Okuma & Velocity: A Quality Relationship

Wade Anderson:

Hey, manufacturing world. Welcome to another episode of Shop Matters, sponsored by Okuma America. This podcast is meant to talk about all things manufacturing related. I'm your host, Wade Anderson, here in beautiful sunny Charlotte, North Carolina. And today in the studio with me, I've got Jeff Estes, a longtime friend of Okuma and head of one of our partner companies, Velocity. Welcome, Jeff.

Jeff Estes:

Oh, glad to be here. Thanks for having me and really appreciate just the opportunity.

Wade Anderson:

Well, Jeff, tell us a little bit about who is Jeff Estes.

Jeff Estes:

Oh boy, that's a loaded question. I'm just going to tell you, that's a loaded question. I have been in manufacturing my whole life. Manufacturing is ...

Wade Anderson:

Five years.

Jeff Estes:

Oh, yeah. Yeah, at least. Yeah, but when I came out of college, I went directly into manufacturing. In fact, I was working in manufacturing as I was working through college and just making parts. It's just wonderful. CNC world is just the dream. How in the world does a machine cut steel and metal and Inconel and titanium and all these crazy materials. How does a machine do that? And I don't want to give away my age, but let's just say after 40 years, I'm still amazed.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah.

Jeff Estes:

Just amazed, yeah.

Wade Anderson:

That's excellent.

Jeff Estes:

Yeah.

Wade Anderson:

What do you do for Velocity? Talk about your role within Velocity and what is Velocity as a company?

Jeff Estes:

That's a good point. Velocity makes CNC machine tool toolholders, mainly for lathes. We make rotary tables for machining centers, but our bread and butter is really our tooling, both the live side and the static side. We bring this out of our supplier out of Italy, which a lot of people would know as SU-matic. And we are the North American distributor of that through Velocity. We only do Okumas. You won't see our tools on any other machine type except Okuma. And it's been a great, great marriage and a great, great relationship that we have both with Okuma and with SU-matic, of being able to bring that in and really focus on that. My role is I'm the general manager of it. I have responsibilities for all of North America. I have territories that are assigned to me that I do directly as a salesperson, but I also have general responsibilities as well.

Wade Anderson:

Okay. SU-matic, I know is going through some changes in, is it Italy or Switzerland? Where did they add- they built new real estate?

Jeff Estes:

Yeah, it's great. Our big company is Suhner, which is in Switzerland, but Sematic is based in Bologna, Italy. And building a new facility. We're tripling the size, should be open next summer. That building is under construction for everyone, the Italians do everything in square meters. I'll just convert it. It's roughly about 50,000 square feet. They're going from about 15,000 square feet to 50,000 square feet, adding capacity, use Okuma machine tools to make our product. Just really amazing.

Wade Anderson:

Sorry, I've got a story I've got to share on that.

Jeff Estes:

Yeah.

Wade Anderson:

About five, probably about five years ago, I had the opportunity to take a trip to SU-matic on behalf of Velocity and Okuma, to learn more about their manufacturing process, what their capabilities are. And it was my first time to be in that part of Italy. It was a beautiful trip. I've been to Switzerland a couple of times, phenomenal place. My first time going to Italy. We toured all the facilities, saw all the manufacturing places that you guys have over there.

Wade Anderson:

Then we go to dinner and certain things- you know I'm a country bumpkin. It amazes me sometimes when the light bulb clicks and you realize where some of this comes from, but we go to dinner at a place where they do a lot of wild game, wild animals and stuff. And one of the specialties come out, it was pasta with this meat sauce and I'm looking at it. And it was a bolognese sauce, like Bologna, Italy, bolognese. Ah, I got it now, right. All my life, I never really put that together. Then they come out with this meat and it's sliced up and it's laying on a plate and I'm looking at it like, "That looks just like bologna."

Wade Anderson:

And then again, the light bulb goes on. Bologna, Bologna, Italy. That's exactly what it was, a very high-end version of it, but yeah, very interesting. We have a great meal. The guys, Ivanis and the team over there, phenomenal hosts to begin with, but had a great meal, enjoyed a lot of laughter and good times. And then he said, "Hey, I've got something special I want to show you."

Wade Anderson:

"Okay." So we all pile in the van and we go back to the manufacturing plant. And we walk in and literally, it's pitch black, completely dark. And you walk in the shop and Ivanis is leading the way to get us in there. And you could hear machines running. You could hear the turrets indexing. You could hear the pallets going in and out, but the entire shop, literally lights out.

