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At Destaco's flagship facility in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, teams assemble thousands of highly configurable products: manual, pneumatic, and hydraulic clamps, robotic end effectors, grippers and vaccuum tooling. Many are built only a handful of times a year. Some are one-off custom builds the plant has never made before.
In a high-mix, high-precision plant like this, there is an increased risk that a missed step could reach the customer.
After rolling out Squint across five production lines, Mt. Juliet cut customer-reported defects by 53% within months, as well as double-digit improvement gains in quality and labor efficiency on its most complex products. Read their full story here.
Before: static instructions, knowledge locked with veterans, and unverified critical steps
Destaco's work instructions lived on laminated sheets at the station, in PowerPoint files on shared drives, and in veteran assemblers' heads. When an operator started a job they hadn't run before, asking a veteran was often faster than finding the right instruction. Safe-to-Start, Quality Inspections, and Layered Process Audits came down to relying on trust.
On custom build, an operator might be doing the job for the first time, with nothing to check their work against. As Rakuya Artis, Destaco's Global Vice President of Operations and Supply Chain, put it: "Our customers can't afford a quality error because we're training a new operator."
Today: a closed-loop quality system where every operator builds to the same standard
Destaco adopted Squint as the industrial AI platform behind its standard work. Its agents turn video of an expert's build into a draft instruction for engineering to approve and apply Destaco's standards at every site. The several hundred instructions Destaco had already built came over intact, so none of that work was lost. But the biggest change wasn't digitizing instructions. It was closing the loop between what goes wrong and what the floor does next.
Each morning, Destaco's Quality team reviews any concerns, whether internal or external, and runs a root cause analysis. If necessary, instructions are then updated on the spot. Every assembler sees the change before the next build and records each critical step before the procedure can close. Work instructions have evidence collection steps to prove work was done correctly and an audit trail of all completed tasks. A corrective action becomes standard work in hours instead of weeks, and Quality can see it being followed on the floor.
"Standard work isn't just documentation, it's one of the most important quality systems in a manufacturing plant. Without it you cannot improve and more importantly sustain," said Jeff Clark, Destaco's Director of Global Operational Excellence and Quality.
What's in the full story
The morning update loop is one part of how Mt. Juliet moved from paper sign-offs to standard work that's verified at every step. The full case study covers the rest, with examples from the floor:
- How Squint's tribal knowledge agent turns veterans' know-how into step-by-step instructions for every build
- How a co-op with no manufacturing background built nearly 100 work instructions in 60 days
- How assemblers prove the line is safe before a shift can start, with photo evidence instead of a dry-erase checklist
- How a standardization agent makes every site build the same product the same way, in each operator's own language
See it on your floor
Any high-mix plant with knowledge locked in veterans' heads and audits on paper can build the same system. Book a demo to see what Squint could do at your plant.
