Flambeau Puts Cyngn to Work

Luke Renner: Hello. My name is Luke Renner and I’m the Director of Marketing here at Cyngn.

We recently deployed our Enterprise Autonomy Suite to a manufacturing facility in Columbus, Indiana, called Flambeau. 

Today, we thought it would be interesting to get Joe Petersen, a representative of Flambeau, to tell you a little bit about what it was like to bring a self-driving vehicle to their facility. In short, the organization saw immediate value. They think it’s going to increase throughput and make them more competitive. 

We hope you enjoy.

Joseph Petersen: My name is Joseph Petersen, I am general manager, plant manager of the Flambeau Columbus, Indiana facility and I am responsible for all the manufacturing. 

We have been struggling to redesign and rethink our material handling side of our manufacturing and distribution process. Cyngn’s solution was one of the first times that I saw a scalable, logical, not working capital intensive, high value solution that will grow with us.

Flambeau is one of several companies that belong to the Nordic Group of Companies.

Flambeau itself has a handful of campuses across North America, including Mexico. We manufacture a variety of different products, and the products range from toys to sporting goods, to industrial, to automotive.

We also manufacture products for OEM, which means we produce other people's product and other people's brands, and we distribute all of the products that are manufactured here out of this distribution center.

We're constantly trying to expand our markets. One of the key things that we can do to do that is to be there with product faster than any of our competitors. Cyngn’s DriveMod really unlocks the potential for us to start the journey of increasing throughput and decreasing the time to market from the manufacturing floor.

The feedback that I'm getting from our associates and our leadership has been nothing but positive.

I start with the associates on the floor, the people that are going to have to interact with that product, use that product, apply that product minute in and minute out. They've engaged it, they've embraced it, they see the application, they are already asking, “what else can we do?”

They're very excited to interact with the product and the nature of, the culture of this facility is one of curiosity. So they took to this almost immediately. 

The autonomous vehicle isn't intended, at least at the Flambeau facility, to displace any human being. What it's doing is helping us offload the non valued activity from our human resources and free them up to concentrate more on the efficiency of the value added side. So we will be able to literally do more with the same amount of people and achieve our strategic goals of growing faster throughput to market competitive.

So value added in our definition is those individuals that are actually converting raw material into a sellable product. The nonvalue added activity would be anything required that doesn't directly include those activities like material handling, material transport, material inventory.

This vehicle will not displace anybody. The value added activity is then freed up to increase its capacity. So it's the same investment, more capacity.

So the experience with the Cyngn deployment team has been nothing short of fantastic. 

They came in, they took a look at what the process is, what we're living with today. They looked at the product, what its application is and capability is, and then laid that into a starting point, knowing our journey is going to be targeting increased throughput. 

We are really excited at Flambeau Columbus campus to get this process off the ground and start our journey to increase profitability, improve our service levels and get to market faster than anybody else.