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Manufacturer of Die Cast Components
Background
The firm is a manufacturer of zinc die cast components. At
certification, the firm had 5 employees and annual sales of approximately
$218 thousand.
In the early 1990s the bottom dropped out of the firm's belt buckle business. Product
from the Orient began flooding the market at unheard of prices. The firm
could not compete, and the owner had to start the long process of searching for new
customers to replace lost sales. While searching for new business
opportunities, the owner discovered the Trade Adjustment Assistance Program and
decided the program could be an excellent vehicle to assist the firm in
recovering from it's sales decline.
Assistance Provided
The business was analyzed for development of an appropriate recovery
strategy. Manufacturing was found to be efficient and up-to-date for the firm's
current level of sales. Financially, the business was sound, but declining sales
threatened the firm's long-term viability.
In the machine tool trade, die casting is considered an art and often not easily
perfected. This became the focal point for the recovery strategy. Over the
years, the owner had been approached by various manufacturers to design and cast
a number of different types of parts. Some were successful, some not. Once he
was approached to design and cast a part that could only be successful on the
market if it was produced in one step. Sounded easy, but the catch was the part
had internal threads, which always require a costly secondary operation.
The recovery strategy focused on hiring a consultant to provide management
with the training and education needed for the various techniques of one-step
internal threading processes, combined with die cast mold making, at the same
time building a prototype model that would produce wing nuts with internal
threads and requiring no secondary operations.
Project Results
The prototype machine was successfully built to cast and internally thread six
wing nuts at a time. This prototype model was designed with the latest hydraulic, water cooled
techniques. It’s designed to have all six nuts cast, threaded, and ejected at
the same time, providing consistent quality throughout the entire process.
Management was excited by the future prospect of many opportunities for the firm’s newly acquired expertise.
Opportunities that would provide exciting challenges for the firm to design
and build parts for new customers who in the past had to be turned
away because the firm lacked the expertise.
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