Conquering Fear On and Off the Factory Floor

Mateusz Kożuch likes extreme sports because they teach him about the nature of fear. And that has application on the factory floor.

They call it a “dream jump,” though you’ve got to be a special kind of dreamer to climb hundreds of meters up a tower and leap, free falling 90 percent of the way down before a system of dynamic ropes and pulleys bring you to a halt. Fortaco’s Mateusz Kożuch is that kind of person. And he’s equally enthusiastic about manufacturing.

Kożuch got his first taste of production at Toyota, where he started as a trainee on the factory floor, responsible for the development of databases that kept track of foundry machines and mold breakdowns. At the time, he was a recent electronic engineering graduate with a knowledge of IT, and he was puzzled that he hadn’t been assigned to the IT department. “But I quickly realized it was a great opportunity, because I was developing a tool for people in production. I could make the database work for the people who actually used it.” After his trainee program, he stayed with Toyota as a freelancer hired to develop digital tools. “I loved discovering the manufacturing world through Toyota eyes,” he says. “And, when I joined Fortaco, I was very happy to see that we use a lot of Toyota thinking in our production.”

Kożuch works in Operations Development. He’s based in Wrocław, though the OD team travels all over to Fortaco business sites, working closely with the people they build solutions for. He considers it one of OD’s missions to free people from boring or unnecessary tasks. “When OD began,” he says, “we were mainly focused on the production environment. But now we’ve branched out to focus on quality, finance, and even HR.” Wherever there’s a job to be made more efficient, Kożuch is interested.

For HR, the OD team has developed a succession planning application. It allows local and global HR leaders to assess the criticality of positions, and then create a succession plan. “The app lets us track competences and make sure the ones needed for a position are developed,” Kożuch says. “If HR thinks the position of Application Development Specialist is critical, for example, then we’d need to make sure we’ve developed power apps and power automate skills in a potential successor. The app helps us create a plan and assign training. It’s a great tool to help the company be ready for change.”

In his spare time, Kożuch is attracted to things that at first appear intimidating—like adrenaline sports. “When you have confirmation that what you’re doing is safe, then everything else is just in our heads and we can confront our fears. That’s what keeps me coming back.” He recently climbed 222 meters to the top of a decommissioned chimney in Głogów, where he leapt into thin air. “It was six seconds of free falling.”

He finds parallels on the factory floor. “It’s all in how you look at things. Some look at a goal and see obstacles. But in OD we’d never say that something is impossible.” In fact, everything is possible is our unofficial motto, but Kożuch wants to keep that quiet. “If we advertise it too loudly, it will create more work than we can ever do!”


A Robot’s Grind

Fortaco Kurikka’s grinding robot keeps people happy: it lets welders weld, keeps costs under control, and ensures uniform quality.

Ossi Antila and Tomi Metsä-Ketelä pose with Janne, the grinding robot

There’s a reason it’s called “grinding.” Because it’s awful work. For welders, grinding is dirty, noisy, can cause upper limb injury, eye injuries, not to even mention the hazards associated with the tens of kilos of steel dust it generates. And it’s a lot of work: there are close to 200 seams in each of the roughly 3,000 Fortaco cabins produced in Kurikka each year for top OEMs in mining, forestry, defense, and the material handling industries.

Grinding is dirty, thankless work. Better a robot do it.

But you can’t get around grinding. Grinding removes welding sparkle, oxide, and scratches. Cabin surfaces must be protected against corrosion, with the surface sealed flat for painting. A robot can reduce the takt time of the welding line by 30-40 percent, meaning significant gains in efficiency and capacity.

Tech talk for engineers

It’s not every robot that can give you those results. Fortaco’s grinding robot station is from Flexmill and uses MillControl- and Tool Time Manager software. The robot itself is an ABB Irb 6700-150/3.20 series.

Flexmill and ABB technology.

RFID tags are used to enable the robot to recognize cabin models, essential for highly-complex manufacturing operations like Fortaco’s, where customers require much customization. When operating, the robot can choose from up to 10 tools needed to do the job, and it operates unmanned, holding three cabins on the line. For cabins not welded on the line, there is a side-feeding feature to enable their grinding. At the end of the line is a two-axis manual control manipulator for use in inspection, with the outfeed done by forklift.

Fortaco’s grinding robot at work on the cabin of a Komatsu forwarder.

But beyond the tech, it’s important to note that the robot’s benefits extend to the HR department. “The grinding robot speeds up some processes and frees workers' hands for other tasks. This, in turn, reduces the need for recruitment in this sector and makes work easier for us in the HR department,” says Sonja Koskela, People & HR and Employer Branding Specialist at Fortaco.

So why doesn’t everyone have one?

If a robot can offer such impressive results, even in a fairly customized production environment, why doesn’t every manufacturer have one? Well, because they’re expensive.

Ossi Antila, formerly Team Leader for Product Development, and now Chief Engineer for Product Development, concedes the robot required major investment, but was simply the next step in production development. “For us, with the quality requirements of world-class cabins, this robot was the next logical investment after a takt-based welding line.” 

Robots of this caliber are “quite rare in the business,” says Tomi Metsä-Ketelä, Sales Manager for Kurikka. “But they’re also a requirement to for us to both continue to grow and to maintain the consistency and quality that our customers expect.”

I christen thee, Janne’

“If this robot makes such a significant contribution,” a visiting journalist asks, “does it have a name?”

A roomful of engineers and technical experts are at a loss for an answer, but rally driver Ari Vatanen, a Fortaco ambassador present to examine the robot, takes matters into his own hands. “I christen thee, Janne,” he says. “And I’m happy to be your godfather.”

