< Previous“Customers absolutely love to consolidate their supply base; they don’t like to have to deal with different suppliers from the West Coast to the East Coast and beyond. And we offer them that with our operations in both the northeast and southeast, the midwest, the west coast, and Mexico,” says David. That is because customers know that they can trust the consistent quality from all U.S. Corrugated locations. Needless to say, it also means that the bigger the orders become, the more the price improves. Working with single points of contact eliminates the frustration of having to speak with multiple people, simplifying the entire process for the client. For this reason, the company’s pack-aging specialists form a solid team with whom each client’s account executive liaises in order to get the job done fast and efficiently. This team takes care of everything from struc-tural support engineering to design. Manufacturing specialists prepare prototypes and perform all other processes involved in getting the best quality corrugated packaging manufactured, printed and delivered on time and within budget, while project managers and customer care agents are always ready to assist. The company even has its own delivery team. In the words of its founder Dennis Mehiel himself, there is no quality in the product if there is no quality in the person producing it.U.S. Corrugated is a carefully curated firm that Dennis Mehiel has spent many decades perfecting. As such, the company was preceded by a manufacturing facility, Four M Manufacturing, established in 1963. This plant created cardboard bottle parti-tions for the beverages industry. Dennis then sold this original business and acquired a number of struggling box and sheet plants. By investing in these operations and running them well, Dennis Mehiel created a network of manufacturing plants and paper mills that was transformed into the country’s biggest privately held corrugated manufacturer in 1995. The company was renamed around this time, becoming known as Box U.S.A., which grew to include 20 plants across the country. The vision-ary entrepreneur then sold the company to a competitor. After his two-year trade restriction had expired, Dennis Mehiel got back into the trade, establishing U.S. Corrugated as we know it today. This time he decided that he was done with building up struggling enterprises and opted for the brand new super plant route instead. He decided that modernity was the best ally in his new endeavor, which he established in Santa Fe Springs, California. This time, all the equipment was brand new – state-of-the-art machines with fully automated robotic features.“We have the newest equipment in the industry. This means that our competitors need more fiber in their paper to make it stronger because their older machines crush the flute as it goes through the press and that degrades the strength of the box. Our brand new machines don’t crush the cardboard, and so don’t take performance away from the box,” says David. Thanks to innovative design and its brand new, razor-sharp corrugat-ing machines, die cutters and more, U.S. Corrugated can use less fiber and therefore fewer trees in the manufacture of its cardboard. In addition, this approach prevents more fiber from entering the waste stream. The company also does its utmost to use as much recycled material in its cardboard packaging as possible, benefiting the environment.“Thanks to innovative design and its brand new, razor-sharp corrugating machines, die cutters and more, U.S. Corrugated can use less fiber and therefore fewer trees in the manufacture of its cardboard.”MAY 201930Thanks to running a lean, well-organized operation, the com-pany’s growth has been outstanding. In fact, it is in the process of establishing another plant in the Midwest as well as another around New Jersey. Considering that its most recent Mexican super plant is also equipped with the latest high-speed equip-ment and a digital printer, this industry leader will no doubt soon have itself an ever wider playing field from which to serve its vast market. “We’re all about taking care of our customers and really go out of our way to give them the quality packaging they need on time at a very competitive price,” says David. One thing is certain; if its founder’s energy and vigor and its hands-on senior leadership are any indications of the company’s entrepreneur-ial prowess, U.S. Corrugated will continue to supply Americans with top quality corrugated cardboard products for genera-tions to come. 31MANUFACTURING IN FOCUS K+S Services established itself in 1982 by repairing electronic circuit boards for the automotive industry, and since that time the company has expanded its capabilities to meet the needs of its diverse current customer base. It has grown to include repair services for motors, high speed spindles, DC torque tools, valves, vacuum pumps, blowers, robotic welding apparatus, electronic servo and variable frequency drives, HMIs and numerous other mechanical, hydraulic, electronic, and industrial components. MAY 201932Written by Jen HockenToday, K+S Services employs over 500 people world-wide and has 22 facilities located in Canada, the United States, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Czech Republic and Poland.The core business of K+S is repair services of the subcompo-nents of industrial automation equipment and although it assists its customers in finding solutions to repair obsolete or antiquated equipment, the company is not in the business of providing complete MRO sourcing solutions. The majority of its competitors are in one category of either electronic, mechani-cal, or hydraulic repairs; K+S provides a full turnkey solution by covering all of those markets.