Hynes Industries was named one of seven honorees in the “AI Implementers” category of the AI Impact Forum awards, presented Aug. 27 by Smart Business, a Cleveland-based media company covering Northeast Ohio’s business community. The category recognizes organizations using artificial intelligence within their own operations to produce measurable results.

Hynes Industries is a manufacturer of custom roll-formed and fabricated metal components with facilities in Youngstown and Painesville, Ohio, and Kokomo, Ind. The company was recognized for an automated, vision-based quality inspection system which allows for 100% inspections of tight tolerance parts.

“For a hundred years, Hynes has built its reputation by solving the problems other manufacturers walk away from,” said Rick Organ, president and CEO of Hynes Industries. “This recognition tells us that same instinct – engineer toward the hard answer – is exactly what it takes to make artificial intelligence actually work in a meaningful way on a factory floor. Seeing our work recognized alongside the region’s most sophisticated AI adopters says a lot about how far manufacturing in this region has come.”

The system replaced a manual inspection process in which trained operators used handheld measurement tools to check parts coming off the line – a process that took two to three minutes per part and tied up two to three people per shift. In its place, Hynes built a multi-camera, multi-laser inspection cell that checks perpendicularity, hole placement, dimensional tolerances and feature geometry on every part in real time, matching or exceeding the precision of manual measurement at a cycle time of 15 to 20 seconds per part – a reduction of more than 85 percent. Parts that pass are routed automatically to palletizing robots; parts that don’t are flagged for rework, with quality data logged automatically for every cycle.

The inspection cell is one piece of a broader, company-wide data and AI infrastructure Hynes has built, which also includes sensors that monitor the health of production equipment – providing up to two hours of advance warning before an unplanned downtime event – and large language model tools that help supervisors surface patterns in shift and production data. Hynes hired a dedicated data analytics professional to build and manage the platform, a level of internal investment in AI infrastructure that is uncommon among manufacturers of Hynes’ size in the region.

Hynes serves the truck-trailer, data center, automated material handling, solar energy and commercial-industrial markets, and has continued to invest in engineering, quality and AI-based capabilities across its three facilities to meet the growing complexity and speed its customers in those markets demand.