But Janne pays no attention. He continues to grind.


An Analog Guy with Digital Skills

Jaroslav Kocik can’t stop being lean – whether at work or at home.

Jaroslav Kocik has been lean all his life, organizing, reorganizing, and doing things a little bit more efficiently each time. But it wasn’t until he became an engineer that he understood that lean was a concept with a name. He loved it so much he became a Six Sigma Green Belt.

In 2015, he joined Fortaco in Holíč, Slovakia, as a Project Coordinator, became a Quality Leader, and joined Fortaco’s Operations Development team in 2019. His current role calls for total dedication to production flow and optimization both in Holíč and beyond.

“There are digital guys, and there are analog guys,” says Kocik about Fortaco’s Operations Development team. “I mostly focus on analog, but I possess digital skills, making me kind of a hybrid.” Being a hybrid has advantages. It means he can transition easily between the two worlds, taking tools from one to apply in the other. “I use Power BI to collect and make sense of production data. I design 3D production models and then use a virtual reality plug-in that allows me to climb inside them.” These cutting-edge tools aren’t just for the Operations Development team, either. “We want to use VR for training machine operators, in particular painters,” he says. “Before they work on a real product, we can check their hand movements, teach the right sequences, and ensure we get the right thickness of paint.” 

Jaroslav makes both decorative and functional items. This is a picture for the family’s wall made using a milling machine.*

Ideas like these have already paid off significantly in the Holíč factory. Before 2019, cabin production was done in cells. A cabin was started and finished in a single cell. The most complicated cabin took about 20 hours to make, an average one 10. “Such a long, stationary process allowed waste to be hidden,” he says. “Our team decided to divide the process into a takt time baseline system using small units, where we could more easily identify any problems.” Currently, cabins move through a sequence of six cells. “When we started, the first cell’s takt time was 45 minutes. Today, it is 38 minutes.” Kocik recognizes that slashing production time at a single work station by around 20 percent using the same number of operators is a remarkable achievement, and it’s bolstered his confidence to look for more opportunities.

A pencil holder Jaroslav made for his daughter using his CNC milling machine. It's 2mm plywood glued and painted.

After four years of changes, factory turnover increased dramatically. “We have two welding robots now, we added a second assembly line, we’re adding more takt-time-based lines, and building a new production hall,” says Kocik. “Everyone now can see that efficient production means that we can grow and expand. Holíč is a very exciting place to work.”

When you’re a true lean practitioner, you never leave your job at the office. At home, Kocik is a DIY enthusiast who owns a small milling machine, laser cutting machine, and a 3D printer. But his tendency to make everything efficient doesn’t seem to annoy his wife. To the contrary, his family encourages his vice.

Jaroslav wasn't satisfied with the sharpness of his kitchen knives (he was sharpening by hand), so he made this knife sharpener using a 3D printer. The design (available on the web) uses magnets to keep the knife at the proper angle.*

He has made a variety of decorative objects and toys, but also produces objects that help organize the house and make everyday life better—see the photos in this article! “I get a lot of ideas from my family,” he says. But he also seems like a guy who gets a lot of ideas no matter where you find him.


On the Road with Ari Vatanen

Three days on the road (and factory floors) with Fortaco’s co-driver, Ari Vatanen.

Ari wants to drive. Can you really say no when a World Rally Champion and four-time Paris-Dakar winner wants to sit behind the wheel of the rental car? After all, he’s not only a better driver, but we might learn something, as well. Besides, it’s an Opel Insignia. How fast can it go?

We’re in Finland, on an 800-kilometer road trip from the Tampere Subcontracting Trade Fair to spend a day in the Fortaco factory in Kurikka, before moving on to Kalajoki, and then back home. Although he’s behind the wheel, Ari is a co-driver for Fortaco, an expert on safety and teamwork, something he picked up not only as a champion rally driver, but with ten years spent in the European Parliament.

Safety at 90 percent

Just north of Tampere, Ari is already making safety observations. What started as an four-lane motorway has shrunk into a two-lane road with lamp posts that are close to the highway. “I regret that my country is doing safety at only 90 percent,” he says. “If a motorcyclist spills here he can easily lose his life against those posts. It doesn’t cost that much extra to add a guard rail.”

In 1985, Ari’s Peugeot hit a mudhole going flat out in the Rally of Argentina, his seat broke, and the car rolled multiple times, leaving him with fractured lumbar vertebrae, a broken tibia, and life-threatening internal bleeding. Both he and his co-driver were medevacked, and he spent 18 months in recovery. As the rally drivers say, “To finish first, you first have to finish,” and Ari takes safety seriously. “You often don’t need more rules,” he says. “But you need to take seriously the ones you have.”

Kahvitauko

It’s only a two-hour drive, but Ari wants his pulla, the sweet roll that is an integral part of the Finnish kahvitauko, or coffee break. “A road trip just isn’t complete without one,” he says. Ari likes his coffee. He drinks about seven cups per day, and he is a connoisseur of Finnish roadside coffee—“let’s avoid ABC truck stops,” he says. To this visiting journalist, all Finnish roadside coffee tastes the same—watered down and nearly diabolical. But Ari can taste the difference.

He’s recognized in the coffee shop just as he was at the Tampere trade fair. The journalist asks him if it’s not tiring to be mobbed like a rock star, fans wanting to relive an old memory or be photographed with him. “It’s quite the opposite,” he says. “When I was driving, I was just chasing my own dreams. But somehow it inspired others, too. All these people are so sincere that talking with them actually gives me energy.” 

Ari may know automobiles, but he perhaps understands people even better, which is one reason he’s visiting Fortaco factories. The company is growing, but its management knows a factory is nothing without a motivated team.

