
Daman Products is a hydraulics manufacturing company founded in Mishawaka, Indiana by Jack D. Davis. The hydraulic industry is mostly invisible to the general public, but it’s an integral part of contemporary life. Every machining operation uses hydraulics in some way — for instance, mining operations, milling machines, construction equipment, and presses are all hydraulically operated.
By pushing an elevator button, for example, you activate a hydraulic system.
The company’s founding.
Daman Products began in 1976. My father, Jack Davis, was let go from his job and had to decide what he ultimately wanted to do — whether it was working for someone else or starting his own business. He chose the latter.
He was fired just before Christmas in 1975. By March of ’76, he had rented a building in Mishawaka and had purchased equipment salvaged from World War II that came out of the Bendix plant. I went to work for him:
At that time, I was twenty-two and worked for him in the evenings. I had no machine experience. He taught me as we went. In June of ’76, I became the first full-time employee. And here we are, 40 years later.
Tough times.
It was a tough slog at first, because neither my dad nor I had business management experience. And we’re certainly undercapitalized. So, it was only through hard work, long hours, resilience, and some really tough, financially difficult lessons that we were able to just keep trudging.
I remember us thinking that when we hit $300,000 in revenue, things will be good. That number came and went and things were worse. So then it was half a million, then a million. What we didn’t realize is that the processes that we were using, which are traditional business practices, were our worst enemy.
I was managing the shop and engineering, and was responsible for purchasing, hiring and firing, scheduling, forecasting, and taking technical phone calls. Back in those days, the fax machine had not been invented. So you’d sit on the phone for hours while a sales guy would try and explain a hydraulic schematic. I would record the conversation so that I could quote the whole thing.
It was intense. I literally worked standing at my desk, because I didn’t know where the next thing would come from — the shop, the phone, etc.
I did three years of night school during this time, and it really was plug and play — learn, apply, learn, apply. I was learning about variance analysis, labor variances, material vs. overhead variances, etc.
I graduated in ’86. The business continued to grow and we had a good reputation in the industry. But as we continued to grow, the difficulty increased. The higher up in the company you were, the more difficult it was because all the decisions that went to the top were disseminating back down. This is traditional business — hierarchical command and control.
We began to build our current building in 1997, which was a bittersweet deal. While there was new capacity here to grow, there was also more machines, more people, more headaches.
New business process.
We were introduced to lean manufacturing in 1997. The person that brought this new idea believed that we could fundamentally change the way we operated, reduce the chaos, and improve our quality. We took a major leap of faith because it flew in the face of everything I had learned in business school.
And it was an awesome decision. 21 years later, it’s still awesome. Processes that were set in place then are still generating results now. What we didn’t understand is that we weren’t just changing processes, we were actually changing our culture as a company. Before, there was a lot of mistrust and an authoritarian management style. After, we became a much more autonomous, process-driven company where people on the shop floor had major control over their day and are trusted to do the work within a system that they eventually could influence.
People on the shop floor today run the machines and are responsible for releasing material from our vendors. They’re responsible for the quality that they produce. They’re responsible for delivering, packaging, washing, and controlling inventory through our ERP system. They also are in charge of preventive maintenance themselves, which is highly unusual — the machinists are trusted to check their own work.
All of this is possible because we have a robust system that allows people to know what to do, when to do it, how to do it, and why to do it without a large degree of supervision.
It’s somewhat surprising to me how few people are comfortable with being autonomous having control over their day. More people than you would think really want to be told what to do and don’t want that level of responsibility.
We are able to maintain an on-time delivery rating of over 99.5% without doing any forecasting. That’s a pretty awesome record relative to our competitors. The way we operate has allowed us to offer quality and consistent performance for over 20 years. It’s really tough to compete with that.
Valuing technology.
Some companies will gear their business around the ERP system. Daman doesn’t look at the system as the boundary, we do what we need to do and then change the system to work within that. We constantly customize our tech so that it can mimic and assist the business processes.
Our ERP system is a system called SyteLine, which we have heavily modified. So that’s something we do daily — constantly change.
Connecting to Metronet Zing.
There are three shifts here, which means we need 100% uptime. Having backups and availability is a really big deal to us, which is one of the reasons we use Metronet Zing. We have a lot of heavy machinery that is very power-heavy. There’s been times where we actually took the power out.
We also need to send incredibly large files to our customers so that they can look at drawings of our products. It was becoming very difficult for us to send those files out, particularly the 3D files. Being able to connect to Metronet Zing gave us the ability to download information much more quickly. It was a huge advance for us on the engineering side and for our ability to serve our markets.
I think we would have been relegated to downloading files onto discs and express mailing files otherwise.
Thanks for reading! We are an open-access fiber optic network serving South Bend, IN and surrounding communities. Learn more: metronetzing.org