Jeff Estes:

Absolutely.

Wade Anderson:

Completely black. And then they flip on the lights and you see they're running everything in a lights out operation.

Jeff Estes:

That's right.

Wade Anderson:

They do a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility. Talk a little bit about their production and how they approach manufacturing what they do.

Jeff Estes:

Yeah. It's a great point. And lights out is very important, especially for the Europeans, but when they approach manufacturing, it's very engineering and manufacturing driven. They're looking at the market, but then they are engineers at heart and they're looking for, "How do you make a reliable product, that's going to perform and stay out in the field for a long time?"

Jeff Estes:

We can say sometimes that the products are too good. They last too long. Same way of Okumas, they sometimes last too long, if you look at it just from a marketing standpoint, but they're looking for longevity, how people will use it. And in there, they use Okuma machines to make the product, but they also use the products that they make on those Okuma machines to make more tool holders. So, they’re testing their product on the machines that we would sell them to and market to here in the US. They're actually being tested every single day in the factory, just making actual parts. It's a philosophy of, "How do you make it better? How do you build it better? And where do you know where the failures are?"

Jeff Estes:

And I know a lot of people don't like to talk about failures, but everything's going to fail at some point. Engineers talk about FMEAs and trying to plan it out. We compare the FMEA to the actual because we're using it. And now we know what conditions does this run best under? What conditions does it not run best under? And then we're able to communicate that to the customer. And then we're able to try to design around it, to how do you make that better? And how do you strengthen that weak point? It's an interesting thing, but like you said, first of all, your dinner probably lasted three or four hours because they eat multiple courses.

Wade Anderson:

Yes. Oh, yeah. That was an event all to itself.

Jeff Estes:

That's exactly right. There's no such thing as a three-course meal, it's more like an eight or a ten.

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Jeff Estes:

And you think that you're done after two or three and you're all full and they say, "Oh, we're just getting started."

Wade Anderson:

Yeah.

Jeff Estes:

And then they take you back in and go into the facility and it is usually late in the evening. Yeah.

Wade Anderson:

You brought up something. I'm going to get a little bit off topic here, but talking about failure, it's such an important learning tool as well. And one of the things, I had a mentor and a philosophy that I was taught long time ago, when it comes to leading, leading in an organization, leading in anything, whether it's life or your business. There's an acronym, SAOF. And that's schooling, apprenticeship, opportunity and failure.

Jeff Estes:

Yeah.

Wade Anderson:

And you can't be a good leader unless you've mastered all four of those. You have to have schooling. You have to have head knowledge. You have to apprentice with somebody who's been there and done that, where you can apply what you've learned from the schooling aspect. And he teaches you the school of hard knocks along the way as well. Then you have that opportunity. You have to have the opportunity to lead or do something substantial. And you've got to fail. You have to fail and you have to learn lessons from it. People talk a lot about, like you mentioned, you don't want to talk about failure, but failure is a big tool that you can use to advance what you're doing in life and in business.

Jeff Estes:

Yeah. I would say something that I've shared a lot through my life, is the only people that haven't failed are the people who've never tried anything new. It's just part of our learning process. And we try, as you say, to learn from the tools that we're given, from books and from prior knowledge, but that application...

Wade Anderson:

Yeah.

Jeff Estes:

You got to put rubber to the road at some point. And then what did you learn from that? And if things didn't go the way you want them, great. Okay, where were the areas that you did well in.

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Jeff Estes:

And then where were the areas that you could improve in? And that's part of that process. And that's that longevity process that you learn. SU-matic does a really good job of that. And our tools and Velocity, excuse me, Okuma, have been in business since 1898. I would say they probably had one or two failures in that time, but look at them.

Wade Anderson:

Yep.

Jeff Estes:

It is the, in my opinion, the premier machine tool in the world and just that longevity and learning and improving is the constant.

Wade Anderson:

When you look at what Velocity is doing, where they're using the tools that they're manufacturing in their manufacturing process, they get to see the strengths, the weaknesses, they can make design improvements based on that. We do the same from an Okuma perspective. We use Okuma machines to make Okuma machines. And because it's in a manufacturing, and we're very much a lights out operation in Japan as well, there's things that we learn from that and new chip conveyor designs because we machine a lot of cast iron in Japan, obviously. Well, cast iron is nasty, sludgy material.

