Collaborating for Success: iNDustry Labs and Viewrail join forces to Drive Growth and Innovation

iNDustry Labs Notre Dame Logo

Collaborating to Drive Innovation and Continuous Improvement

An iNDustry Labs project is helping Viewrail see things in new ways.

Through iNDustry Labs, engineers, students, and recent graduates from the University of Notre Dame are helping local companies adapt to new technology and both attract and retain talented workers.

Viewrail, a growing company based in Goshen, Indiana, manufactures, sells, and installs modern staircases for homes. It is utilizing technology to do vertical integration and eliminate waste. But continuous improvement is challenging and iNDustry Labs has been able to help.

Collaborating for Success

Viewrail Logo

iNDustry Labs is an outgrowth of Notre Dame’s decades of effort to be engaged with the local community. In 2018, a Lilly Endowment grant funded the LIFT Network, of which iNDustry Labs is the anchor. Its goal is to support and improve manufacturing in the South Bend – Elkhart Region.  This region is one of the nation’s hubs for producing recreational vehicles, boats, and products such as the stair systems made by Viewrail.

“We’re the industry-facing part of the university,” said Natalie Medich. Medich has more than 25 years of experience in manufacturing and is now engineer in residence for the group based in Quinn Hall of Innovation Park.

iNDustry Labs partners with the university’s College of Engineering and Mendoza College of Business, particularly the Information Technology, Analytics, and Operations Department. enFocus hires recent graduates as fellows to help iNDustry Labs work with companies in the region. Students and recent graduates are able to work with the four engineers in iNDustry Labs and take on projects of their own.

As Notre Dame and local industry collaborates, the goal is to help companies solve problems. “It’s meeting them where they’re at in their manufacturing journey and helping them get to where they want to get to,” said Medich.

Viewrail and iNDustry Labs: Collaborating for Growth and Innovation

Caleb Morris – CCO for Viewrail

Caleb Morris, chief customer officer for Viewrail, said, “It’s great to have the chance to work with people who bring a different perspective to our business. They can help us see opportunities that we may have missed and then we can work together to identify the best approaches.”

iNDustry Labs helped the company write and submit a manufacturing readiness grant application to the State of Indiana requesting $180,000 for capital expenditure. “That’s something we’re really excited about,” Medich said. While Viewrail values technology and automation, the company is also working on how to best utilize people in its growing operations. 

In addition, Mendoza’s data analytics students helped Viewrail evaluate sales data to assist Viewrail, which grew from $17 million in sales in 2017 to more than $100 million in 2021 and 2022.

The company relies on internet marketing and sales. Customers enter the systems when they inquire about a purchase. “Everyone talking to sales has a profile and we have data on how marketing and sales teams are working together in that funnel or pipeline,” said Casey Stump, who has been director of revenue operations in the sales and marketing department. (He has been with the company since 2017 and is leaving for another opportunity.)

Studying conversions of the potential sales into actual ones is a key to the company’s success.

Viewrail and iNDustry Labs are Collaborating to Utilize Data for Business Success

Viewrail shared data from 2019 to 2022 with students and posed two questions, according to Stump. 

Natalie Medich – Engineer-in-Residence at iNDustry Labs

First, if the company is to meet its sales goal of $130 million this year, how many deals does it need in the potential pipeline to achieve it?

Second, how do you view the sales pipeline on a broader scale rather than just month to month?

Stump presented to students and after several weeks of working in groups, six groups made presentations.

“It was helpful to see the way they approached it,” Stump said of the students’ work.

From the quick analysis of a large data set, they were able to learn that quotes done in the month of March result in a higher percentage of sales, and, potential customers who engage with marketing emails are more likely to purchase a set of stairs. 

The key way the project helped Viewrail was showing how a model could be built to better use data. “Businesses like us now have so much data to crunch. No one is utilizing it to the degree that they could,” Stump said.

iNDustry Labs will continue to help Viewrail — and other companies in the region — with data analytics and more. Medich wants to create more interactions between companies and students. “One of the goals for this next academic year is to take students, wherever they’re at in their career, and showcase some of the companies like Viewrail,” she said. The goal is to showcase the complex and exciting work companies are doing locally and retain more of students to work in the region.