Heather Miller
For 85 years, MSC Industrial Supply Co., a $4 billion company offering more than 2.5 million products, has helped manufacturers improve the way they work. By equipping its metalworking specialists with Autodesk Fusion, MSC has helped customers achieve $3.1 million in cost savings across more than 100 optimization engagements.
One example is aircraft manufacturer Air Tractor where Fusion helped MSC demonstrate a new machining strategy that reduced production time from 4.5 hours to 1.5 hours, freeing up an entire machine and delivering more than $600,000 in savings. With plans to expand Fusion adoption, MSC is scaling its ability to deliver measurable value and smarter manufacturing solutions to customers.
Elevate your design and manufacturing processes with Autodesk Fusion
For 85 years, MSC Industrial Supply Co has built its business around helping manufacturers improve the way they work and supplying the tools to make it happen. The $4 billion company offers more than 2.5 million products, selling primarily through its e-commerce platform.
MSC is also growing a substantial field organization that supports customers right on their shop floors. A major part of the field presence is more than 130 metalworking specialists located throughout the United States. These specialists work with manufacturers to identify production bottlenecks, advise on better tooling and machining strategies, and recommend the right products.
“Their main role is to help deliver productivity and cost savings to customers,” says Michael Gomez, Director, Manufacturing Research and Technology, MSC.
Now, MSC is equipping its metalworking specialists with Autodesk Fusion to enable the delivery of even more value. With the initial deployment, MSC has already saved customers $3.1 million dollars. And they’re planning on even more expansion.
“Fusion helps MSC engineers rapidly evaluate machining strategies and implement process improvements. In documented engagements where Fusion supported our metalworking specialists’ work, we implemented approximately $3.1 million in customer cost savings across more than 100 optimization engagements.”
—Sara Dulski, Vice President Metalworking Business Unit, MSC Industrial Supply Co.
Taking a new approach with Fusion
MSC purchased 100 Fusion licenses early last year and began training its internal specialists to use the software as part of customer optimization engagements. The program grew out of repeated requests from specialists who saw an opportunity to move beyond traditional tooling recommendations and become more involved in the way customers plan and machine their parts.
“In speaking with a lot of the metalworking specialists, CAD/CAM kept coming up as an opportunity,” Gomez says “I always say innovation is fun because it doesn’t have to be that you invent something new. It might just be, ‘Hey, we’re going to give you this new capability.’ We’re doing that with Fusion.”
Fusion gives specialists a more strategic way to sell to customers. They can now work with a customer’s part or process to demonstrate different tooling and toolpath strategies digitally. Fusion also allows MSC to connect its recommendations with the tooling brands it distributes. Supplier tool libraries, add-ins, and related manufacturing resources make it easier for specialists to select tools and incorporate them into a proposed machining strategy.
“We carry such a broad range of brands, we can not only recommend the right tool with Fusion, but now we can start to really get into the strategy of what a customer’s doing,” Gomez says.
“We’re combining CAD/CAM, simulation, and visualization in Fusion with our team’s expertise in manufacturing and machining and ultimately delivering an experience our customers are really happy about.”
—Michael Gomez, Director, Manufacturing Research and Technology, MSC
Seeing is believing: Making machining recommendations easy to understand
One of the most important benefits of this new strategy with Fusion is turning a technical recommendation into something a customer can see. Machining strategies can be difficult to communicate and time-consuming to test. Fusion allows a specialist to program the proposed approach, simulate the operation, and show them how the revised process would work digitally in much less time. For MSC, this is more than a presentation benefit. It improves the quality of the conversation between the specialist and the customer.
“When it comes to the simulation capabilities in CAM, changing a tool and the toolpath, and the visualization of how you might want to machine a part, it’s extremely easy to do it all in one place with Fusion,” Gomez says. “Now we can show a customer their part, how we believe it can be made better, and share the cycle time savings all ahead of time. It really enables customers to be a little bit more comfortable to experiment with something new.”
Turning demonstrations into measurable savings
Just one example of MSC’s success using Fusion is with Air Tractor, a manufacturer of agricultural and firefighting aircraft. During a visit, David Hray, metalworking specialist at MSC, noticed that Air Tractor was machining a block through a series of traditional, incremental passes. The machine would cut around the outside profile at a depth of approximately one hundred thousandths of an inch, step down, and repeat the same motion. An angled surface was then machined slowly with a two-flute ball end mill.
“It just took forever,” Hray says.
Hray proposed a different process. Rather than repeatedly stepping down in shallow increments, the new toolpath would engage the full flute length of the end mill and rough the profile at full depth. Fusion helped him demonstrate the strategy before the customer committed to changing the process. Hray programmed the component, simulated the toolpaths, and showed how the new approach would work.
The improvement went beyond faster cutting. Air Tractor had previously squared the raw blocks on a separate machine before completing the remaining machining operations. The original workholding arrangement also required a clamp positioned across the top of the part. Hray developed a new setup that held the material from the bottom using a dovetail and eliminated the top clamp.
“They don’t have to square these blocks up on another machine anymore,” Hray says. “They can machine a complete part in two setups.”
“By developing and demonstrating it in Fusion, we took the operation from four and a half hours total to an hour and 30 minutes and freed up an entire machine,” he adds.
Taken together, the changes reduced the total production time dramatically and will save Air Tractor more than $600,000. Approximately $375,000 of that value came from freeing the separate machine previously used to prepare the blocks.
Realizing new results
Although the Fusion initiative began without formal adoption requirements, MSC has already associated it with significant customer results.
“In the first six months alone, we saw $1 million in savings for customers,” Gomez says. “Now, in just a year and a half, we’ve saved customers $3.1 million dollars. This was all purely organic, which is what I get really excited about.”
As MSC adds new comprehensive Fusion training to the program and formalizes additional onboarding of more specialists, they expect to see even more impact and value provided to customers.
“At the end of the day, we want our customers to find the best solutions tailored to their specific needs and, hopefully, save them a lot of time and money as well,” Gomez says. “Using Fusion, we’re really able to demonstrate and make it happen for them.”