Kurikka

When we arrive at the Kurikka plant, a man in a welding cap is waiting at the gate. His name is Ari Siirtola. “My son saw on the internet that you’d be here today,” he says. He presents Ari with a white pen. “I rode my son’s moped to work today for you to sign. He has no idea I’m doing this. He’ll be surprised enough that he won’t be able to concentrate in school.” Ari loves the idea. He pens a message to 14-year-old Elmeri on the Suzuki’s gas tank.

Welder Ari Siirtola, driver Ari Vatanen, and Elmeri’s moped.

Inside the factory he meets Hanna Voutilainen who is in her fourth career. She worked as a cleaner, a caterer, switched to nursing, and now she’s a welder. Under the guidance of Fortaco’s welders, Ari welds his name on a cabin part. He meets Teemu Lamminmäki, a forklift driver who has owned 57 Fords. Why so many? Did he wreck them? “I only crashed two,” he laughs. He just loves Fords, something Ari can understand, since his first professional drive was a Ford Escort RS1800. Ari also meets Jarmo Kasari, who has competed in over 30 rallies as a co-driver.

With Hanna Voutilainen and the cabin part he signed. (Don’t worry. It goes on the wall, not in a customer’s cabin.)

Everyone seems to have a personal connection to Ari, and it’s time to move on to the next factory. But as someone who’s risked his life inside of vehicles, Ari has some appreciation for well-built steel structures. He’s got plenty of questions himself, and we’re not going anywhere quickly.

Kalajoki

The next morning, after stopping at a Shell station for a coffee and pulla, we arrive at the Kalajoki factory. General Manager Jyri Paavola greets us at the door. Inside, his management team gives us a safety briefing, politely explaining that Kalajoki is now 1,500 days without an accident, and they don’t want us to ruin it.

Kalajoki is known for its welders who assemble 35-ton trays that carry Wärtsilä engines. On the shop floor he meets a welder, Kai Saukko, and in conversation they discover they have a mutual friend in nearby Merijärvi. Right then and there Ari tries to call their friend, Johannes, but he doesn’t pick up. “The world is not small, but Tuupovaara is very big,” says Ari, naming his hometown. We are almost 500 kilometers from Tuupovaara.

Kai and Ari, trying to reach mutual friend Johannes on the phone.

Another welder, Aaro Heikkilä, drives a BMW and wins Ari’s approval—Ari is a BMW ambassador. Ari strikes up a conversation with Gabor Toth, originally from Hungary, who plans to attend the Kokkola rally that evening to watch a friend race. “He drives a Lada,” says Gabor, “but it’s got a Toyota engine.”

Recruiting

Before leaving, Ari films a welder recruitment video for Fortaco. “I’m Ari from Tuupovaara,” he says, removing a welding helmet, “and I just joined Fortaco as an apprentice welder.” Ari likes to joke around. “If it’s too serious,” he says, “it won’t connect with people.” His sense of humor is self-effacing. He has described himself as a “clown” or a “chauffeur.” But this clown chauffeur is a consummate professional. Whatever he’s doing, he is fully engaged.

He’s behind the wheel again, this time moving toward Tampere. He talks about all those he met who made an impression. “I’d like to see Elmeri’s face when he sees that moped.”

There are dozens of speed cameras on the road. He’s a safe, courteous driver who follows the law, though he thinks the government should more clearly post speed limits if they’re going to put speed cameras so close together. He tells a story about a ticket his friend recently received, the Finnish policeman dressed as a mushroomer, holding a plastic bucket in one hand and a speed gun in the other.

But at some point he can’t resist showing us what the Opel Insignia can do. “Say you’re on a two-lane road and a driver in the opposite lane overtakes and occupies your lane. Moving to the right is always better than a head-on collision, and you can almost always find a place.” He wants to show us what the car’s electronic stability control can do, how it allows you to turn the wheel while braking heavily, pulling into a bus stop in just a few meters when you’re going 100 kilometers per hour. “You don’t need any special rally skills,” he says, standing on the brake and turning right into a bus stop without burning any rubber. “You just have to be mentally prepared for it and know the car can do it. Modern cars are amazing.”

Ari is ready for more. But our stomachs aren’t quite sure. So he drives onward. It’s just a few kilometers until our next pulla.


Problem Solver

Fortaco’s Dominik Stępień really enjoys finding practical solutions to problems. He wouldn’t mind solving yours.

Like many other digital natives, Dominik Stępień's first unofficial job was as chief of his family’s IT department. "I was the type of kid who was always curious about how things worked. I took apart the family's phones and laptops, put them back together, and hoped that they worked."

Hands on

The devices he took apart worked often enough that he was inspired to get a Bachelor of (Mechanical) Engineering degree from Denmark's VIA University College. “I was curious about living in another country and the education in my native Poland is highly focused on theory,” says Stępień, “and I wanted hands-on problem solving.”

He certainly got it. At VIA, he joined the team that designed a formula student car, with his responsibility the chassis and brake system. Then he joined an engine design company where he helped engineers optimize how they work with CAD systems. “This started me on my path developing IT tools to ease everyday routines,” he says. “I saw how digital could impact your daily work life.” While he was getting a Master degree at Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, he went to work for an automotive component manufacturer where he designed digital tools and, eventually, came across an intriguing job ad from Fortaco.

Nearly 40 apps designed

At Fortaco, he's part of the Operational Development team. "The OD team mainly focuses on process optimization in the daily work of people," he says. "We’re split between analog work (lean techniques) and digital work (applications we design for people)." His formal title is Application Development Specialist, and he's the guy who writes the software that helps to solve problems on the factory floor.