Jeff Estes:

It sure is. Yeah.

Wade Anderson:

Well, we learned lessons from that and we apply those. We re-engineer our own equipment to have better reliability and longevity. One of the biggest costs to any company is downtime. How do you prevent downtime? Well, you got to re-engineer, redesign things, make it better. And that constant improvement loop, that loop cycle that you're working through.

Jeff Estes:

Yeah. And you said something earlier too, you were mentioning that lights out. Okay. If you think it's hard to monitor things when you've got someone watching the machine, think about what's happening when you're not there, whether you're getting two hours, four hours, eight hours, a couple of shifts, a shift and a half. That machine logic has to tie in where, "Okay, this event happened. What's my next step? What do I do? What's my fallback? Do I have redundant tooling? How do I address this?"

Jeff Estes:

And all that logic comes into play in lights out. And that's part of the process that we use in our manufacturing, is, "Okay, this happened. This tool failed. Or we got too much load on it."

Jeff Estes:

Well, we should have a redundant tool that we can go to. And the machine's smart enough to tell us, "Hey, that machine is expiring."

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Jeff Estes:

Okay. You've got to link to that. And then if our tool holder fails, where it's overheated or something, well, guess what? We're throwing more load on the turret or on those drive systems. The same message is coming back on, "This isn't working the way it should. Something's happening here."

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Jeff Estes:

You learn all that from doing lights out. We can talk about it, but until you do it, oh wow.

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah, you can practice boxing all you want, but until you got your nose bloodied, you don't really know how to box, right.

Jeff Estes:

Yeah. I'm a really good golfer on TV, but get me out on the golf course, it's a whole different story, so yeah.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah, yeah. Excellent. Jeff, obviously we know Velocity from standard type products, pull studs, our turret tool holders, live tools. You guys also do a lot from a special standpoint. We utilize your engineering horsepower with special applications, special projects. Talk a little bit about what does Velocity bring to the table from an engineering perspective?

Jeff Estes:

Yeah. One of the things about engineers, they do not like to do the same thing day in and day out. It's just inbred in them. They love to design stuff. They like to try different things and something new. And being an engineering company, we like to make specials. And a special that we could talk about, is going into deep pockets of a product.

Wade Anderson:

It's like a aerospace case, an engine case.

Jeff Estes:

Yeah.

Wade Anderson:

Something like that.

Jeff Estes:

If you think of companies who make large valves or some type of aerospace component, where you have to do cylinder work.

Wade Anderson:

Blowout preventers.

Jeff Estes:

That's exactly right. The Okuma machine tool, let's say it's a large machine tool, like a VTR. The head and ram actually can't go down into some of these areas. So, you had to put some type of extension, but these customers want to have driven extension. They want to drive the part and maybe do a right angle.

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Jeff Estes:

An example would be, they go into a seven or an eight inch bore and it may go down 20 inches. And then they want to machine, some type of feature at a right angle inside of that. Well, we make two holders for that, special tool holders to do that. And understand, if Okuma can throw a hundred Newton meters or 600 Newton meters of torque, we can't transfer that much in there.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah.

Jeff Estes:

It just can't happen. We can't transfer 80 or a hundred horsepower, but that's not the type of feature that you're doing deep in those pockets, but it has to be accurate. It has to be dead nuts to a perpendicularity or parallelism or something very critical or a cylindricity or something that’s very, very critical. That's where we love it. We love it when somebody says, "This isn't an easy one."

Jeff Estes:

And we're going, our eyebrows raise right then because it's fun at that point.

Wade Anderson:

Right, yeah. Okay.

Jeff Estes:

That is part of our company.

Wade Anderson:

You mentioned the VTR for an example. It's a ram style spindle. What kind of connection are you guys using?

Jeff Estes:

We actually buy a curvic coupling adapter from Okuma. We integrate it into our tool. We align it at the factory.

Wade Anderson:

You're using the same coupling system we would run on our attachment heads.

Jeff Estes:

We actually buy it from you.

Wade Anderson:

Okay, all right.

Jeff Estes:

We make sure it is compatible and it works. And then we do the alignment. And then the only thing that the installer has to do, is to find alignment, doing that fine tuning, those five, six, eight microns that they had to bring it in, but there's none of this spinning all day trying to get it aligned. That's already done, much like your heads you already have on those machines.

