midwest-manufacturers

HUI has been running parts on our brand new TruMatic 6000 TRUMPF machine over the last year.. This is great news for both our customers and our teammates. With the machine running at full capacity we have seen improvements in production speed, shop floor efficiency, and additional design capabilities.

In the US, the two main organizations who set electrical safety standards for electrical enclosures are NEMA (National Electrical Manufacturers Association) and UL (Underwriters Laboratories). Although the standards for each enclosure type are independent from each other, the protection expectations are mostly the same. UL ratings are often described in more technical language, but after reviewing the summarized protections in the "NEMA and UL Ratings Equivalency Chart" below, you’ll quickly see that the enclosure protection expectations are almost identical.

HUI has added manufacturing production capacity by remodeling office space and turning it into a new shop floor area. With the new additions HUI plans on adding over 10,000 hours of capacity, which translates into space to hire additional manufacturing employees as we continue to grow as a sheet metal manufacturing company. In this video HUI's Continuous Improvement Manager, Mike, explains the renovation and the plan for the new area.

If you typically buy standard electrical enclosures and boxes, you know that there are thousands of options available. However, when you need a few modifications to enclosures at high production volumes, it’s best to get help from a manufacturer who provides custom fabrication. HUI’s Industrial Business Development team specializes in these custom enclosures, so we thought we’d share some common modifications you can expect from custom metal fabrication manufacturers.

The industrial design engineering team at HUI has been with the company for many years now. In fact, the longest-standing team member, Chris Freund, has been engineering with HUI for 29 years. Wayne Schad has been engineering for 13 out of the 25 years he’s worked for the company. Lastly, Scot Hoerth has also been engineering at HUI for 13 years. Over this time they’ve gained a wealth of valuable knowledge and experience with each new industrial design project. That’s why we thought we’d share some of the secrets they’ve learned from 55 combined years of engineering for manufacturing at HUI.

The New Year is finally here! It's nice to take this time to think about everything we’ve accomplished in 2018, as we get excited to begin 2019. That’s why we’d like to take a moment and reflect on the top five manufacturing posts published on the HUI Manufacturing Blog in 2018.

HUI has been running parts on  our brand new TruMatic 6000 TRUMPF machine over the last year now. This is great news for both our customers and our teammates. With the machine running at full capasity we have seen improvements in production speed, shop floor efficiency, and additional design capabilities. 

Continuous improvement should be a big part of every manufacturing company’s culture, so it’s important to find ways to encourage employees to get involved. At HUI, we bring together a lead from each team, who focuses on finding opportunities to make company-wide improvements. However assembling the team is just a start, so we’re going to cover some ideas on how to encourage continuous improvement on the shop floor.

In a recent blog post we discussed "Activities to Get You Started with Continuous Improvement" to give you more information on some popular activities you can use to weed out the unnecessary wastes in your manufacturing processes. However, in that post we didn't go into detail about the types of wastes you might find. The best way to illustrate those wastes is to remember the acrostic: "Downtime", which derives from the seven forms of muda/waste outlined by Toyota Production System. The eighth waste was added in the 1990s as the system became more widely accepted around the world (source: The Lean Way Blog). Keeping these eight wastes in mind will keep you in the continuous improvement mindset, so we've created this "8 Wastes of Lean Manufacturing" Infographic to help you remember what each letter stands for.

HUI is excited to announce that in June of 2018, we officially upgraded our quality management system to the new editions of ISO 9001 and ISO 13485. We are now ISO 9001:2015 certified and ISO 13485:2016 certified! This is great news for our customers, but why? That’s what I wanted to know when I interviewed HUI’s Quality/Process Manager, Tim Jandrey, and here’s what I learned: