When a family-owned aircraft parts shop traded flash drives, hand counts, and hour-long daily reports for one connected factory orchestration platform, part counting hit near perfect, thousands of labor hours vanished, and sales climbed toward 30% growth in a single year.

Executive Summary

Rimeco, a CNC machine shop specializing in aircraft and aircraft engine components, struggled with disconnected systems, manual reporting, and persistent part-counting errors. By implementing Harmoni’s factory orchestration platform, Rimeco integrated its ERP, quality, and maintenance systems into one streamlined solution. The result: near-perfect part counting, hours of saved labor, and a clear path toward a fully connected factory—all while the company tracks toward 30% sales growth this year.

Introduction

Founded in 1992, Rimeco is a family-owned CNC machine shop that produces precision aircraft and aircraft engine components. What began as a two-person operation in roughly 800 square feet at the back of a small building has grown into a 46,000-square-foot facility running around 40 machines.

President John Rubik has been with the company for nearly 30 years and has watched manufacturing transform around him. “We used to stand at a machine and write the code in manually,” he recalls. “Now everything’s done on a CAD/CAM system, and the program is sent to the machine right through the Harmoni portal.”

That spirit of continuous improvement is exactly what drew the company to Harmoni. As Director of Operations, Matt Culver puts it, “The things that are going on here [are] by far drastically different than the norm. There was a lot of potential here for growth, bringing in new machines, new technologies like Harmoni.”

The Problem

For years, Rimeco operated with a patchwork of disconnected systems. The shop had machine monitors that tracked when equipment was running versus idle, but that data lived separately from the company’s ERP system. Someone had to manually bridge the gap.

“We had someone putting together a daily report—probably spent about an hour working on that report every day to compare what the machine monitors were saying versus what the system was saying,” John explains.

The disconnected setup created friction across the shop floor:

• Fragmented systems: Machine monitoring, ERP, maintenance tracking, and quality lived in separate software, forcing employees to log in to multiple systems throughout the day.
• Part-counting errors: Counting parts manually was a constant headache. “We start with 100 pieces. After the first operation, somehow have 102, and then after the third operation, 96, fourth operation back to 98,” John says.
• Tedious program transfers: Loading programs meant carrying flash drives between the IT manager’s office and the machines—or, going back further, racing to a terminal within a narrow time window before a request expired. “It was tedious,” Matt recalls.
• Paper-heavy documentation: Inspection sheets were filled in by hand. Work instructions were, in John’s words, “sketches on the back of a napkin.” For an AS9100-certified shop, maintaining that paper trail for auditors was time-consuming.

Above all, the disconnected systems stood in the way of Rimeco’s bigger ambition. “Our long-term goal is really to connect the factory together,” John says, “to have information moving from machine to machine… all coming together as one system. Operating in different systems just made that difficult to do.”

The Solution

Rimeco turned to Harmoni to unify its operations under a single connected platform. The integration with the company’s ERP system was a major selling point, allowing machinists to handle their administrative tasks right at the machine.

The implementation rolled out in tiers. As Matt describes it, the first tier localized everything operators do to their individual work cells: “Instead of them going to a set station at the beginning of each shift, the end of each shift, they report directly to their machine. Clock in for attendance. Log in to the job they’re working on.”

The second tier streamlined the setup process. “Programs being stored in Harmoni get uploaded and downloaded to and from the machine right there locally,” Matt explains. “We no longer have to carry a flash drive back and forth from the IT manager’s office.”

Over time, Harmoni absorbed system after system. Rimeco tied multiple separate software systems into one, including:

• ERP integration for automated part counting and job tracking
• Maintenance tracking, replacing a standalone computer system
• Quality tools, including check sheet and work instruction modules
• Digital work instructions with photos and step-by-step details
• Cell leader dashboards offering a full shop map of machine performance

Adoption was smooth. “We had like 100% of people participate right off the bat,” Matt says. A small group of operators piloted the new process for a week, fed feedback to Harmoni, and the rest of the shop followed quickly. Today, the workflow is second nature: “It’s part of their routine now. It’s kind of ingrained into their daily structure.”

A defining feature of the partnership has been Harmoni’s responsiveness. “We have biweekly calls to talk about how things are going and improvement ideas,” John says. “They’ve customized aspects that, working with other software vendors, they’re not as open to changing. A lot of times they either give you an out-of-the-box solution and you’re kind of stuck to that… Harmoni’s been great about really going through ideas and just implementing them.”

Result

Harmoni delivered measurable improvements across Rimeco’s operations:

• Near-perfect part counting. Automation eliminated one of the shop’s most persistent issues. “It’s really got our part counting down to nearly perfect,” John says. Operators now simply verify quantities and flag any scrap at the end of the day.
• Hundreds to thousands of hours saved. Program version tracking alone has been transformative. When a small change to a program once caused problems for the next operator, the team had no easy way to trace it. “This could save us hundreds or even thousands of hours a year compared to what it used to take to figure out these problems,” John notes.
• Eliminated daily manual reporting. The hour once spent reconciling machine monitors against the ERP in a spreadsheet is gone.
• Faster, simpler audits. Digital documentation replaced paper trails. “It’s a lot easier when it’s all digital, and we can just pull it up in a portal and show [auditors] the documentation that they’re looking for,” John says.
• More capacity from existing resources. With the shop on track to grow sales roughly 30% this year, automation is critical. “Anything we can do to automate any process and get more out of our existing capacity is just priceless to us,” John says.

While an exact ROI figure is difficult to pin down—Matt notes there was “no existing process in place to compare it to”—the decision came down to a clear choice: automate data capture with Harmoni, or hire a full-time person to do the same job manually.

When asked to describe Harmony in one word, the answers said it all. John: “Connected.” Matt: “Integral.”

Conclusion

For Rimeco, Harmoni isn’t a finished project—it’s an evolving partnership. “It keeps evolving continually, and we keep getting more out of it,” John says. The company is especially excited about Harmoni’s emerging AI tools, which promise to turn the vast data generated by its machines into actionable process improvements. The vision: operators who can ask the system questions and draw on prior job data to find the best way to run a part, eventually enabling a single machinist to run an entire cell.

That ambition ties back to something bigger than any one shop. “I think in general, our nation, we need to get back to manufacturing,” John says. “We need to be the best in the world at manufacturing. And I think having products like Harmoni is what helps us get there.”

Would he recommend Harmony to other machine shops? “To everyone except for my competitors.”