Wade Anderson:

Okay, excellent. What do you see the future being in manufacturing? I always like, anytime I do these podcasts, what do we do here? What do we do now? What stuff guys can take advantage of, but look out on the horizon, what's the next five years look like? Where do you think we're going to be five years down the road?

Jeff Estes:

And we've been talking about this for a while in the machine tool industry, multitasking is just being able to do more on the same machine. That's becoming more and more important.

Wade Anderson:

Why is that? I know, but for people who aren't maybe used to doing two lathes and a milling operation- I know in my heart why I want to go to multitasking, but what is it from Jeff's point of view?

Jeff Estes:

Well, it's really simple. You're trying to hold all your tolerances in one workholding. And you also don't want to have to build up, have three or four machines. You've got one machine. It's doing different functionalities and different functions. You don't have three or four setups. You got one setup, you've got one set of workholding. You don't have to buy chucks or fixtures for a lot of different machines. And the last one that nobody really talks about, but the accountants really love to talk about it, is the WIP, the work in process. You're moving product through. Your throughput time is more consistent and more smooth. You're not building pockets of WIP that are sitting here idle that you've got X number of dollars invested in. You're able to move that product through.

Jeff Estes:

There's a lot of advantages, but from a quality standpoint and from a lights out standpoint, which we talked about earlier, multi-function machines work perfect in that because you may not have a two-minute cycle, you may be trying to do an hour and a half worth of work and you're doing it on one machine. Guess what? That machine is doing it. What can you do in that hour and 15 minutes that's open to you? What other functions and actions can you do at work?

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Jeff Estes:

A lot of things are really good about trying to do multiple tasks in the one. Okuma has various levels of machines. I think that a lathe with a milling function on the turret, is a multi-function machine because it's taking a typical turning process and now you're getting milling functionality and that's about as simple as it gets. And it can get pretty complicated as you go into the five-axis machines.

Wade Anderson:

The MULTUS.

Jeff Estes:

Absolutely

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Jeff Estes:

They all build upon each other. And really, that's where people are going.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah. I did an exercise and I was going to present at IMTS. Of course, now IMTS is going virtual it's IMTS Spark. If anybody hasn't logged in, check it out. Google IMTS Spark and put your credentials in. You can see pretty much everybody that was going to be at the show, now in a virtual environment. Now, my talk is going to be a webcast instead of a live presentation, but I put together a spreadsheet a long time ago, working through how much does it cost to make a part? And over the years I keep adding to it. And the biggest thing that I've learned, it's a very complicated spreadsheet to- if I showed it on the screen, it's very busy, but once you work with it a couple of times, you realize there's only a few variables that you have to tweak and you can see a massive swing to how much it's going to cost you to make that part.

Wade Anderson:

And invariably, almost every process I've looked at, the labor component of it is what really swings how much your part is going to cost you to produce. And you look at how much you're making it versus how much you're selling it for. And then, "Okay. Now, how do we- if we can't raise our sale price, how do we reduce our cost to make it?"

Wade Anderson:

And a lot of times, that becomes keeping that spindle running, getting your productivity up or having unmanned lights out type operation, which we've been talking about. There's some unique things people can do with the machines they've got, being creative with their processes. And that's where I think circling back to some of the specials and tooling that you guys make, there's applications we'll look at and we'll automatically gravitate towards, "Well, you need a MULTUS. You need a machine with a B-axis head to get to some of these angled holes and things like that."

Wade Anderson:

But in reality, we can do some of that on a standard single or twin turret lathe, using angle tool holders and things like that. Talk about some of the tooling you guys make that would address issues like that.

Jeff Estes:

Absolutely. If you wanted to do a right angle mill on a lathe, then you want to mill something on the OD of the part, we've got tool holders that can do that and can transfer a lot of force, but the one plug I have to give, you better make sure your machine tool can handle that opposite force being pushed against it or you're not going to hold the tolerance that you want.

Wade Anderson:

And have the whole system.

Jeff Estes:

That's exactly right. You start looking at everything. How does it fit together and can that machine tool lock? Can it stay in a position or can it hold that position and exert that much force? Hobbing. 10, 12 years ago, we didn't hob on lathes. You had a special hob. Now, it's very, very common, but the force that's being put back on the machine tool is amazing.