He's one of the people behind the app used in the Wroclaw factory to track the location of parts. "Before, someone would get a phone call, an email, or an SMS, saying a part needed to be transported. But if that person had other pressing priorities, it might not get done. So we created an app where anyone can order the transportation of a part. You see the exact status and where the part is, and so you know the job has been done. It reduces the need for direct communication between separate parties, and all the information is in one central place." He says it’s not radically different from tracking your UPS package, though in the Fortaco version there are fewer intermediate stops.

Stępień’s team has developed nearly 40 apps that are now in use throughout Fortaco factories, and he says there are plenty of new prototypes brewing in their kitchen. “When an app is proven in one business site, it can easily be rolled out to others and adjusted in process as needed. We have an app for cabin production that can be modified to work in the production of welded parts.”

“What's cool about these apps is that they're scalable and adjustable. That means that when you start the process, you can digitalize only a small part of it. As you grow, you can then create another app for another part of the process. Then you can make those two apps talk to each other so they work as a system. This is our core focus in a couple of factories at the moment, and it holds enormous potential.”

One app, three to five ideas

Not everyone on the factory floor is a digital native and sometimes aren’t as quick to embrace the power of new tech to solve old problems.

“Sometimes when people see the first app, they’re like, ‘Ah, there is no way anyone will use this.’ Maybe they’re old school welders not used to using tablet computers in production. But they try it, realize it’s not difficult, find it helpful, and then they come to us with other problems to solve. Out of every app you can get three or five new ideas at a business site.”

Stępień sounds a bit like a therapist when he admits he wishes more people would come to him with their problems. “We may actually already have a solution that we’ve developed that solves the problem.” There’s a saying that if you want something done, then ask a busy person. The OD team is small, but they’re always ready to help. “If we don’t have time then we’ll make some!” says Stępień.

UFOs?

Among the OE team members, Stępień is known to love a good conspiracy theory. It’s not that he blindly takes them as a truth; he more likes the idea of them. “UFOs, aliens, government conspiracies, who controls the world: I enjoy learning about those because too often you can get locked into one way of thinking. Conspiracy theories can broaden your horizon and make you consider things from another perspective.”

So entertaining a conspiracy theory may not be a terrible exercise to prepare oneself for solving problems on a factory floor. Still, a visiting journalist would like to know what’s in Area 51. Stępień pauses a bit, perhaps considering his many options for solving that mystery. “Have you considered,” he says, “the possibility that Area 51 is a holiday destination for aliens?”


Lean Machine

How automobiles and a highly-organized personality turned Matti Kärkölä into an advocate for lean manufacturing.

Fortaco's Operational Development team is all about cultivating a zero-defects manufacturing culture where improvement is the norm. And they know that the most important variable in the manufacturing equation is people. So if you want to improve, you'd better have the right team.

The newest member of the OD team is Matti Kärkölä. Joining Andrzej Wrona, Mateusz Kożuch, Jaroslav Kocik, Dominik Stępień, and Kamil Zdeb, Matti is the sixth team member, but the first from Finland.

Suomen kieli

With several thousand employees operating across a dozen business sites, "English is of course Fortaco's main language of communication," says Kärkölä, "but it's always easier for people to be involved in making change if they can do it in their native language.” As a native Finnish speaker, part of Kärkölä’s role is to serve as OD’s chief evangelist in Finland.

He brings much more to the team than language, of course, and OD team leader Andrzej Wrona has referred to him as a natural leader. “That’s very nice to hear,” says Kärkölä, “though it’s very difficult to praise oneself.” Beginning in his student days, he’s often found himself in leadership roles. “When necessary, and when I can bring added value, I’m willing to help with things that haven’t been formally assigned to me.”

From automotive to off-highway

Once upon a time Kärkölä worked as an auto mechanic. An interest in cars led him to the automotive engineering program at Seinäjoki University of Applied Sciences. "I was interested in car tech, but the work opportunities in that area seemed to be as a car inspector, a supervisor in a car repair shop, or selling spare parts. These didn't appeal to me, but I learned that I loved manufacturing."

Kärkölä did an internship with Fortaco in 2018. He later authored a Bachelor’s thesis for Škoda Auto on production and logistics, after spending several months at a Škoda factory in the Czech Republic. “I worked with a team whose job was to track parts for production, figuring out where they are when they'll arrive. Škoda has amazing processes to solve these problems so that production is never stopped."

Since joining Fortaco full time, he's spent time at a Toyota factory in Derby, England, and has received internal training to work with steel fabrication and lean production management. Since Fortaco benchmarks itself to the automotive industry, this experience is critical. "It’s all in the name of working more like the automotive industry and less like a smithy," says Kärkölä.


Szilvia Sándor’s Homecoming

When Fortaco’s Szilvia Sándor joined the Jászberény team it was a bit like coming home.

“Life is sometimes strange,” says Szilvia Sándor, Finance Manager for Fortaco Group’s Jászberény business site. Strange, because joining the company in 2020 was something of a homecoming for her: Szilvia's father worked in the same plant for almost 40 years.

“The Jászberény plant has been around since 1951,” she says, “and before the multinational era my father was a turner and machine operator in the plant. I vividly recall spending summers at the factory’s holiday house at Lake Balaton. I remember lots of happy people together, warm water, and the weather was always perfect. It isn’t true, of course, but that’s how memory works. I also spent my last semester from university in the factory and wrote my thesis about Aprítógépgyár, the name of the Jászberény business site before Fortaco.”

2020: Not quite utopia

After supervising the move of an Electrolux factory from Hungary to China – and the elimination of her own job – Szilvia landed at Fortaco, as head of the finance department, in September of 2020. The factory was familiar, but the pandemic had made it less of the utopia she remembered as a student.

