As general manager of a fabricating company, Aaron Edelheit was always pleased with the job his powder coating vendor did on the parts he sent them.
So happy, in fact, that when he learned that Commercial Powder Coating in Bend, Oregon, was for sale in 2022, he stepped in and bought the company.
“I was a customer for eight years and became good, personal friends with the owner,” Edelheit says of former owner Tracy Huettl, who stayed on as a salesman for CPC after the sale.
Adjusting to a Big Learning Curve
GM Royce McWhortor, President Aaron Edelheit, and Sales Manager and former owner Tracy Huettl.Edelheit says he had been looking for career advancement for some time, and when Huettl learned that was the case, he offered to sell CPC to his customer. Edelheit took over in July 2022, and his previous background as a heavy equipment mechanic put him around a lot of parts and machinery that needed coatings.
“But this was a big learning curve,” Edelheit says. “I’m certainly learning a lot, especially on the business side of things, but I have been lucky in having the right people in the right place already.”
Aside from Huettl staying on to bring in sales, Royce McWhortor is the general manager who helps keep the operations on the right track while Edelheit watches over the business end of things.
Commercial Powder Coating Inc has served the Northwest area for over two decades, operating in a facility that is over 25,000 sq. ft., which allows them to offer powder coating, sandblasting, stripping, pretreatment, packaging, and shipping.
The company has 27 employees, a saving grace for the coating newbie Edelheit.
“I knew coming into it, I was nervous about not knowing much about powder coating,” Edelheit says. “But at the same time, I didn’t have to know it because of the people that were here and in the right place. I can learn as I go, and I get the time to do it.”
Transform to a Digital Operation
An employee checks an order using software from Steelhead Technology that helps automate nearly all of CPC's processes.One thing that Edelheit saw as an immediate need — and something that Huettl had recommended to him when he purchased the business — was to transform the company into more digital operations, including ridding itself of handwritten notes and job orders that often led to confusion and errors.
Edelheit noticed right away that McWhortor — who was also in charge of scheduling jobs and workflows at CPC — was spending almost five hours each day working on the daily schedule of when parts were to be coated and in which part of the facility.
In addition to the time spent scheduling, McWhortor was also having to print those schedules and rearrange work orders, plus print and get them to the right department to handle the part when it came in.
The issue with manually doing this process, Edelheit says, was that his team wasn’t able to recognize issues that were cropping up on the plant floor until the work orders and printouts came back to the office at the end of the day, and they could finally see where bottlenecks and problems were occurring.
“And being a new owner, I didn’t want to be that guy that says, ‘I want to do it my way,” and I don’t. I really care about their input.”
“And then hopefully you can read the person’s handwriting about time and processes, and hopefully they didn’t spill their coffee on it or put it through the oven,” Edelheit says. “I knew this needed to be a problem we solved right away. When you have over 180 pending work orders, sometimes, we need to get organized.”
Finding Software Specific to Powder Coating
Edelheit and McWhortor sought their solution by attending a trade show late last year, where they searched the vendor floor in hopes of finding an integrator to help them go paperless and improve efficiencies. They say they saw a few that attracted their attention, but none had a specific program that worked specifically with — and was designed for — a finishing and coating operation until they met the reps at Steelhead Technologies.
A relatively new supplier to the coatings market, Steelhead offers a cloud-based platform tailored to drive data-based management that offers intuitive features, measurable impact, and custom-engineered deployments.
Edelheit says he was cautious not to force the paperless system onto the company’s existing workforce.
“There’s been a lot of changes, but they were all driven from feedback,” he says. “And being a new owner, I didn’t want to be that guy that says, ‘I want to do it my way,” and I don’t. I really care about their input.”
But with all the changes made since Edelheit took over, the paperless system with Steelhead was going to be the biggest one by far. One of the biggest improvements that became apparent after the system was installed late last year was the ability to see where jobs were in the workflow process and the red flags that went off if coating projects were not making progress through the facility.
For example, the CPC team can quickly look and see that a job has been in this queue for three days.
“With the paper system we had, the only way we might know something was wrong was when the customer calls and asks where their job is,” Edelheit says. “Often, it got pushed to the side. So it really helps us to identify when we dropped the ball on projects.”
Capturing Data Permanently for Future Projects
CPC spends a great majority of its coating hours putting a powder coat on wheel rims for a major West Coast retailer, Les Schwab Tires. They coat about 5,000 wheels a year for the 600-outlet store.Huettl says when he first started at the company with the original owner more than 20 years ago, the process was to photograph the jobs that came in and write notes on the images to help keep track of the process, which was smart at the time but also very time-consuming.
With the new software tracking system, they can do that inside the system, and it is captured permanently.
“Plus, instead of recreating a work order over and over again because we have a lot of repeat customers, but it’s that fine data that really turns me on to this,” Huettl says. “And that’s also our success: pay attention to those details.”
Every operator and supervisor at CPC has access to a computer or a tablet on the shop floor, where they can review the coating specification, see an image of the part, and read any additional notes that may have been used the last time the parts came through the line.
"A second location would give us more capacity and maybe have the space to do an automated low-temp line.”
“We had a job this morning where we needed to call upon the historical data and tribal knowledge,” Huettl says. “We had an instance where the night shift hung something differently than what the day shift would normally do. So we went out to the shop floor, snapped our photos, documented it, and so now it’s repeatable, regardless of day or night shift. That, to me, is key to this whole thing, efficiency. And by having these photographs, it increases efficiency.”
Coating Wheels, Airframes, Dental Equipment, and Automotive
CPC spends a great majority of its coating hours putting a powder coat on wheel rims for a major West Coast retailer, Les Schwab Tires. They coat about 5,000 wheels a year for the 600-outlet store.
Their customer base is also diversified in working with local fabricators, some aircraft engine frames for a regional manufacturer, and handrails for custom homes. Work has been picking up for coating dental equipment, as well as some structural steel, suspension components, and even automotive components.
CPC has several manual conveyor lines — Huettl calls them “push-pull lines” — and an automated 3-stage washer and pretreatment system to facilitate the shop’s three large batch powder coating booths.
Edelheit says his long-term goal is to hopefully add a second location since they are maxed space-wise at their current spot at 25,000 SF. He says he realizes there is more work to be had in the region, but he wants to focus on turning the work around quickly for any new customers they bring on.
“We just can’t do it in a quick enough time,” he says. “There are a few other powder coaters around — and we’re definitely the largest — but I do know people will go elsewhere. A second location would give us more capacity and maybe have the space to do an automated low-temp line.”
Edelheit says he worries that if CPC can’t handle all the new work in the area, another powder coater might come into the area to pick up the slack.
“I just want to make sure that we can take care of all the powder coating needs in the area and not give anyone a reason to look elsewhere,” he says.