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Jeff Estes:

It's huge. The force that's being put on our hobbing tools to be able to do that and to make a good quality gear tube or spline. Broaching, who would have thought about broaching?

Wade Anderson:

Yeah, I know. That was something I was going to bring up. I think about, we've done broaching operations on machines in the past, where you're basically shaping the shape, but for us to do it on the machine, you got to program a Z move, X move, Z move, X move. So to step your way into a tooth depth, you're doing this box shape over and over and over and putting a lot of wear in a small centralized location on the machine, but you guys actually make a broaching tool now. Oh, that's built into that system.

Jeff Estes:

It is.

Wade Anderson:

We're really just feeding in the X-axis then.

Jeff Estes:

That's right. You feed to a position and you lock there. And then we take it from there with our stroke up to 65 millimeters or two and a half inches, that we can do a stroke. OD or ID. And we can go in and actually, it is shaping. We can shape splines, shape gear teeth or do slots, do key ways, whatever you want into that part. And the beauty of it is, although broaching tools aren't cheap, they're a lot less expensive than replacing a machine drive or replacing a ballscrew or a guide way on a machine tool.

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Jeff Estes:

We're putting wear on a smaller component that actually can be expendable and you buy another one and you replace it. And it extends the life of the machine.

Wade Anderson:

Right, protect your more valuable asset of the company.

Jeff Estes:

That's exactly right. And let's face it, the tool holder in many cases, will take the force of a bump. People hate to call them crashes, but let's just say a bump. A lot less of that force is transferred into the machine, so you don't damage your machine. You may have just ruined the tool holder. You may lose the cutting tool itself, but that's easy to change and it's easy to get back up and into production too. Again, our tool holders are somewhat expendable and we're trying to keep the costs down to where if a bad thing happens and you didn't mess up your machine, very quickly if you have another tool holder or you get an exchange from us or a replacement, we'll ship it out and you should have it the next day. You're back up and running and you're back in your production.

Wade Anderson:

Very nice. Now, a new product that you guys introduced, it was at last IMTS, I think, was the fourth-axis rotary tables.

Jeff Estes:

Right.

Wade Anderson:

It's a whole new segment of Velocity's business. Now, not only being a valuable supplier from a lathe standpoint, but now you're getting into the mill arena.

Jeff Estes:

That's correct.

Wade Anderson:

Tell us a little bit about the fourth-axis tables that you guys build. I know there was a huge design timeframe that went into this and talking to all of our distributors and trying to build something that everybody was requesting and meeting all their needs.

Jeff Estes:

Yeah and we actually went high end. We did not focus on the lower end on the rotary tables and there's pluses and minuses to that, but we definitely went on the high end side. We stayed at 200 millimeters, just to try to, trying to get to where people can use it on an M560, an M660, the new GENOS M660, M460. It really fits on all three of those models well. And we only provide it for Okuma. We've got Okuma direct drive motors in there and driven from the Okuma drives. It is designed to try to maximize the capability of the machine as far as its repeatability and its capability.

Jeff Estes:

It doesn't really care if you're cutting aluminum or Inconel, it really doesn't care. And it was a design that way. It was designed to whatever you want to throw on it, a material, it can take the load. The brake system is a much heavier brake system than what you'll see on our competitors. We have three disks instead of two, just to hold it in position, so instead of relying on a servomotor to hold it, we actually have the brake really holding all the force.

Wade Anderson:

Excellent. You guys really matched Okuma's design philosophy.

Jeff Estes:

Yeah.

Wade Anderson:

We build a premium machine that can tackle a wide range of materials. People ask me all the time, "Do you produce a machine that'll cut aluminum?"

Jeff Estes:

Yeah.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah.

Wade Anderson:

"Do you produce one that'll cut titanium?'.

Wade Anderson:

"Yeah. It's the same machine, there it is."

Wade Anderson:

Now, you get into bigger horizontals. We may have different spindle RPM ranges to tackle different applications, but the frame of the machine is designed so that we can do heavy hogging type work or high speed, high dynamic work because we build the mass behind the machine to be able to handle anything that's thrown at it. And you're really doing the same with that rotary table.

Jeff Estes:

That's right. And for people who are job shops, they may not know what they're going to make next week. They may be making aluminum this week and then next week somebody comes in and says, "Hey, I want one part, very special item made out of titanium."

