Employees put Mack Tool & Engineering on top

When Mack Tool & Engineering began 22 years ago in South Bend, the sky literally was not the limit.

That’s because its first customers were in the aerospace industry.

“My dad always ran other people’s machine shops very successfully,” says Paul Hartz, president of the company. “I was a junior at Purdue when I got a call from my mother saying, ‘Your dad wants to mortgage the house and start a machine shop!’ We started off doing aerospace work, and this led to other niches.”

Paul Hartz, president of Mack Tool & Engineering, South Bend, Ind.

Today, Mack Tool continues to work for Fortune 500 companies as a supplier of precision-tooled airliner and military aircraft parts. These include parts for landing, fuel and avionics systems, fuel nozzles, motor housings, actuators and pumps.

“Basically, we manufacture all the critical components for a plane except the seats, the air frame and the tires,” Hartz says.

The company eventually broke into the medical arena in 1992, providing parts for medical instruments and surgical implants, in some cases for companies located in nearby Warsaw, Ind.

“We started off with three employees and have grown to 52 today,” says Hartz, who attributes Mack Tools’ success to his workforce.

“We developed a really qualified workforce here in South Bend,” he says. “It started with my dad hiring two of the best machinists in town, and we built on that foundation. We’ve always done the work that others cannot do — work that was only entrusted to a few companies. This allows us to have higher profit margins and a higher pay rate on the shop floor. This has fed our success over time.”

Mack Tool possesses advanced machining equipment, like this Cincom C32 VIII Swiss Turning Center capable of performing simultaneous machining for high productivity.

The latest equipment also is an important factor in Mack Tool’s success.

“Our CNC [computer numerical controlled] equipment is less than seven years old,” he says proudly. “We’ve invested more than $6 million in the last nine years. We try to make our people as productive as possible.”

He explains that he can take a solid individual with a good work ethic, with little knowledge of machining, and develop that person into a very productive employee.

“This person might not have been a grinding machine operator before,” Hartz says. “But after sending him to the machine manufacturer’s school, he’ll come back and within four weeks his productivity jumps five- or six-fold. The quality goes ups as well. Our investment in technology goes hand-in-hand with our employees’ success.”

Hartz says his company draws much of its workforce from area educational institutions.

“We pull from [the] Purdue University [College of Technology] here in South Bend, Lake Michigan College, Southwestern Michigan College and Ivy Tech,” Hartz says.

He explains that there are so few companies that perform the kind of work that Mack Tool does, that hiring “floor-ready” employees using classified ads is unlikely.

“No matter who we bring in, we have to train them in-house,” Hartz says. “We have our own system here of how we want the job done. From paperwork to inspecting parts, we have a very tried-and-true system that has worked for us.”

Hartz is pleased with the basic skills potential employees have as they emerge from local educational systems. But he is only looking for those who can meet the demands of what his company calls the “Mack Tool Spirit.”

“This is what it takes to be a good employee at Mack Tool: Doing hard work, showing the desire to do your best, having a sense of urgency, being able to innovate, and doing what it takes to get the job done,” Hartz says. “This all equals excellent results. So when we hire people, we are not necessarily worried about experience. We need someone who can come in, stick to these principles and succeed. When we hire someone, we want to make sure that that person will be with us long-term.”

Today, the Mack Tool system of employee recruitment and retention begins with working closely with local schools.

“Now we have a system,” Hartz says. “We make up a pool of all the people taking industrial, manufacturing-type classes at our local colleges. Maybe they might not yet be graduates, but they’re interested students. We then interview them as prospective employees to see if they will fit into our culture. We spend so much time and effort training in-house, we have to hire at a consistent percentage rate. It’s all about our culture, our equipment and the investment in our people.”