Everyone knows how great it is to be able to try out a product before you commit to buying it. This idea is often referred to as “Try before you buy.”

But that whole idea got turned upside down 4 years ago when the owners of Bloomington, CA’s 46-year-old True Groove Machine were asked by Brandy Tidball to sell their company to him on a long-term buyout arrangement.

“The owners were really ready to retire,” says Tidball, “but everything they had was tied up in the business, so they didn’t want to risk turning the company over to an untried new owner. When I made them an offer to buy, they were amenable to the idea, but they weren't willing to let me take over without first seeing whether or not I could run a company with 24 employees. I couldn’t blame them, though, because at the time I was running a small shop called RNS Machine Works, with two employees in a corner of one of their buildings. I could see why they were nervous about gambling on me.”

The True Groove owners countered Tidball with a proposal of their own. “Why don't you come on board as general manager for a year or so,” they said. “If we see you can do it, then, okay, we’ll sell it to you.”

“I guess the bottom line was they wanted to try me out before they sold out,” Tidball says. “In any case, I agreed to their terms and three years later, about a year ago, we finally came to terms, and I became the owner.”

New Owner, Old Problems

When Tidball took over as GM, he found some good news and some bad news waiting for him.

The good news was that he had inherited a team of experienced, hard-working employees led by 29-year True Groove veteran Dave Butler, the company operations manager and Brian Grigson, production manager.. The bad news was that there was an ongoing breakdown in some of the company’s internal systems.

“Dave had joined the company when he was fifteen years old, and he knew everything there was to know about the company,” Tidball says. “I didn’t have to go searching for things that needed to be fixed, because Dave had them all laid out for me. He’s been a tremendous asset.”

“Probably the biggest problem when Brandy took over was in purchasing,” adds Butler. “The owners had somehow allowed themselves to become a bottleneck. We were having trouble even buying the tools we needed. As a result, we had delivery problems and some unhappy customers. I’m not sure why it was like that, but I guess somehow over the years the owners’ priorities had changed.”

“Luckily, after six months as GM, I was able finally to convince them to turn over the company check book to me,” Tidball says, “and after that, things got better fast.”
“We needed a lot of new things,” Butler says. “We needed new equipment, new internal systems, a way to collect job cost data so that our quoting accuracy could improve.

Once Brandy had control of the purse strings, he was able to take care of those problems pretty quickly.”

To handle the job cost data collection, Tidball installed a shop management system called E2.

“The E2 Shop System is comprehensive manufacturing software that gives us total shop-floor control,” Tidball explains. “With E2 we see the business as never before. I had used it at RNS Machine Works, and knew what it could do for us. It’s hard to imagine running a busy shop without some kind of software like that.”

“Probably more than anything else that system has helped us increase our productivity,” Butler says. “I mean we can see what we’re doing right and wrong.”

New Company Name: Axxis Corporation

One change Tidball made when he finally had control of the company was to give it a new name.

“The name True Groove really didn’t fit the company anymore,” he says, “and, of course, there had been some delivery and other customer problems, so I thought we needed a fresh start with a fresh modern name that gave us the sense that we were dealing with a modern, advanced-technology company. Our new name, Axxis Corporation, I believe, does just that. Our employees have responded well to it, and so have our customers. Its kind of like, ‘out with the old, and in with the new.’”

New Equipment

Four years ago True Groove, now Axxis Corporation, had 24 employees running 20 or so CNC machines.

“Right now we have forty employees and a total of 30 CNC machines,” says Butler. “Brandy has spared no expense to give us what we need to increase productivity.”

“You have to have equipment to get the job done,” adds Tidball. “Right now our productivity is above industry average, and it’s still climbing. In the past four years we have more than doubled our sales, too. Plus, our customers are much happier now that we can give them the quality they need and meet their delivery schedules.”

Switchbox Bottleneck

Sometimes easy-to-solve problems can create big bottlenecks in the production line. One such problem Butler pointed out to Tidball was the very old-fashioned switching system used to deliver g-code programs to the shop floor.

“We had a really low-tech switching system,” Butler says. “As a result, the more CNC machines we brought in, the more of a nightmare the system became.”

“We kept adding switch boxes,” Tidball says, “but they were basically all in one location and our guys ended up standing in line to switch over to their machine to get a program. The old system became a very high-cost bottleneck, in terms of machine downtime, wasted labor hours and delayed deliveries.”

Refresh Your Memory Solution

To solve the switchbox bottleneck, Tidball bought a system called Refresh Your Memory.

“The system has only one switchbox and that’s automatic,” he says. “That box is connected to our central server where our programs are stored, and then each of our twenty machines in our main building are connected to that box using RS232.”

“The Refresh Your Memory switch box is automatic,” Butler says. “Our guys go to one of 8 conveniently placed console locations to use the system. They click on a simple menu that shows a list of customers, then parts, then machines. They click on their part number and their machine and the program they need is now in a queue line available.”

“After that, the programs are easily accessible from the machine control panel,” Tidball says. “Our operators just call up the program they need and it is automatically loaded into their machine. You can’t get much easier than that.”

“We also bought a Refresh Your Memory floating license, which allows us to use the system on any computer, but only one at a time. We keep it on a lap top so that we can move it from machine to machine if we need it. Our guys love the system, even though it has cut down on their BS time at the old switch box.”

“The amazing thing to me, is how much the new system has increased our productivity and throughput,” Tidball adds. “It seems like a small thing, but the Refresh Your Memory system has had a truly big impact on the bottom line. It’s easy to use, quick to learn, and works great.”

Plans for the Future

At present Axxis Corporation serves a broad variety of commercial customers, making such parts as wind tunnel components, turbine engine and tractor parts. The company now has the capability to machine virtually any kind of material, though mostly it works with stainless steel, aluminum, titanium and magnesium.

“We’re really diversified now,” Tidball says, “and we’re growing at a good pace. We’ve bought a lot of new equipment, including two, dual-pallet Haas horizontals. We offer precision turning and milling, and we also have a big Haas GR 510 CNC router for projects too big for our mills.”

But now that he has a year of ownership under his belt, where does Tidball want to take Axxis?

“Well, I still have RNS Machine Works in the building next door, which I use really as our prototype arm,” he says. “As for Axxis, I plan on growing considerably bigger than where we are right now. In the next five years we’ll build another building on the lot next door. I want to diversify heavily into the medical devices market and other industries requiring precision machining. I want to continue modernizing our equipment and improving productivity. Plus, I want to continue improving Axxis as a good place for our employees to work. That’s just as important as any other goal. Happy employees do the best work.”

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