Jeff Estes:

Well, they're not going to go out and buy a new machine and all the tooling and everything else. They're going to try to use the machine that they've got. As Okuma designs their machines for all those, so is our rotary table. It's designed to take that load and that force. Sometimes products actually hit harder to machine components than it does the easy ones because you also calibrate the back load, the opposite force and you calculate that in. We have to run that fine line. How do you calculate accuracy and position accuracy where you don't have a lot of back force, but then the next part you run, you may be running a material that gives you a lot of opposite force.

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Jeff Estes:

And it's always an engineering task to try to do that. We designed it to fit whatever Okuma's can make, a rotary table can handle it. We can't handle all your power. For those of you out there that are in job shops and you're just going, "Oh, great. It’ll handle 50 horsepower."

Jeff Estes:

No, I didn't say that. It is a fourth-axis, but just like a five-axis machine or that you would buy, as you move more and more axes, you lose more and more force, but we can handle a great load on it.

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Jeff Estes:

Yeah.

Wade Anderson:

Excellent. What's the best way for people to learn more about Velocity and the products you offer?

Jeff Estes:

Well, there's several ways. First of all, you can go to Velocity Products or just the Velocity website. And you can see any product that we have. You can go on LinkedIn, you can type in Velocity or Suhner, S-U-H-N-E-R. And you can get all kinds of information on our mother company that's making the product back in Italy. You can go on their LinkedIn page. Obviously, you can contact us through sales, velocityproducts.com or you can contact any of our sales guys or our distributors. Okuma distributors are our distributors.

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Jeff Estes:

Any Okuma distributor, you can contact them. We are a member of Partners in THINC, so you can always contact Partners in THINC, Wade being the head of Partners in THINC. Just contact them or the technology centers and you can get information or get to us. I promise you, there are some questions that none of us can answer immediately. And that's part of that learning process.

Wade Anderson:

Sure.

Jeff Estes:

But we really do like those questions. So please bring them because that's the engineering part of us.

Wade Anderson:

Bring you the hard stuff.

Jeff Estes:

Well, we like that. The easy stuff, that's one thing, but the challenge is what we get up for every day and we really like. And we'll get a group together. Even in this world, we'll bring people together through Zoom or our Microsoft Teams or whatever and we'll have conferences just to go over things. And the customers love that.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah.

Jeff Estes:

They can talk to us through it.

Wade Anderson:

I was talking to John Tuohy on another podcast and we talked about how the whole virtual environment, the navigation through the COVID world now, has forced us to utilize Teams and Zoom and tools like that. And it really makes the world a much smaller place. I know just speaking between us, we had a meeting with Ivanis and Patrick in Switzerland and that was pulled together in five minutes of, "Hey, we need to have a quick round table discussion."

Wade Anderson:

Fired up a Teams meeting. And next thing you know, you're in a different part of the country than I'm in. I was at home in South Carolina, Ivanis and Patrick were in Switzerland and that quick, we were all online, face-to-face communicating. And it really makes the world a small place.

Jeff Estes:

Yeah. And it's not just talking too. We were doing a Zoom very, very similar to Microsoft Teams with a customer and doing the same thing with people in Italy and Switzerland. This customer was in New York. And of course, I was in my area in South Carolina and I had all the drawings on my PC in South Carolina, but I gave access to my PC to everyone. And we had engineers in Italy and engineers in New York playing with those drawings, modifying those drawings on my little PC in little South Carolina. And it was just amazing.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah.

Jeff Estes:

And when we got off, as I was leading it, the host, the customer made a comment as we were getting off, he still had his microphone on. He says, "That was really cool."

Jeff Estes:

And that's what you want. You want that ability to get customers and the designers and the company together, talking to meet their needs. It's part of our future.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah.

Wade Anderson:

This isn't going away. We've learned some stuff about being able to do conferencing and it's really good. There's no substitution for face to face, but we don't have to do as much face-to-face as we had to in the past. We can do face-to-face using other technologies as well.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah. Excellent. Well, Jeff, I really appreciate your time today. Thank you for joining us on this episode of Shop Matters. If you have questions, ideas for future podcasts, please reach out to us. You can find me on LinkedIn, Wade Anderson on LinkedIn. Or you can reach out to us on okuma.com/shop-matters. Till next time, we'll see you then.