2020 had been a rough year. “Orders had dropped and production was at a low level,” she says. “We were working four days per week, instead of five, during that summer. We were experiencing losses and operating in a mode to build for the future.

But 2021 was different. “2021 was a recovery period for us. Production is still increasing, we won lots of new business with both existing- and new customers. The good news was that the value of orders was already higher than we could meet.”

Growing fast

In the second half of 2021, and in 2022, everything was looking up. “We’re staffing up, increasing machine capacity, which is challenging for us,” Szilvia says. “It was very exciting, but it was also a time to be cautious: growing fast needs extra attention.”

Szilvia says growth can be complicated. “Growth is easy if you just keep your prices, but you have to make sure growth is profitable. We’re seeing increased raw material prices, high energy prices and customers queueing for products. To be profitable we have to monitor ourselves carefully, choosing customers and products prudently.” Fortunately, she says, Fortaco customers understand that the post-Corona manufacturing environment is different and complex.

Getting the ‘right price’

Since Szilvia joined Fortaco she’s been able to build her team, as well, adding a chief accountant, finance assistant, and controller. Her team’s work is critical in this quick-changing environment, and they check financial results and do cost forecasts on a monthly basis. “There’s a plan,” she says, “and then there’s reality. The nature of business is that unexpected things happen – a machine will break down, or Corona will cause fewer workers on the CNC machine.” 

In 2022, her team implemented Fortaco’s Right Price Project. The project, already used in Fortaco factories, is an SAP development program which enables very clear margins both per project and per customer. “This program allows much more information to be collected at the product- and customer levels. It will ensure that we’re always offering the right price to our customers.”

The lake community

The house at Lake Balaton is still owned by Fortaco and, aside from some basic improvements, it looks very much the same as it did during Szilvia's youth. While she hasn’t visited the house, she still is very much looking forward to rebuilding what the house symbolizes to her: the Fortaco community.

“Corona and the year 2020 have done a lot to separate us physically,” she says. “People split up in order to not meet each other. We worked different days at the office so we wouldn’t interact. There was no Christmas dinner.” But the normal life was returning. “Corona was not easy from the point of view of team spirit. And I knew, we’re coming back.”


When the Customer Sleeps Well

What ladies lingerie taught Stanisław Ozga about off-highway equipment.

The early 1990s were a difficult period in Poland, which had just begun its transition to capitalism. In 1990, Stanisław Ozga graduated university with a degree as a mining engineer. "After spending a full month one-thousand meters underground on a student internship, I wasn't keen to continue in mining," he laughs.

Realizing that a career in sales and marketing would keep him working above ground, he did some additional coursework, sent out CVs, and found a job selling vegetable oils. Then he sold insurance, worked a gastarbeiter in Norway on a salmon farm, and even ran his own trade company for several years.

In 1994, he stumbled upon Zakłady Dziewiarskie Mewa SA, a textile factory that manufactured ladies lingerie. The company was formed in the 1960s but had suffered after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Despite being the largest underwear factory in Poland with 800 workers, it had no sales. Ozga was invited to head the sales, marketing, and export operations.

‘Process is critical’

Ozga traveled to southern Europe, since he knew this region was home to the world's top lingerie brands. He persuaded the Italians to allow Mewa to produce for them. He also focused on the home market, employing designers to create collections for the Polish market. 

After a meeting in France, the Playtex company asked him to create a production line for their bras. But the factory employees — and even his boss — were very skeptical. “The Playtex bra design was much more complex,” he says. “To the workers it was like being asked manufacture a Mercedes when you’ve only ever made Dacias.” The technological process was also much more sophisticated, with operations calculated in seconds. But Ozga understood bra manufacturing as very similar to making mining frames. "The principles are the same. The process is critical. If you have the right tools, and if you organize yourselves in the right way, then it can be done well." Ozga did it well.

Ozga stayed with Mewa for the next ten years, growing its export to Western Europe, Russia, and even to Saudia Arabia. Today it is a successful publicly traded company.

The recipe for safety

In 2004, Ozga joined Fortaco in Janów Lubelski. In 2008, he says, the Janów Lubelski factory found itself in a similar situation to the company he had just left. “All our eggs were in one basket, because were almost entirely serving only one market, the construction industry.” When the global financial crisis brought the construction business to its knees, the factory lost half its orders overnight. Military orders, a smaller part of its business, also shrunk dramatically.

“My job,” says Ozga, “was to essentially fix the same problem: to diversify our portfolio to reduce risk. This is the recipe for safety.” As a rule of thumb, Ozga says no single customer should constitute more than 30 percent of the Janów Lubelski factory output. Currently, material handling is the largest sector the factory serves, but it has multiple customers within the sector. Mining is 25 percent of the portfolio, with the balance made up of the construction, agriculture, energy, and military sectors.

“What we’re working on now is to balance the share within each industry. We don’t need to serve more industry segments, but rather grow along with the customers we have. They are the world leaders in their businesses, and our objective is to help them grow.”

Turnkey production

Poland today is not the Poland of the 1990s. Its GDP ranks tenth among the 48 sovereign states of Europe, and it’s no longer a low-cost country for manufacturing. “It used to be that manufacturing in Poland was four times cheaper than in Finland,” says Ozga. “It’s still cheaper, but nothing like it used to be, and the day will come when it’s not cheaper at all.” 

To prepare for that day, Janów Lubelski is increasing efficiency and automation so that it can be competitive. “We're focusing on more complex products in the mining industry, for example, where complicated welding is required,” says Ozga, “and we look for complex machining tasks where we can put our CNC centers to work. In December 2021, we added a paint shop. By having the entire chain of operations, we open the door to assembly. We are now ready for turnkey manufacturing for our customers who have sold all their capacity and need assistance."

