Sales representatives at TigerStop feel like they are competing against the status quo. As makers of high-tech cutting equipment, they try to pry companies from the simple, beloved tape measure.
But sales are growing at the company. Manufacturers are looking more and more for ways to trim the most expensive and time-consuming parts of production: labor. That hunt has translated to double-digit growth for TigerStop for at least the last five years.
“To be competitive in the U.S., you have to be efficient, you have to be flexible,” said CEO Rakesh Sridharan. “You have to be fast (and) productive, and the people that are running these machines can be utilized in a more valuable way.”
With automation becoming increasingly more viable, companies like TigerStop are positioning themselves for the continuous growth.
Changing stripes
Company lore says founder Spencer Dick had a eureka moment when he saw machine operators at his cabinet company stop often in order to recalibrate. He went to work making prototypes of programmable add-ons and lugging them to trade shows.
TigerStop, officially founded in 1994, has since sold around 30,000 variations of its products, according to spokesman Simon Spykerman. It weathered the Great Recession and the downturn in the housing market — and the downturn in wood products.
Last year, the company posted more than $11 million in revenues. Revenues grew by 15 percent on average over the last four years. It grew 16 percent in 2016, and Sridharan projects it can grow by 18 percent in 2017.
Its products aren’t the robotic arms clapping cars together in a warehouse that we typically associate with automation. They are saws, or mounts for saws, that can be programmed to quickly and precisely cut raw materials.
One of its cheaper models will have a long, orange and steel-gray table mounted on a table saw. A technician can punch in measurements on a green keypad, sending the metal piece that the wood is placed against zipping into narrowest fractions of space — lining up a precise cut.
The high-end models do more. They can analyze a block of wood or metal and lay out a virtual map of cuts that minimize waste. Spykerman compares it to delivery truck drivers fitting as many possible boxes of various shapes into a trailer.
Growing lean
Portland-based window maker Indow said two TigerStops was all the company needed for a “dramatic” raise in output. The company has 18 people on its production side who can churn out 160 units per day.
“Our labor costs would have been significantly higher, because we would have to use tape measures and some other manual material to get close. But we need better than close,” said Rich Radford, vice president of operations.
Leanness has been a theme when people talk about automation. Businesses such as Indow can add newer technology that may be expensive, but can rapidly make good on the investment. The company will look to expand aggressively, Radford said.
“We’re not doubling year-over-year (production), but we’re not too far from that,” he said.
TigerStop’s own situation is similar. The company has 40 employees and just two warehouses where it makes the saws: one in Orchards and another in The Netherlands. Its 10-year growth plan, which executives call ambitious, envisions expanding sales all over Europe.
With manufacturing rising all over the world, they are watching for opportunities in every corner.
“It’s not necessarily an American-only mission,” said Spykerman. “The idea is to help manufacturers compete globally and keep jobs locally. That applies to any country. We want European jobs to be able to succeed and keep those jobs locally.”
Sridharan was announced as CEO less than a month ago to oversee this phase. He was a former executive at another global company, Portland-based Leatherman Tool Group, and has degrees in mechanical engineering, manufacturing management and business administration.
Machine learning
Companies such as TigerStop are going with the technological grain, not against.
A new study from the research group McKinsey Global Institute suggests that 49 percent of worker activities — not just jobs, but parts of jobs — can be done better by a robot or machine.
The Trump administration has also stated it a top priority to coax companies to bring manufacturing plants stateside. If they are convinced to pay the higher American wages, they may try to lower their costs with automation.
TigerStop has already sold many products to marquee manufacturers such as door and window maker Jeld-Wen and aerospace giant Boeing, Spykerman said.
Automated sawing may only scratch the surface, according to the McKinsey report. Researchers there said almost every occupation has potential for some automation. And thanks to advances in software engineering, jobs we consider highly skilled could be as vulnerable as manufacturing and food service jobs.
“I kind of look at it differently from my perspective: We’re creating jobs where there were none before,” said Aaron Holm, CEO of Blokable, a Seattle-based maker of modular homes with a manufacturing plant in Vancouver. The company plans to grow heavily this year with big investments in automated manufacturing.
“We’ll be creating entirely new jobs in the region and the country that probably just weren’t jobs that existed before,” he said. “With the folks that we’re hiring, we’re taking people who have experience in other domains and asking them to use that experience in a new area.”
Radford conveyed a similar thought. Rather than using TigerStops to make their employees redundant, they have assigned new tasks for them to do during their newfound downtime.
“I think it’s always a challenging discussion: what is your motivation (as a company)? Is it about the company culture or is it about the bottom line?” he said.
Opponents argue that even if the push for automation and leanness makes new jobs, they will require more education.
Ultimately, the sales team at TigerStop say they see their products as logical steps forward for the manufacturing industry that they hope to capitalize on. Salesman Mathias Forsman compared it to lumberjacks.
“That one employee is kicking out as much as four employees,” with the TigerStop, he said. “It’s like saying we should have guys with axes out there instead of chain saws.”
