In 1980, Haas noticed that it took one of his employees a long time to manually position an indexer. Haas thought that building his own indexer with a stepper motor drive would be more efficient. He built one for himself and few more for other machine shops. In March 1983, he displayed his indexer at WESTEC (an industry expo). After seeing the positive reaction of attendees, he decided to form Haas Automation to mass-produce them. His first commercial product, the HBI-5C (Haas Brothers Indexer), sold well because it was programmable and inexpensive. In 1986, Haas and a partner were awarded a US patent for their invention.