How to sleep well

What has such a wide range of business experience, including a decade in the ladies lingerie business, left with Ozga? If he’s learned one lesson he says that it's to remember the customers pay our salaries.

"You've got to defend their interests and protect your own company's interests at the same time. You have to really take care of them, but I don't think 'making them happy' is the right way to put it. I have a German customer who says he can sleep well when he knows Fortaco is his supplier. I think that's how to express it: the customer should sleep well. And that's really why we're growing."


Fortaco’s DIY 4.0

Fortaco’s approach to Industry 4.0 allows it to do things on its own terms, controlling speed, costs, and autonomy over its data.

Industry 4.0 is a fashionable term, and great to throw around at cocktail parties. But the idea of Industry 4.0 can manifest itself differently in different companies. For Fortaco, it means “everything connected,” in the words of Andrzej Wrona, Operational Excellence Director.

"The first industrial revolution was steam,” says Wrona, “the second electrification and mass production, and the third automation, such as robots. Now, the fourth revolution allows everything to be connected, meaning those robots may now talk to each other."

Wrona says autonomous cars are a good example of Industry 4.0 technology in action. "Take two cars without drivers. The one in front brakes for a pedestrian, the other car is immediately informed and slows down, making a collision nearly impossible." So what if you could do the same thing in a factory? What would it look like? It would look like Fortaco.

Do it yourself?

Given that Fortaco benchmarks itself to the auto industry, one might imagine factories teeming with data scientists and consultants collecting data and building data architecture. One might imagine hundreds of millions invested into startups – as Porsche has done – to develop technology.

But Fortaco's strategy has been to use a DIY (do it yourself) approach. "If you hire outside it's expensive," says Wrona. "So when we go outside we're looking more for teachers, rather than companies who can sell us something." It's all in the name of maintaining flexibility. And it means that the famous tools of digitalization are adapted and applied as needed.

Here are six examples of how Fortaco is applying Industry 4.0 to the workplace:

  1. ‘Uber’ for internal logistics

In Fortaco's steel fabrication plant in Wrocław, data is used to manage the transportation of goods between work stations. "Wrocław's layout is complicated," says Wrona. "Production spaces are separated from one another, requiring us to move items in production from one hall to another. We used to use emails, calling, whistling, or shouting, but we've now developed an app that works a bit like Uber.”

Much like ordering an Uber car, a worker inputs the need to move a product from one station to another for further processing. The forklift driver sees this in the form of a virtual ticket representing the job, with his name assigned. Having this information, the driver moves the goods. When completed, the operator marks the job as done, and everyone can see the product has been moved. This is a digital mirroring (a digital shadow) of production. “The app shows where everything is, and we also eliminate the need for planners to go to the shop floor trying to find out the production status of each product,” says Wrona.

2. Priority parts in Kurikka

Late parts are a headache for most manufacturing companies. It's often necessary to order missing parts using express couriers. But parts arriving priority may still end up in standard channels, queuing with serial deliveries, meaning urgent parts can be internally delayed due to missing information. "We had poor information flow," says Wrona. "It meant a part might sit on a shelf for two or three days without production knowing it had arrived."

The team created an app which allows the prioritization of urgent materials, ensuring they move to the production line. The purchaser marks urgent goods within the app, and the information appears on a large screen in the receiving area. The app has enabled everyone to be informed about urgent parts and they are fast tracked.

3. Modern warehouse management

The Kurikka business site has implemented a warehouse management system for precise stock management. Every single part has a digital shadow in real time, which shows precisely what material is available, avoiding surprises and line stoppages caused by missing components.

"Everything that comes into the factory is scanned," says Wrona. "If I put five parts on a shelf, the system knows it. When parts go to production the system generates a list, and the pickers are directed to the correct storage destinations.”

The system monitors material movements and ensures high-quality logistics services to production. Machine learning also comes into play, since the algorithm uses historical data to designate optimal box placement. "It's reduced picking time significantly," says Wrona, "and it talks to our ERP system, informing our SAP about what needs to be ordered."

4. Tracking equipment utilization

Data can also shed light on investment decisions. Welding robots, for example, are expensive investments, and it’s critical to understand how those Fortaco has already invested in are used.

A pilot solution has been implemented in Fortaco’s Holíč plant, where IoT sensors track and record welding robot performance. A camera monitors knob position and informs an algorithm whether the robot’s status is automatic, manual, or off. A separate sensor monitors power consumption, collecting data about welding arc time. These two pieces of information provide an understanding of whether investment is producing a return, and what obstacles may stand in the way of efficiency.

Since data never lie, Wrona says it's sometimes been a revelation on the floor. "When a display shows poor utilization of equipment some have taken it as a challenge. 'Is it really true?' an operator said. 'So much underutilization? I don't accept it! I'll change it for the better.' And he really did change it!"

5. Visualizing data in Holíč

Data changes behavior, and displaying the efficiency of a robot has meant its uptime has increased. "It becomes a game," says Wrona. "People do what is necessary to make the bar rise."

Another good example is the visualization of actual operating time versus the target. "We managed to access data from our time registration system," says Wrona, "and we added some easy-to-understand visualization capability to the system’s built-in functionality." Data in the form of graphs is made available to assemblers so they can monitor their performance in real time. "Production planners, sales people, and process engineers make very good use of visualized data. It removes opinion from the equation and helps us know that we're making good decisions."