“We don’t just repair; our philosophy at K+S is to refurbish the customer’s components to a like new condition. During the refurbishing process preventative maintenance is also performed on known high failure rate items. Final testing is 33MANUFACTURING IN FOCUS performed in a closed loop environment to ensure the refur-bished component meets OEM standards and the customer’s needs. We also believe that if we don’t have a functional test capability for that repair, we don’t consider it repaired,” says Dick Puhl, Director of Sales.There are four separate companies that fall under the K+S umbrella. Superior Spindle Services, located in both Taylor, Michigan and Monterrey, Mexico, repairs machine tool spindles. Encore Systems repairs DC torque tools and controllers, and provides tool management services, with facilities in Brookville, Ohio; Oakville, Ontario; Monterrey, Mexico; Salamanca, Mexico; and soon to be in the United Kingdom. Kennedy Repair Services is based out of Troy, Ohio and specializes in the remanufacturing of weld guns and robotic welding apparatus and Aztechnology is a Michigan registered Minority Business Enterprise partner of K+S that also repairs and provides asset management services.K+S is factory trained and authorized to repair products for Siemens in Canada and Mexico. K+S has been awarded other authorizations by Fronius, Miller and Lincoln welders, and LSIS products. K+S represents Star Valves in all of North America for new sales, repairs, and warranty service. K+S prolongs the useful life of equipment and allows its cus-tomers to avoid costly capital expenditures by supporting obsolete equipment for as long as possible. The budgets of manufacturing companies in all arenas have been cut back, particularly in the automotive industry, but fortunately, K+S is able to service these customers with its S.T.A.M.P. repairable asset management program to help with uptime and decrease the overall cost of ownership. “The foundation of professional service offerings we provide is our asset management program, where we’re fully embedded into a manufacturing plant with onsite people. We collect data surrounding equipment failures, mean time between failure, exceptional usage and then frequently present to the plant staff to help them drive their reliability and cost savings opportunities,” says Puhl. K+S can also provide dedicated reli-ability engineering and predictive services to demonstrate to the customer where their failures are and where they are losing production time. “We provide root cause analysis for failures based on compo-nent, machine or process oriented losses to help our custom-ers increase their OEE by making data driven decisions. We are then able to provide a number of different solutions to help them once those decisions are made,” explains Charles Gauss, Vice President. The use of predictive and preventative maintenance is becoming more prevalent in the industry because it allows a manufacturer to fix potential problems before they occur and keep the operation up and running consistently rather than having to pause and repair a component. Vibration analysis, thermography, and tribology are all techniques used for pre-dictive maintenance. K+S has the ability to put a predictive and preventative maintenance program together for its cus-tomers based on its observations or to help augment their existing program. “In the past, we were strictly measured on the cost of new versus refurbishment and moving forward it’s really about, ‘how do we help [customers] improve their OEE while also saving them money?’ We’ve always done a great job on the repair side; now we need to bring more value to our customers on the predic-tive side to help them with their uptime,” says John Willis, Chief Operating Officer. K+S designs custom solutions for its customers by conducting a value management study to address their concerns. Reliability engineering, predictive and preventative maintenance routines, upfront engagement (industrial bill of material evaluation and warranty tracking) and storeroom solutions are all combined when necessary to create the most efficient operation possible “K+S prolongs the useful life of equipment and allows its customers to avoid costly capital expenditures.”MAY 201934for the customer. “There are different levels of our onsite services. We cater to the requirement of the customer; if they need help running their storeroom as well as an asset manage-ment program, that is something that we provide as well, it just depends on their needs,” says Willis.The manufacturing industry as a whole is experiencing a skilled trades shortage that is creating more opportunities for K+S to assist its customers by filling that gap. The skilled trades shortage is something K+S is also experiencing. To address this challenge, K+S has partnered with the state of Michigan to participate in one of its most active and successful work-force programs, MAT2 (Michigan Advanced Technician Training, or MAT squared). The Michigan Talent Agency and Henry Ford College joined together to afford students the opportu-nity to earn an associate degree in mechatronics or computer numerical control (CNC) that is fully funded. The MAT2 program enables students to begin a career right away and get paid while attending school, which is a great way to attract more numbers to the depleting workforce. The MAT2 program has proven highly successful for K+S; in fact, it was one of the largest employers of mechatronics students in the state of Michigan for the last two years. The two-year degree takes three years to complete while alternating semes-ters between school and work and the student signs a contract to stay with K+S for an additional two years after graduation while of course being paid a competitive wage. The company is looking forward to continuing its relationship with the MAT2 program moving forward. “We are in a very unique type of industry,” says Gauss. “It’s not like we can go pick somebody up anywhere that knows how to refurbish complicated manufacturing parts at a sub-compo-nent level, so this program has worked very well for us and we know it will take us into the next 10 to 20 years. That’s the main way we’re handling the skilled trades issue on our end.” K+S also gets involved in the trade schools and local municipali-ties in every location to ensure that it takes advantage of every opportunity available and grows its team to its full potential. K+S knows the strain an aging skilled trades workforce can have on its customers and it understands the supplier to customer relationship