Between the engineering drawing and the finished part, someone has to make sure everything fits together. In this Rexfab Experts interview, Industrial Specialist Eric Brochu explains how bridging engineering and manufacturing saves time, keeps quality consistent, and makes our products more competitive.

1. What role do you play at Rexfab?

My role at Rexfab is industrial specialist, or methods specialist. There are several terms for it, but more and more it’s heading toward “industrial.” My role is to bridge the gap between mechanical engineering and manufacturing.

I make sure the parts to be manufactured have complete drawings with adequate dimensions and tolerances. I make sure the lengths and the choice of raw materials are right. Beyond that, it’s also about choosing the appropriate machines and adding theoretical manufacturing times in order to plan production.

Choosing the equipment and the machines to make the parts is like a recipe that helps manufacturing. Then, once that’s done, it helps standardize our products. It ensures a certain level of quality.

2. Why is it important to have an industrial specialist? Why is it important to have that bridge?

We save time, really… When information or a dimension is missing from the drawing, production has to go back to engineering to ask questions. Meanwhile, production stops until the answer comes back.

From the start, having a good drawing saves us time. Having the right operations and the right machines also means we make sure the parts are always manufactured the same way. We make sure one isn’t made on the milling machine one time, and then the next time made with a vertical saw and a file. I’m exaggerating a little, but we make sure the right machine is making the parts.

3. When there isn’t a good bridge between mechanical design and manufacturing, what’s the problem?

It leaves room for improvisation on the manufacturing side. The person has to choose the material cut size themselves. The shape or cut length depends on the equipment or machines being used. Depending on which machines are used, the final product won’t look the same visually or could have different dimensions. Quality control can’t do its job properly if tolerances or dimensions are missing.

The mechanical designer’s role is to provide a final drawing with proper tolerances and dimensions—take a ball bearing, for example. We don’t ask them to provide the more complex details of each manufacturing step. If needed, we can ask engineering to produce drawings with different dimensioning so a machinist doesn’t have to calculate machine movements. That way, the person making the part already has the information right on the drawing. They don’t need to ask or do calculations.

4. Do you have an idea of how many parts we manufacture each year?

There are a lot… Right now we’re up to 123,000 different parts in the library. But they’re not all active.

Some of them we made only once and won’t make again. They’re specific to one customer. Others come up often in our standard products.

5. If a customer asks us to make a special part, can we do that?

It happens less and less because we’re trying to standardize, but yes, we can do that.

Special requests sometimes come from a customer who is visiting to approve their equipment. There are special requests where, for example, the customer prefers to change the type or shape of a standard handle. In that case, we design and manufacture a special handle specific to that customer. That handle may never be manufactured again.

When a customer asks for non-standard options, it goes back to engineering; it becomes a custom request for a specific customer. That’s the kind of item that falls to the industrial specialist. They ask me whether it’s feasible, with what material, or how long it takes to manufacture. Sometimes I challenge engineering: not with those shapes, or not with those materials. It’s a feedback loop. Assuming it’s feasible, we can create the part, build the manufacturing routing, and go into production. That way, we’ll already have an idea of which machine we’ll use, how long it takes, as well as the material and the cut size.

6. Can we say that all of this helps the company with manufacturing, improving its capacity and its ways of working?

Yes, because it’s always the bridge between the two. It goes both ways. Production has requests, suggestions, or pain points.

When parts or assemblies don’t work well, or take a lot of time, the information is passed on to me, and I can break it down and bring it to engineering.

We might change a design because that item is complicated to manufacture. It takes too much time or the materials are expensive. Sometimes we save costs just by changing the size while keeping the same material. For example, instead of starting with a plate, we can start with a round bar. It doesn’t change the design itself. It just changes the size of the material we use. We use different machines, so the time isn’t the same. Sometimes I improve the process. There are fewer steps and we still get the same original result, but at a lower cost. There’s always the interaction and the suggestions from production that we bring back to engineering.

7. If we wanted to change something, is that possible? Will engineering adapt the drawings?

More and more. The production manager and production planning see the impact when we choose the right machines and the right quantities or batch sizes. They see the impact: we save time and production costs. Ultimately, what happens is that we’re able to offer a more competitive product.

With the results generated, we can increase our efficiency.

For the customer, that’s a good thing.

Perfect. Thank you very much.