VIDEO: How Killeen Manufacturing Turned a Century of Tribal Knowledge Into a 17x ROI

Killeen Manufacturing has been running machines in Auburn, Massachusetts for over a century. Many of their machines run around the clock, including nights and weekends. No bottlenecks. Ahead on inventory. By every measure that matters on a shop floor, Killeen was winning.

So why go looking for a problem that didn’t exist?

Because “good” and “as good as they can be” are two different things. Killeen wanted to know which one they actually were.

Watch how Chris Merrick, CNC Senior Technician, and Joe Gagliardi, Production Manager, walk through it firsthand with Tony Gunn.

Getting CNC Machine Monitoring Up and Running Was the Easy Part

Chris Merrick, CNC Senior Technician at Killeen, was the guy on the ground when Datanomix Production Monitoring came to the floor back in 2024. He’s the first to tell you it was up and running fast.

“Datanomix has been great. Getting it up and running was super easy.”

Chris Merrick, CNC Senior Technician at Killeen

The Datanomix team came in and delivered their signature kick-ass coaching, walking Chris through exactly where things plugged into the controls and where to find the menus. Because the Datanomix coaches are knowledgeable, they were able to show specifically how the Fanuc setups worked. When Chris had questions, the answers came in minutes, not days.

“The longest I waited might’ve been about 30 minutes,” said Chris. That’s not a small thing. Every shop has a horror story about a monitoring install that ate a week and a half of someone’s life. Killeen didn’t have one. Implementation isn’t what separates good production data from bad. It’s what happens after the screens go live and the reliable support over the years that follow.

Beyond Green and Red: Real-Time Machine Monitoring for Root Cause

Joe Gagliardi runs the floor day-to-day, and he’ll admit the same thing every operations lead eventually admits: at first, it’s just green and red.

“For a while it was just looking, hoping to see those green bars, and not always the case in reality,” said Joe. That’s the trap. Green feels good. Green also doesn’t tell you why a bar feeder threw an error, which machine has quietly been the worst performer over the last month or the last year. Killeen didn’t stop at the dashboard. They went past it.

“Datanomix is very helpful to track every alarm code that pops up on the machine. You can look back at what’s been your problem machine for the last week, the last month, even the last year.”

Joe Gagliardi, Production Manager

That’s the difference between a system that tells you something happened and one that tells you why it keeps happening. One is a status light. The other is a diagnosis, built from years of tribal knowledge finally turned into data insights.

Unattended Operation: Four People, Ten Machines, No Guessing

Every morning, Joe gets the team in front of the screens and runs through their own version of a built-in playbook within Datanomix.

“We do the morning huddle. We stare at the screens, and we see what ran well yesterday, what didn’t, and decide how we fix that.”

Joe Gagliardi, Production Manager

It’s a floor full of people looking at the same truth at the same time, fixing problems before the day gets away. Datanonmix is on TV screens everywhere: above the machines, in the lobby, in the break room. The guy running machine 1213 gets ribbed by his coworkers for having the best week on the floor, because everyone can see it. 

It matters just as much overnight. When an emergency job hits and a machine goes down after hours, a real-time notification goes straight to a phone and Killeen doesn’t lose the shift. 

“We’ve got a couple of guys that live close. They get the notification, run in, and start the machine back up. That way we don’t lose a whole night’s production.”

Joe Gagliardi, Production Manager

Uptime, Utilization, and ROI: The Payoff Behind the Data

Killeen has been running Datanomix since 2024, when they completed their pilot. The results from the time of this story are a real recent snapshot of how the shop runs today.

In that window, uptime climbed 15%. Utilization climbed 17%. Common waste dropped 25%. Annualized out, that pace works out to 504 hours and $40,363 in productivity gains per machine, and a 17x return on investment.

Those numbers don’t belong to a shop still figuring things out. They belong to a shop that’s driven to be as good as possible.

The Takeaway on Shop Floor Data

A hundred years of tribal knowledge is worth something. Killeen respects it. But tribal knowledge can’t tell you what’shappening on the floor right now, and definitely not why.

Killeen believed their floor was running well. Two years of data confirmed it, but there was still room to Make More. Datanomix Production Monitoring found 504 hours per machine they didn’t know they had.

What would your data confirm? Schedule a demo and find out.