Tenth Labs

Manufacturing consulting and engineering

Manufacturing problems, solved on your shop floor.

Tenth Labs is a manufacturing consulting firm. We come to your plant, work through the process with the people who run it, and fix what is costing you parts, time, and money. Where software helps, we build that too.

Email an engineer See what we do
Dial test indicator graduated in ten-thousandths of an inch The needle moves back and forth between zero and one graduation. One graduation is 0.0001 inch, which machinists call a tenth. 0 1 2 3 4 3 2 1 .0001 in

A fix designed away from the floor rarely survives it.

Plenty of improvement projects look right in the conference room and fall apart in production. The plan was written by people who never stood at the machine. It misses the things everyone on the shift already knows: which numbers can be trusted, where the process drifts, and what an operator has time to do in the middle of a run.

We work the other way round. We do the job inside your plant, close to the process and the people who run it, so that what we change fits the work as it is really done. What you get at the end is an improvement that is running in production, and a team that knows how to keep it there.

  • We watch the process before we recommend anything

    Time on the floor comes first. We want to see the job run, read the travelers and the logs, and ask the people doing the work what slows them down before we propose a single change.

  • We measure results in your numbers

    Scrap, rework, downtime, late orders, hours spent chasing information. If a project does not move a number your plant already tracks, it is not finished, however good the plan looks on paper.

  • We start with what you already have

    Your machines, your people, and your existing systems are the starting point. We look for the gains available with what is already on the floor before we suggest that you buy or replace anything.

  • We tell you when you do not need us

    Some problems need an outside engineer. Many are solved by a change your own team can make this week. We will tell you which one you have, even when the honest answer is the smaller job.

What we do

We are manufacturing people first. Most of our work is practical consulting on the floor, and we suggest starting with a single problem, small enough that you can judge it on its results.

Process and production improvement

We work through a process with you from incoming material to finished part and find where time, material, and capacity are being lost. That covers how work is routed and scheduled, how setups and changeovers are run, where jobs sit waiting, and where the hand-offs between departments break down.

Then we help you make the changes, one at a time, and stay long enough to confirm that each one holds once the attention has moved elsewhere.

Good fit when output, cost, or delivery has slipped and nobody can say exactly why

Machining and manufacturing engineering

Hands-on engineering support from people who have run the work themselves. We help with taking a new part from first article to repeatable production, working out why a job will not hold tolerance, and tightening up how work is planned, set up, and documented.

This is useful when your own engineers are stretched, when a difficult job lands, or when you want an experienced second opinion before committing to a method.

Good fit when a job is harder than it should be, or a new part has to launch cleanly

Quality and root-cause problem solving

When a defect keeps coming back, we trace it to its cause using the measurements and the people involved, and we do not settle for the first plausible explanation. We look at the inspection data, the process settings, and what is different between the good parts and the bad ones.

Once the cause is clear, we help put a fix in place and set up the checks that show it is still working months later.

Good fit when the same problem keeps returning after it was supposedly fixed

Software and data tools

Some problems are best solved with software, and when that is the case we build it. That means tools written around your own workflows, in place of the spreadsheets and paper that no off-the-shelf system quite replaces, and analysis of the production data you already collect.

Where it earns its place, that can include machine learning models or assistants that answer questions from your own documents. We treat these as tools for a specific job and recommend them only when a simpler approach will not do.

Good fit when the process works but the tools around it do not

How we work

Every engagement follows the same order. The steps run longer or shorter depending on the problem, but we do not skip any of them.

  1. Embed

    We come to your plant and work alongside the people who run the process: operators, engineers, quality, and maintenance. Being there is how we find out what the job really involves.

  2. Learn

    We study the process and the records it produces. We find out what is measured, what is missing, and what can be trusted. Then we agree with you on the problem worth solving and how success will be measured.

  3. Improve

    We make the changes on-site with your team, in short rounds, whether that is a new method, a revised process, or a tool we build. Each round is tried on the floor, and the feedback shapes the next one.

  4. Hand over

    We finish when the improvement is holding in production and your team can run it without us. You get the documentation and training needed to keep it that way.

We came up through the shop

Tenth Labs is two partners based in Michigan, with 35 years of combined manufacturing experience between us. We came up through prototype machining and manufacturing engineering, working on the floor and answering for the parts that left it.

Along the way we learned to build software and work with production data, and we use both when a problem calls for it. We have been the people a new system or a new procedure gets handed to, so we understand what it takes for a change to earn its place in a working plant.

That background shapes how we work. We know what a bad part costs, and we know how little a fix is worth when nobody on the floor will follow it. So we work with the people who run the process, in the plant where they run it.

Combined experience
35 years
Background
Prototype machining and manufacturing engineering
Based in
Michigan, USA

Tell us what you make and what is getting in the way.

Send us a few lines about your plant: what you make, where the trouble is, and what you have already tried. We will read it and reply to set up a call or a visit. A first conversation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.

hello@tenthlabs.io