6. How data affects culture

Data is also great for what Wrona calls "small kaizen things." Getting workers to apply 5S techniques has never been easy. "People have other priorities and it just doesn't happen. But we know that many small improvements made frequently are effective, and we know production people know best how to arrange their working environment. As leaders, we've got to make sure they have the time and tools to do it, and of course monitor progress.”

So Fortaco developed a smartphone app where the production cell leaders make a 'before' photo and add a short description of the change to be made. After the improvement, a second photo is made that documents the change. The app also provides statistics about progress made by individuals to help them achieve annual targets.

The result has been that everyone can see who made 20 improvements and who made three. "The app has helped us to form habits and make real improvements,” says Wrona. “If you have 25 improvements per year with 10 line managers, that's 250 improvements in the Kurikka factory." And not only Kurikka. The app has proved so useful that it's being rolled out across other Fortaco factories. 

Where data will take us

Currently, Fortaco is using data to make its production more predictable, which translates directly to better quality and reliability. Its dedicated digitalization team of five, part of the operational excellence group, is committed to make a digital shadow of manufacturing for better, fact-based management, and eventually use intelligent analytics tools to further improve performance.

In the future, Wrona envisions full traceability with a quality check embedded in a system based on real-time data. Fortaco products will carry unique QR codes, the code redirecting the user to a web-based system where relevant information is present. “We’ll have raw material and components certificates, and operator traceability,” says Wrona, “and information about quality inspection, and test results.”

There'll be assistance for production, as well. Operators will be guided with instructions for operational sequence and production stage information. Quality testing instructions will be there, too, the results of which may be inserted directly into the same system as a form of data (no pen and paper required).

Given the pace of technology's development, long-term benefits are harder to predict. In the not-too-distant future, Wrona is excited about data that today appears disconnected, data the human brain can't process. “There are already tools available that can analyze data we collect in multiple configurations and return results a human being could never see,” he says. “It’s all about the amount of data and processing capacity. But the technology is already there.”

In all cases, the embrace of digital will mean that Fortaco will be a dominant player in the off-highway industry. "If you don't go digital you'll be out of the game," he says. "Nokia didn't believe in smart phones. Kodak didn't believe in digital photography. Fortaco is a premium supplier and we've got to make sure we offer a lot more than steel and a hammer."


How Long Until a Totally-electric Off-highway World?

While the industry’s attention often seems focused on fossil-free steel as a solution to climate change, a growing number of innovative companies – both established and startups – are solving the other, bigger problem: the generation of CO2 over heavy equipment’s lifetime.

No one disagrees that fossil-free steel is a good idea. It’s even a great idea. Governments and industry alike are rallying around the cause, and there are two separate initiatives alone in Europe to produce steel without CO2 emissions.

Fortaco, as well, is part of these initiatives. Attacking the problem in its infancy is an important project, but what’s often forgotten in our excitement about green steel is that the problem has a dimension of much bigger magnitude, and that big problems require big solutions that address the problem from a variety of angles.

In 2021, Carbon Brief, the UK-based website covering climate science, mapped 553 steel plants and found them responsible for nine percent of global CO2 emissions. While creating green steel is of critical importance, in the grand scheme of things the vehicles that use that steel over their lifetimes will generate far more CO2 than the production of the steel itself.

The transport sector alone generates 22.3 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, not to mention the off-highway sector, the massive machines that build the infrastructure that enable the transport sector to exist. “As a society, we’re actively attacking the problem in the cradle when it comes to CO2 emissions,” says Dr. Rafał Sornek, SVP Technology and Zero Emission Solutions at Fortaco, “when a much larger problem comes from a lifetime of carbon generated by the equipment that steel goes into. What many don’t know is that that problem is also actively being addressed, and the industry is a lot further along with a solution than many are aware.”

Electric experiments

How close are we to totally eliminating CO2 emissions in off-highway? No one has a definitive answer, but there are lots of companies asking the right questions.

Artisan Vehicle Systems is a California startup which caught the eye of the industry by demonstrating electric possibilities in underground mining early on with this 2016 video. AVS, which was acquired by Sandvik in 2019, enables zero underground emissions, produces less noise and heat, and does not require the addition of large infrastructure or power systems for a mine. Theoretically, provided it can be applied at the scale required, it enables massive savings on ventilation costs, the biggest source of power costs for underground mines.

Through its Electric Site Research Project, Volvo Construction Equipment and Skanska have imagined how a fossil-free worksite might look and built the world's first emission-free quarry. Their objective to electrify every transport stage in a quarry: excavation, primary-, and secondary crushing. Tests, they claim, show a 98-percent reduction in carbon emissions, 70 percent reduction in energy costs, and 40 percent lower operator costs — which gives them the confidence to predict a total 25 percent reduction in total cost of operations.

If AVS imagined an electric mine, and Volvo built a complete utopian vision, where are we now and how far is the industry at large from adopting it? One glimpse at the current reality may be seen at the cargo handling solutions company, Kalmar.

Kalmar leads the way

"Electric machines are not new," explains Per-Erik Johansson, Technology Manager Electrification at Kalmar. "We've had forklifts with up to nine tons of lifting capacity since the 1980s. From 2010 to 2015, we also developed forklifts with a lifting capacity of up to 18 tons. Lead acid technology was used, and we increased the system voltage to 120 volts to manage the higher power need. We didn't go to high voltage because the components and systems weren't available. In those days, there was still little focus on zero emissions and the CO2 footprint, but we knew that would come. By the end of 2010s, technologies had developed that permitted the needed power and fast charging of big machines, and so we began researching them. It's amazing how fast things can change."

