VIDEO: HOW TO Turn a Supplier into a Partner

JACOB SANCHEZ: To succeed in today's manufacturing industry, you need to do more than just make a good product. You need to become a better partner. This industry is a two-way street. You have manufacturers that need to share their knowledge of their products with their customers, and then you have the customers that manufacturers need to listen to, to understand the obstacles in their day to day. You need to take all of that to create a better product, a better partnership and at the end of the day, better solutions. That's why I'm here at Walter America's campus meeting up with Brian. How's it going, my friend?

BRIAN SCHULTZ: Good to meet you, sir. You must be Jacob?

JACOB SANCHEZ: Yes. Brian, what do you do here with Walter?

BRIAN SCHULTZ: So I recently moved down here to South Carolina to take the position as the technical trainer for Walter in the U.S., actually, for all of North America, I guess. We're servicing Mexico all the way up to Canada out of this facility.

JACOB SANCHEZ: Nice. And a brand new facility. Correct?

BRIAN SCHULTZ: Brand new. Everything you can see in here is all brand new, freshly constructed, all brand new everything. So it's state of the art all the way around.

JACOB SANCHEZ: I'm ready to get out here. I heard we have a lot to do today. Some schedule of meetings. We have people that flew in from around the country. I'm very excited to get into this with you. And something that we're going to be understanding, not just how Walter does their products, not just how they get things out the door to your floor so you can rip some chips and get your machines running.

It's going to be learning How To turn the supplier into a partner.

What a way to start off this tour, my friend. I'm very excited. This looks like a place that's ready for the growth of the industry. Sarang, how’s it going sir? So I'm going to be here with a lot of your colleagues today. I'm going to be going through a tour. I'm here as “Sanchez Solutions” one of Walter's number one companies in North America.

We've been doing business for a long time, but I want to see how we can grow together. I want to see what more we can do for each other other than “You give me product, I give you money”. So let's start with this space. What is this?

SARANG GARUD: So this is an extension of our Walter Academy, which is the global initiative. So we believe in training not just our sales engineers, but we make sure our distributors are trained so they can kind of help the end user. And then we also train the end user. And the idea is not just a death by PowerPoint, but to have kind of demonstrations lined up, along with what you have going here.

So there's a lot of partnership going on, different kinds of initiatives. It's not just we teach you a product, it's about, okay, how do you use this product? How do you do this project? How do you find any information on a specific product?

JACOB SANCHEZ: I have some more questions. I want to meet with your colleague out here too.

BRIAN BAKER: Hey, Sarang, how are you doing? Jacob?

JACOB SANCHEZ: Nice to meet you, Brian.

Sweet, yeah. All right. So classrooms, those are my bread and butter. This is my home. I love machining, I love the smell. This is a beautiful facility.

BRIAN BAKER: And this is where all the magic happens. This is what we like to show off here. This is our machine room. Right now we have a couple machines in here, but there's still more on the way. I mean we're not done with this.

JACOB SANCHEZ: Real, real quick, I'm going to ignore the sign, I need to, dude, you got the through spindle coolant on there and everything.

BRIAN BAKER: This is awesome. Well, that's one of the drills that we actually have in our catalog, so.

JACOB SANCHEZ: Okay. Good to see it. Professional face back on Sanchez Solutions machine shop owner how to take care of my people. What does this mean to me? How can this help my employees? What do you guys do for me?

BRIAN BAKER: Well, not only do we use these machines just to run demos and show off our tools and what we're doing with them, but we will train our distributor partners and our end users how to use these tools. And you know, what can we actually do with them. Beyond that, if our customers have some problems or they have something that they'd like to improve, we can bring their parts into this facility and actually put it on our machine and actually cut chips and solve their issues right here for them.

This is a prime example. One of our customers sent them these parts for us, and we have them numbered. They were having a chip breaking issue. So we were able to put this on our lathe, and we were able to run it with a couple of different chip breakers and find out how to improve their process. So we're not taking up any of their downtime, or we're not taking any of their production time or their capacity.

JACOB SANCHEZ: And I appreciate that because something that people tell me a lot of the time as a business owner is you need to upskill your people, you need to train your workers, you need to keep them competitive. And at the end of the day, I can't always shut off my machines to train them. It's not that I don't want to. The thing that I need to take care of first is production, because that means money for them, their families and this company.

And it's tough, man. It's really tough.

BRIAN BAKER: And that's where we come in. We like to partner with our customers and their end users. We don't really want to think about them even as customers, but partners. Let's take a look back here. We got something else I want to show you.

JACOB SANCHEZ: Oh, yeah. Okay. This is where I started. People like to say CNC machining, the future of this, the future of that, but every shop you go into, there's always going to be a manual machine in there. What are you doing out here?

