Last fall, Accuride Corporation’s Gunite plant in Rockford won an industry award for excellence in manufacturing and business. It reflects an extraordinary transformation for a facility that just a few years ago was, in the company’s own words, “left for dead” by the previous owners.
J’myrah Thornton, a lead production supervisor at Accuride’s Rockford plant, points to an immense machine turning out brake drums for commercial trucks – large metal cylinders bigger around than a car tire.
“Right now we’re in the high-volume area. There are six spindles. We do about a thousand parts per machine. So between two shifts, that’s about 6,000 pieces a day,” he says.
Thornton walks past other machines, each producing smaller and smaller batches of drums, ending with ones that make one at a time, for custom and specialty orders. Beyond the machines, stacks of brake drums wrapped in plastic for shipping stand towering like skyscrapers in a city.
The place is noisy – ear protection required – but clean; you might even say immaculate. As we walk, what looks like a small street sweeper goes over the coated floor. And the air is clear – no masks needed, at least in this part of the plant. But it wasn’t always this way.
Ed Bledsoe is the plant’s director of operations.
“Four years ago, when I joined the team, this place was broken, unfortunately. Previous owners did not invest in the company,” he says.
Those conditions were the result of decades of neglect. The company started out as Eagle Foundry before the Civil War, making it possibly the oldest manufacturer still going in the city. It stayed under the control of the founders, the Forbes family, for generations. Along the way it became Gunite, named after a sturdy type of processed iron the company developed for the brake parts it was making for the growing truck industry. In 1960, the company was sold, then sold again several times over, and the long slide began. Accuride bought the plant as part of a larger deal in 2005.
Greg Risch is president of Accuride’s Gunite division that includes the Rockford plant. Risch says when then-new Accuride CEO Rick Dauch visited the plant several years ago, the company had to make a decision.
“It was hard to see anything, because the equipment and the facility was pretty dirty. The air handlers weren’t working so the conditions were a little less than poor. We saw this as, number one, our responsibility to our workers to do something about it. And we said, it’s either we fix it, or sell it,” hesays.
Risch says it became clear that, in spite of the conditions, the union workforce was keeping the plant going. And, even with a host of quality and other issues, Gunite had a brand loyalty among its customers that was worth keeping.
So Accuride put $63 million into the plant to make the necessary changes.
Bledsoe says that, when visitors come now, they’re amazed.
"We’ve invested in things like new lighting, smooth surface floors, bright white walls, new machinery. We’ve remodeled breakrooms. We’ve added windows to the facility. We never had windows before,” he says.
Bledsoe says people now joke that the place is so clean you could eat off the floor.
Risch says it all boiled down to a sense of responsibility and asking -- and answering -- a simple question:
“’Would this be a place you would recommend that your family work? Would your son or daughter work here?’ And if the answer is no, that’s embarrassing. And that’s the perspective our CEO had: ‘ I want to make this a place I would be proud to have any of my family work,’” Risch says.
There are other parts of the equation, too. Risch and Bledsoe say the union is brought into the discussion when changes are to be made, and Bledsoe has even learned the names of all 300 or so employees by heart. They appreciate it, he says, and that’s important, too.
But Gunite didn’t win the Association for Manufacturing Excellence Award just for cleanliness or congeniality, however important those might be. Accuride’s management also instituted lean manufacturing, trying to make the plant more efficient as well.
Eric Pansegrau is a plant superintendent at Gunite. In another part of the plant, he shows off equipment for making slack adjusters. They keep brakes adjusted so they continue to work properly under the heavy wear trucks give them. Each one has a bar code on it. It’s just one of several ways workers keep track of each part, what needs to be done with it, and when more are needed to keep things flowing. He points to tall shelves lining the walls. Pansegrau says that perfectly illustrates the difference between a lean manufacturing system, properly executed, and the way the plant was run in the old days.
“We had ten times the material here for slack adjusters five years ago, and yet we were always running out of parts to build each day. Now you look at this room and we’ve got a lot of open spots, yet we never run out components,” he says.
Pansegrau says Accuride also did things like rearranging much of the plant’s equipment, so the flow from raw material to finished product ready for shipping went directly from one end of the plant to the other. And they’re always pushing to improve.
In short, the company created an environment and a system that allows its workers -- and ultimately the plant -- to succeed.
The result: a big improvement in quality, in on-time performance meeting customer deadlines, in reducing waste of time and material, and ultimately, in profits. Risch says the Rockford plant’s metrics on all fronts have beaten the projections the company made several years ago when it set out to transform the plant, and the trajectory looks like it will continue upward.
And the award? The icing on the cake, Bledsoe says, recognition for their efforts that is much appreciated by all, thank you.
Like any other manufacturer in a global economy, Risch says Accuride worries about what it sees as unfair competition from abroad but, that being said, Gunite is in a good place.
“Do we feel that we can compete with any North American competitor? Absolutely,” Risch says.
So far, so good. The company’s customer base continues to grow, and last year it signed an agreement to become the exclusive aftermarket brake parts supplier for Daimler Trucks North America.
And, Risch and the others say, they’re constantly keeping track not only of their products, but of efficiency and efficacy of the processes to make them, in order to keep the company strong and growing, well into the future.
Which means, after more than 160 years, Gunite’s story may have only just begun.