is strengthened when a true partnership is formed. To that end, K+S even hosts onsite training sessions with its customers’ maintenance staff to raise awareness about how to properly install or replace equipment and how to use predictive maintenance to reduce the amount of unplanned downtime on their own. This type of extra effort is one of many ways the company demonstrates its commitment to the success of its customers. In the future, K+S Services will continue to follow through with its mission to provide quality repairs, effective solutions, and efficient service worldwide. “The use of predictive and preventative maintenance is becoming more prevalent in the industry because it allows a manufacturer to fix potential problems before they occur.”Written by Karen HawthorneIn the Gulf War, the U.S. military sent in four-wheel-drive tactical Humvees with canvas tops and sides for combat, ready to perform with minimal maintenance on challeng-ing terrain over long periods of time. The lightweight vehicles were designed to carry cargo and occupants in safety. What they weren’t expecting were the IEDs – improvised explosive devices – that tragically took many lives. The military needed to up-armor their transport vehicles for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. That’s when Red Dot Corporation, a Seattle, Washington-based manufacturer of mobile heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems and replace-ment parts for heavy-duty vehicles, was called in. “As soon as you enclosed those soldiers in those armored vehicles it became a pizza oven, especially in the Middle East. So they needed air-conditioning and they needed it really, really fast,” explains Pat Carroll, Vice President of Sales for Red Dot. “In the span of roughly 60 to 90 days, we went from concept to validating the testing of the AC system and started producing AC systems that were dropped into Kuwait to be outfitted by the military. At that time our commercial business was sailing along at a pretty good clip so we couldn’t just drop that into our regular production, so our leadership team got creative and hired a weekend shift to build nothing but military product.”Red Dot Corporation is focused on bringing comfort to people whose office happens to be a vehicle. The company been leading the mobile HVAC industry for 55 years. 37MANUFACTURING IN FOCUS The AC made such a big difference that the military started adopting it in their vehicles as an aftermarket addition and to spec it into vehicles at the factory. To date, Red Dot has fielded north of 80,000 systems. The 55-year-old company has a solid reputation for innovation, quality and on-time delivery to hundreds of aftermarket dis-tributors and original equipment manufacturers around the globe, in the construction, agriculture, mining, defense and trucking sectors. Through distributors located from Mexico to New Zealand, the company offers the industry’s most com-prehensive catalog of all-makes parts, accessories and unit kits. For both OE and aftermarket, the team can take a project from custom design to delivery with an in-house technical center that stacks up to the best in the business, Carroll says. He’s seen a lot of growth and the development of a diverse range of products during his 26 years at Red Dot. Those products include industry firsts like separate climate controls for the sleeper compartment of heavy trucks, the trinary pressure switch, air-operated water valves and vent doors, and low-profile rooftop condensers.“We’ve got customers – whether it’s Caterpillar, Daimler, or others – that will partner with us to do their air-conditioning “Red Dot is 100 percent employee-owned, which gives it a unique and enterprising culture.”MAY 201938testing or gather their field service data. Just because they know when it goes to the Red Dot technical center it will be done right,” he shares.People are a top priority at Red Dot and the company really means it – the business is actually 100 percent employee-owned, which gives it a unique and enterprising culture. The products are focused on bringing comfort to people in demanding job envi-ronments and the founder’s number one concern was always the welfare of his employees, so much so that in the early 1970s, Red Dot moved to a four-day work week so employees would have Fridays for personal business in the days before weekend banking and shopping. “Everyone from top to bottom has a little skin in the game,” Carroll says. “If they think like an owner and act like an owner, they are going to do a better job for the customers. We are going to have people who really care on a day-to-day basis. And it should really help the employee as well; they should benefit from their hard work and not have to rely on the wolves of Wall Street, so to speak.”In fact, Harcourt G. “Harky” Runnings, the founder and former chairman of Red Dot, brought a family spirit to the workplace long before it was fashionable. He was a veteran of Boeing, among other companies, who started a Seattle radiator repair shop. He had a friend who drove a truck to Alaska and always talked about how cold it got in the cab and how he would have to get out and chip ice off the windshield. So on a weekend, Runnings put a little heater together that could be put under-neath the seat or on the dashboard – and it’s still in production today. He founded Red Dot in 1965 when the popularity of his heaters outpaced his ability to produce them. As for the name, Red Dot, well… “There’s no real significance behind the name,” says Carroll. “He just wanted a really short and memorable name that would fit very well in the ‘pay to the order of’ part of a check. He wanted to call it Dot but he thought people would confuse it with the Department of Transportation.”When he retired in 2000, Runnings sold 100 percent of Red Dot’s ownership to its employees. And at Christmas that year, he and his wife gave Red Dot employees a total of $2.2 million for their support and loyalty over the years.“Everyone from top to bottom has a little skin in the game. If they think like an owner and act like an owner, they are going to do a better job for the customers.”Next >