Margins are thin, and the competition is everywhere. It feels like every shop has a laser, and fabricators aren't just competing against each other anymore. They're competing against their own customers, who are asking whether it makes more sense to bring the work in-house.
How Right Angle Steel & Fabrication Found Hidden Machine Capacity
Case Study from | Datanomix
Two Seconds. 114 Parts Per Hour. How Right Angle Steel & Fabrication Made Every Second Count.
Margins are thin, and the competition is everywhere. It feels like every shop has a laser, and fabricators aren't just competing against each other anymore. They're competing against their own customers, who are asking whether it makes more sense to bring the work in-house.
The shops that win in that environment are the ones that know their numbers.
That's where Josh Cook, President of Right Angle Steel in Nappanee, Indiana, found himself. The shop had grown to over 100,000 square feet, 65 employees, and a full suite of fabrication capabilities, including lasers, press brakes, welding, and coating. Business was good. But Josh knew there was more capacity hiding in the shop. He just needed to find it.
The Problem with "Probably Fine"
Right Angle runs a high-mix operation. Some orders are 10 parts. Some are 10,000. Very few repeat. That variability makes inefficiency easy to hide, and in fabrication, hidden inefficiency is expensive.
A part has an estimated cycle time of 7 seconds. An operator runs it in 9. As Josh puts it, "Is that a big deal? Well, in the world of fabrication, it is." Nine seconds instead of 7 means 114 fewer parts per hour. Multiply that across shifts, across machines, across hundreds of thousands of parts, and you are not talking about seconds anymore. You are talking about the bottom line and what you can pay the people on your floor.
And cycle time is only part of the picture. When a10-piece order drops into the schedule, it triggers a changeover. Those changeovers have a cost too, one that almost nobody is actually measuring. What does it do to efficiency when you have to stop, reset, and spin back up? In a high-mix shop, that question has a real dollar answer. Josh just didn't have a way to calculate it yet.
He knew the gaps existed. He just couldn't keep telling himself they were ’probably fine’ and needed the data to prove it.
What Real-Time Data Actually Shows You
Right Angle implemented Datanomix Production Monitoring to bring real-time visibility to the shop floor, and the first thing it surfaced was exactly what Josh suspected.
Cycle time gaps became undeniable. When a part's average runtime was 15 seconds, but 100 parts in a single night clocked in at 45, the data didn't just show a problem. It sparked the right questions. Was it a training issue? A material problem? A tooling inconsistency? The answer varied. But now the question could actually be asked, and the right people could act on it.
Finally, the job mix's impact on efficiency was quantifiable. In a high-mix shop, dropping a 10-piece emergency order into the schedule has a real cost. Before, that cost was invisible. Now Josh could see exactly what each changeover did to his efficiency and make smarter decisions about how to price and prioritize that work.
Scheduling and delivery went from guesswork to confidence. Josh would plan 10 hours of work, and somewhere in the execution, the day would get away from him. With live machine data, he could see exactly how time was being spent, test different shift configurations, and build a schedule he could actually stand behind. As Josh puts it, "The customers are truly counting on you. If you say it's gonna be there today, it's gonna be there today because I have all the data to back it up."
When the Data Empowers the Team
The technology is the easy part. The real shift at Right Angle happened when operators could finally see their own performance in real time.
When the data started flowing, it didn't just surface what machines were doing. It surfaced what was possible. Operators who had been running parts a certain way for years were suddenly looking at numbers that let them compete against yesterday's performance, the estimated cycle time, and their own personal best.
Josh was direct about how that culture shift happened. "To understand the true difference between what seven seconds and nine seconds mean when you're making thousands of parts" isn't something you can explain in a meeting. It has to be shown. Once operators could see it, the conversation changed. As Josh puts it, most people on his floor understand why two seconds matter now. "Or they're not here very long."
That's not a warning. It's a reflection of a team that takes pride in its work and the standards it holds itself to.
Same Machines. Better Results.
The pilot results at Right Angle speak for themselves, but the numbers only tell part of the story.
Uptime increased 41%. Capacity jumped 45%. Common waste dropped 30%. On an annualized basis, each machine gained 300 productive hours, translating to $24,000 in recovered productivity and a 10x return on investment.
And those gains compounded in ways that don't show up in a single metric. Anomalies that used to disappear into the noise now surfaced immediately.
Schedules became something Josh could actually stand behind. The manual reporting loops that took additional time & overhead were replaced by data flowing directly from the shop floor to the people who needed it.
None of it required new machines or more headcount. The capacity was already there. It just needed to be seen.
Watch Josh tell the full story in his own words.
Building the Shop of Tomorrow
For Josh, the question has never been whether to improve. It's always been what to improve next. Real-time visibility answered many questions. But it also opened new ones. As he puts it, "How do you minimize overhead, maximize output, and maximize what you're able to pay the people that are actually making the world go around? It all starts with constantly looking for how to do things better than you did yesterday."
For Josh, real-time production data is just the foundation. With Datanomix as the basis of their digital thread, the vision is a fully connected manufacturing operation where every system and every machine is talking to each other, from the moment a quote is generated through the ERP, all the way to the customer receiving an accurate lead time within an hour of placing an order. No phone calls. No guesswork. No gap between plan and reality.
In a market where everyone has a laser, and the margins leave little room for error, that kind of connected operation isn't just an efficiency play. It's a competitive advantage.
Datanomix empowers manufacturers of all sizes to increase productivity and profitability through its Data-Powered Production solutions. Its product portfolio, including Production Monitoring, G-Code Cloud + DNC, TMAC ai, and ToolAnalytix, is designed to turn machine data into actionable insights with zero operator input, giving shops the digital thread they need to build a truly connected manufacturing operation.
Paired with its Kick-Ass Coaching and Prove It Pilot programs, Datanomix helps shops turn visibility into measurable results, not just more reports. Headquartered in New Hampshire. Learn more at datanomix.io.
The content & opinions in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily represent the views of ManufacturingTomorrow
Datanomix
Datanomix empowers manufacturers of all sizes to increase productivity and profitability through its Data-Powered Production™ solutions. Its product portfolio includes Production Monitoring, G-Code Cloud™ + DNC, TMAC AI™, and ToolAnalytix™ - all designed to turn machine data into actionable insights with zero operator input. Headquartered in New Hampshire, Datanomix software analyzes real-time production signals to identify bottlenecks, improve quality, and provide prescriptive coaching to drive continuous improvement. For more information, visit www.datanomix.io.
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