Manufacturing: Decidedly Not Dead Yet
In this column, I’ve brought you profiles of companies that make all kinds of stuff all over Central Massachusetts. The underlying message is that manufacturing is not dead, but it has changed drastically. What has struck me perhaps more than anything is how manufacturers respond to these changes.
In this column, I’ve rounded up a few of my favorites from around Central Massachusetts, and I think they demonstrate a couple of the strategies used by smart companies to ensure survival and success in an evermore competitive world.
Tie Downs
The first company is one I visited late last summer, ACT Fastening Solutions in Gardner. At a time when manufacturers are going out of business and blaming it on China or are moving operations to China to take advantage of much lower labor costs, Ken Tomasetti, ACT’s president, argues, “We can compete against China.”
And Tomasetti makes plastic cable ties. Talk about beating China at its own game. But Tomasetti, who started ACT in his home and now makes about 1.7 billion cable ties a year at a high-tech plant in the Summit Industrial Park, isn’t making empty claims.
He knows it’s true that American companies can compete with China and he knows how difficult it is to do so.
“We’re running the Daytona 500 every day here,” he told me. ACT hasn’t given an employee a raise in years. Instead, the company uses a bonus program similar to a profit sharing plan that pays employees well and exceeds what the company could pay in regular wage increases. The company also does everything from manufacturing to product testing to packaging and label making in-house.
Where Tomasetti competes by making more high quality cable ties faster and with fewer people using machines of his own design, other companies have taken the opposite strategy.
Take H.T. Machine Co. in Webster: Like ACT, H.T. was started by one man in his basement. In this case it was Howard Tryba, a machinist from Webster who was sick of riding a company shuttle from his home to his job at Pratt & Whitney in East Hartford, Conn.
From the beginning, H.T. specialized in doing the machine jobs no one else wanted to do. The small, oddball jobs Tryba found his niche in completing sustain H.T. today. Everything the company makes is made according to the design and specifications of others, and often, the job includes one or two very specific parts that are needed right away.
The ability to make parts that virtually no other company in the region can, and to do it at a moment’s notice has landed H.T. customers from some very lucrative industries like medical equipment and wire and steel rolling. A steel rolling mill can lose millions of dollars in the blink of an eye during an unforseen shutdown. The company even gets work from other machine shops that accept the kind of work H.T. does, only to send the assignment to H.T. anyway.
The last company I want to mention here is New World Stoneworks, a truly entrepreneurial and ingenious new business in Uxbridge that uses high-powered water jets to cut stone for masonry projects.
With the help of a CAD system, New World can cut stone for any project with virtually no waste or dust. New World’s system also lays out each stone for a project so that once masons are on site, all they have to do is assemble the chimney, or fireplace or whatever the project might be.
Projects that used to take months, now take a week. Industries you might expect to be skeptical are enthusiastic instead. Architects love the system because it makes planning for stonework much easier. Masons love it because they no longer have to chisel away at stones on site only to be left with a pile of wasted stone to clean up.
And all of this is because company founder Ken Jackman needed some stonework done at his home and thought, after witnessing the tribulations of traditional stonework, that there must be a better way. At the time, there wasn’t. So, he invented one. Now, the patented water jet systems used by New World can not only cut custom shapes, they’re so precise, they can even cut letters into stone.
Got news for our Industrial Strength column? E-mail WBJ Managing Editor Matthew L. Brown at mbrown@wbjournal.com.
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