Pindel Global Precision, an ISO9001:2015-certified contract manufacturer of precision-machined parts for global customers, typically serves the industrial control and automation industries. But when COVID-19 hit, CEO Bill Berrien saw an opportunity to help. “We put our name out there as a candidate willing to make ventilator parts at cost,” says Bill. “There was a national, humanitarian urgency to meet the need. We had to raise our hands.”
At the same time, Pindel was in the middle of another big change—switching the shop from PartMaker to ESPRIT. Pindel decided to make the switch to ESPRIT due to its emphasis on continuous innovation. “ESPRIT’s regular feature launches, AI capabilities, and reputation for creating great, edit-free NC code make it a better choice to help the team work together and work quickly.”
“The manufacturing ecosystem we have in this country, and particularly Wisconsin, can make us the world’s factory floor,” Bill says. “But it has to be enabled by automation and AI. At Pindel one of our key mottos is ‘work smarter, not harder.’ If there’s a tool out there that lets the person do more, let’s jump on it.”
COVID-19 was Pindel’s watershed moment, and ESPRIT made the transition as smooth as possible. “Our team here in Wisconsin worked through the weekend. By Monday, we were cutting chips on test material—on all five different part numbers,” says Bill, recalling the week his team adopted ESPRIT and began making ventilator parts. “By Tuesday we were making parts, and by Wednesday we were anodizing them.” Bill says that the key to successfully navigating this transition was trust—both in ESPRIT and his team.
Today, Pindel continues to manufacture ventilator parts at full speed while simultaneously pursuing AS9100D certification. Bill looks toward the future. “I believe that on the other side of this crisis, there is going to be a realization that the legacy mindset around supply chains is no longer applicable. We’ve got a tremendous amount of automation right here and a capability and capacity to deliver production parts immediately. We’ve got the technology, the ecosystem, plenty of untapped capacity, and an incredibly skilled workforce. We can change the paradigm; we should be the factory floor for the world.”
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