Kalmar is a part of Cargotec and supplies cargo handling solutions and services to ports, terminals, distribution centers, industrial and heavy industry. With around two billion euros in sales worldwide, the company offers one of the most accurate reflection of the market reality for electric machines. Johansson says almost half of the small- or medium-sized machines Kalmar sells are electric, the rest diesel. "Our bigger machine market share is in starting phase. Orders are in, and pilot customers are eager to get started. We see huge potential — and the slow takeover from diesel."

Johansson says big questions for customers are total productivity and total cost of ownership (TCO). When it makes financial sense, it's then just a matter of growing your mindset. "In the beginning, I myself was skeptical of an electric reach stacker weighing 150 tons. But when you start thinking about it and drill down into what needs to be in place, you realize that it's possible for container handling, too." The barriers are simply disappearing. "Five years ago, we had maybe 10 to 15 percent of customers who believed in electric. Today, 80 or 90 percent say they'll go electric."

Changing mindsets

Those mindsets are changing across the entire supply chain, too.

Johansson cites batteries as an example of how fast things change. "Three or four years ago we were engaged in picking a battery supplier that would be the best for our applications. Now, three years later, there's a new battery technology that almost doubles the energy content and performance, all at half the price. It used to be hard to find a supplier. Now they're standing in line."

Customers are another force driving the change, he says. Diesel customers, who once dominated the business, are thinking differently now. "Diesel customers used to be only capex oriented. They looked at the purchase price of the machine. They didn’t see opex part of the picture because diesel was a cheap fuel. But now, when we see diesel and gas prices climbing, it highlights the biggest difference in TCO: the price of diesel versus electricity.”

Regulatory and taxation are a third force in the mix. The European Commission’s proposal to cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55 percent by 2030 is an influencer. And taxation at least equally so. “To be able to reach this target we need to replace the dirty diesel vehicles now, or actually yesterday,” Johansson says, “since the lifetime of a machine is roughly 20 years.”

Johansson says the industry foresees future taxation on CO2, which means diesel. “Also,” he adds, “electricity is at least twice as efficient as diesel, if you look at the entire chain from energy content in diesel to movement of machine compared to the energy you need to put in electric.”

Buy since sometimes electricity is simply not available, Johansson points out that a fossil-free diesel substitute is an option. Kalmar's HVO100 (Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil), for example, can reduce CO2 emissions in off-highway equipment by up to 90 percent.

Diesel won’t die

For the foreseeable future, diesel will continue to make sense for many applications, especially those in the off-highway segments where the job sites are far, far off-highway. But diesel does not have to be your grandfather's diesel, either, as proved by a startup in Austria called Xelectrix Power.

Recognizing that many applications run diesel generators at inefficient load curves or have high start-up peaks, Xelectrix uses peak shaving to allow a generator to operate in optimal range, reducing fuel consumption by 40 percent and maintenance costs by half. Xelectrix adds a parallel platform technology, attaching a power box to supplement the generator. They offer four ranges of boxes, the largest in a 20-foot container with maximum 150 kW/320-480 kWh.

“When we hybridize a diesel generator, we plug ourselves into it, telling it to work harder,” says Shaun Montgomery, Xelectrix's Chief Sales Officer. “A generator running at 90 percent capacity is more efficient than one running at 40 percent. You need less fuel to produce a kilowatt-hour when a generator has a load factor of between 85 to 95 percent. So you take a load, store the excess power in the batteries, and switch off the generator when the batteries are full. Run it efficiently or not at all.”

Xelectrix has created battery storage with power electronics, with a bi-directional hybrid frequency inverter at the heart, capable of pushing and pulling power, converting AC to DC and back again. "It has a grid-forming ability," says Montgomery. "When the grid fails, we create one, and photovoltaic, say, continues to work. PV looks after the load, and when more is produced than needed, it goes to the batteries."

Xelectrix has created a massive, fuel-efficient, power pack that can power major job sites in both on- and off-grid situations.

Montgomery likens current times to undergoing another industrial revolution. "We've used diesel generators for well over one hundred years, and the energy crisis is forcing people to think about volts, kilowatts, and kilowatt hours. The mentality switch is happening extremely fast. On the construction side, if you're not knowledgeable about how the regulations for building in cities are changing, if you don't understand CO2 offset taxes, well you better get up to speed."

Lighter materials

As technologies like Xelectrix’s enable industry to move closer to a zero-emissions mode, never has the weight of those vehicles been more important.

“Every kilogram of steel you save creates leverage in terms of reduction in the size of the battery,” says Fortaco’s Rafał Sornek. “Batteries are a significant part of capex, even when you consider falling prices.”

Sornek says many of Fortaco customers are asking for help in redesigning streel structures and cabins in the new electric versions of their machinery. “Once you begin the work of redesign, weight reduction is a natural part of it.” But he cautions that Tier 0.5 and Tier 1 suppliers should not wait on OEMs to supply the answers.

“The transition to zero emission solutions requires coordinated effort by all the players in the off-highway industry. But it requires also change in mindset of Tier 0.5 and Tier 1 suppliers who need to be involved in developing technologies and solutions much more intensively than in more stable times.”

Changing mindsets

To assist in the battle to win hearts and minds for electric solutions, Fortaco has formed a unit called Technology and Zero Emission Solutions, which Sornek now heads. “It’s a unit dedicated to supporting our customers on their journey to zero-emissions solutions,” he says.

On the technology side, the unit is charged with taking care of organic growth, including research on fossil-free steel applications and novel HVAC systems suited for electric vehicles. But it will also actively scan the market for partnerships and M&A opportunities in areas that can support Fortaco customers with zero-emissions objectives. “For any of our customers who on a journey to zero-emissions solutions,” says Sornek, “it’s our unit who can help take them there.”