BRIAN BAKER: Well, basically, we have some of these manual machines, for a couple of reasons. One of the main ones, though, is any customization that we have to do. If we have to modify a tool for a customer or something along those lines, this is the perfect place to do it. And sometimes the old school is the best school, you know, do it.

John, back here right now, he's getting some blocks qualified up for some of the demos we do. But other parts of his job are actually assembling the tools for our customer. Well, they're not just buying the tool, they're buying the whole assembly, and we'll put the inserts in the pocket, we’ll assemble them. We'll even balance them if they have high-speed operations, package them up.

We can even engrave and customize and put the customer’s part numbers on the tools for them.

JACOB SANCHEZ: I like that. This is sweet. So good to see you again, my friend.

BRIAN BAKER: Sending you back off to Jacob.

JACOB SANCHEZ: Thank you.

BRIAN BAKER: You guys have a great one, guys.

JACOB SANCHEZ: My friend, this is what I've been talking about. This is what I've been wanting to see. So we've been going around all day talking about what you can offer me on the education side, what you can offer me on the machining side for bringing my parts in here. This is what you offer on the actual product side, correct?

Dive into it for me.

SARANG GARUD: Yeah. This is the production unit. This is actually where all the magic happens. So we get the blanks over on that side. We cut it to pieces the right length, then we get it into the OD grinding centerless grinding. So that does the body. Then we go into flute work. That's where we are grinding the clearances and the flutes.

And then over on that side is the end work. So that's the tip part of it. And then it goes into different kind of processes: blasting, varnishing, coating.

JACOB SANCHEZ: Yes. And again, people, we're all here, right in America, nothing's changed. That's a big thing I think we need to discuss if you can do all of this in Germany, but why here? Why is it a big deal?

SARANG GARUD: This is where we are actually the closest to the customer. We have this facility for our North America market. Canada, USA, Brazil, all of these, Mexico. And, this is basically where a lot of ITAR work happens as well. So all the defense work, it's all made in America.

JACOB SANCHEZ: That makes sense.

And right here this is something that is also very interesting. So these are drills from customers probably around the country that have got sent in to come to this station to get real work, correct?

SARANG GARUD: This is the reconditioning.

JACOB SANCHEZ:  Reconditioning, yeah, I like that.

SARANG GARUD: So you can see that these are all, damaged tips and all. So this is the staging area. We get it in, we kind of batch process it. So there's going to be different lengths, different customers, different types of drills. They may need different coatings on each of the drills separately.

So this looks like this is a DC 173. That's a deeper drill for the crankshaft that we make. It's a very special drill just for that application. So yeah, from here on we kind of clean it up, do the rework as needed. And then we send it back to recoating.

BRIAN SCHULTZ: This is really the room where the secret sauce gets mixed in. And like I said, we buy our machines from the outside world, but everything that comes in gets our custom touches put on it. We have our own proprietary, carbide blend, a proprietary coating blend, a proprietary finishing operation. So what I wanted to, I had one of our guys over on our production bring over some samples of, you know, the whole process straight through so we can kind of take a look here.

So they come in as our serrated blanks with through coolant holes already in them. We cut them off to length. We'll see that machine. We have a, cut off and, chamfered ends for the coolant holes. We go into step drills. We go from step drills into…

JACOB SANCHEZ: Get some fluting in there.

BRIAN SCHULTZ: helical flutes, straight flutes, long length of diameter ratios. And then we cap it all off with our proprietary coating process.

JACOB SANCHEZ: Which is what we just saw here.

BRIAN SCHULTZ: Just saw right here in the back.

JACOB SANCHEZ: This is the A to Z of like your day to day. This is what you push out the door to make the money. I appreciate this, man. Everything you guys have shown me today has just been phenomenal. You and your team. Real quick, before I dive in, I want everybody to know if I ever do divulge Walter secrets, I have to work here forever.

BRIAN SCHULTZ: There is a lot of secret sauce here in the back of the building that we're not allowed to talk about outside this building, so.

JACOB SANCHEZ: Something we are allowed to talk about, though, is the things that Walter is bringing to the table for you, not just for them and their workers. That Academy that we went through, that's for you. That's for you to train. That's for you to learn. Bring in your people. The Tech Center we went through, that for them to help you figure out your process so you don't have to shut down your line to train your people. The customization is key here, and it's key to finding all of these in a supplier so you can learn How To turn a supplier into a partner.

Narrator: For more metalworking tips and industry best practices, stay tuned for the next How To episode and subscribe to the MSC Industrial Supply YouTube channel, a source of original manufacturing content Built To Make You Better.