South Bend firms retool, upgrade to stay ahead

Innovation is nothing new for South Bend’s Manufacturing Technology Inc.

“We’re a fourth-generation, family-owned business that’s transformed itself several times since my great-grandfather started the company in 1926,” says Daniel Adams, owner and vice president for sales and business development.

Manufacturing Technology Inc. employee servicing one of many large machines in South Bend

“We are constantly innovating to stay on the edge of technology to produce, with less cost, the highest-quality machines that are more advanced, more precise and more capable,” he says.

The company started as a tool and die shop supporting the likes of Studebaker Corp. from the 1930s to the 1950s, until it started having problems.

“We had to look for other ways to survive,” Adams says.

So the company began manufacturing specialized machines, including sophisticated welders for Caterpillar Inc., which used them to make hydraulic cylinder rods for excavators, bulldozers and other heavy equipment.

Manufacturing Technology Inc.

In the 1970s, Manufacturing Technology Inc. bought the patents and rights to make the welding equipment, which it sells to the automotive industry, Caterpillar and NASA.

The next step was to carve out a special market by building huge welders. “That’s our niche,” Adams says. “Other companies will build machines that produce 100 tons of force for forging materials together. We make machines that go up to 2,000 tons of force.

“Likewise, we are constantly upgrading to stay ahead,” he says. “Right now, one of our competitors is in India. Their costs are much lower than ours, especially on the labor side. So we sell a more advanced, more precise and more capable machine to combat the price pressure.”

The company also has had to adapt to changing worker skill demands.

“We need to hire people with special machine design, control and building experience, and that’s very rare these days,” Adams says. “So we are starting to ‘grow our own’ through internships and things like that because we are having such a hard time finding them.”

For Bipin Doshi, president of Shafer Gear Works Inc., staying ahead of the curve means the company — which produces high-precision, custom-engineered gears and machined parts for a variety of industries — will be opening a 50,000-square-foot plant that will be 100 percent robotically controlled.

The factory, which will serve the heavy-duty truck market in North America, is a joint venture with Somaschini, an Italian firm. It will be called South Bend Gear and is scheduled to open later this year. For the South Bend Gear effort, the City of South Bend has provided incentives to assist with the expansion, specifically a five-year phase-in on new taxes associated with the new investment. Doshi says it will cost nearly $20 million, including $15 million in equipment, and will have 26 employees by the end of 2012.

“We use the latest technology, primarily to level the playing field in terms of sharing information with all our employees,” says Doshi, who bought Shafer in 1988.

“The data I can see, with very few exceptions, everyone should be able to see,” he says. “We do that by constantly making investments in IT, so if I have to communicate with someone, they can view the same data on the computer that I can.”

John Axelberg, president of General Sheet Metal Works, a provider of metal parts and assemblies to numerous original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), says his company is moving “more and more work” to robotic welding cells.

Robotic welders at General Sheet Metal Works in South Bend

“We just installed our fifth robotic cell in the South Bend plant this year to keep up with a new customer’s growing demand,” says Axelberg, whose company has factories in South Bend and Wisconsin.

That customer is Array Technologies Inc., based in Albuquerque, N.M. Array Technologies supplies utility-scale solar farms with tracking systems that keep solar panels facing the sun throughout the course of the day.

“We want to deliver the best possible value to our customers, and automation is one of the ways we do it,” Axelberg says.

“But automated machines are just the beginning,” he says. “Our big push now is automating the flow of information from our customers to our shop floor and suppliers.

“We’re asking our customers to fundamentally reimagine the supply chain, which is no easy task, but seamless integration gives them a huge competitive edge.”

Axelberg says his firm’s employees have been good at changing with the times. He says one current employee remembers making service parts for Studebaker.

“We used to hire people to run machines,” Axelberg says. “Now, we look for people who can help us develop better ways of working.”