A Text Alert Saved Atlas Tool Works From 12 Hours of Lost Machine Time

A Century of Investing in the Next Technology

Atlas Tool Works is a family-owned manufacturer in Lyons, Illinois, founded in 1918. For more than a century, the company has stayed competitive the same way: by investing in tools that let the team do precise work faster.

Its 75,000-square-foot headquarters houses everything from traditional metal forming equipment to multi-axis machining, laser cutting, water jet cutting, and wire EDM, serving customers in aerospace, defense, telecom, and medical manufacturing.

Today Atlas is led by the fourth generation of the founding family and takes parts from prototype through high-volume production under one roof. A growing share of that production happens with no one standing at the machine.

For Andy Driscoll, Director of CNC Machining at Atlas, unmanned machining is central to how the shop competes. Some machines routinely run 22 to 24 hours per day, with much of that production happening unmanned.

When Unmanned Machines Stop, Nobody Knows

Running lights-out is one of the most effective ways for a shop to get more output from the same equipment. But it comes with a built-in blind spot: when nobody is at the machine, nobody knows when it stops.

At Atlas, unexpected stoppages on unmanned runs happened once or twice a month, and they often went undiscovered until someone showed up for the next shift. On a high-volume job with a tight schedule, losing those hours sets production back a full day.

A Text Message at a Baseball Game

On a Monday evening around 5:30 p.m., Andy was at his kids' baseball game when his phone buzzed. It was a text alert from Sense: one of Atlas' CNC machines had been idle for 30 minutes.

The machine was in the middle of a mostly unmanned production run and was expected to keep cutting until 10:30 p.m., when Andy planned to stop by, reload material, and let it run until 5:00 a.m. Instead, it had alarmed and stopped hours before anyone was scheduled to check on it.

Rather than discovering the stoppage the next morning, Andy knew almost immediately that production had unexpectedly stopped.

Back Up and Running Within the Hour

There were no machinists scheduled to be available overnight if the machine stopped.

Fortunately, the alert arrived while help was still available. The team quickly coordinated a response and had the machine back in production within about an hour.

Without that early warning, the machine likely would have sat idle until the lead machinist arrived the following morning.

“I would have had to wait until 6:00 a.m. the next morning when the lead machinist came in for his shift.”

— Andy Driscoll, Director of CNC Machining, Atlas Tool Works

12 Hours and $2,400 Saved with One Notification

A single Sense alert saved Atlas roughly 12 hours of machine time on a job where any stoppage sets production back a full day.

“This job runs about $200 an hour, and we saved about 12 hours of run time, so around $2,400.”

— Andy Driscoll, Director of CNC Machining, Atlas Tool Works

Catching the problem at 5:30 p.m. instead of the following morning protected the job's delivery schedule.

This was not an isolated concern. Unexpected stoppages happen on unmanned runs at Atlas once or twice a month. Each notification gives the team another opportunity to respond before a brief interruption becomes hours of lost production.

Unmanned Machining with Confidence

Sense has changed what it feels like to walk away from a running machine for a shop that relies on unmanned machining.

“It is very helpful to know if the machine is not running unexpectedly. Plus, it is helpful to know when the machine stops its normal cycle, so we can come in on the weekends to load it back up.”

— Andy Driscoll, Director of CNC Machining, Atlas Tool Works

For Atlas, the value extends beyond a single alert. The team now knows when a machine unexpectedly stops, allowing them to respond before hours of production are lost. They also know when a machine finishes its normal cycle, making it easier to reload material and keep unmanned jobs running through evenings and weekends.

Following the success of this incident, Atlas expanded its Sense deployment to additional machines across the shop.

For a company that has spent more than 100 years investing in technology that helps it do more with the same people and equipment, real-time machine visibility is a natural next step.