Glueckler Metal has found success producing highly specific parts for the heavy duty truck and automotive markets
Written by James Buchanan & Produced by Kevin Patey
Based in Barrie, Ontario, Gluecker Metal has found that in its case the key to success is being the best at producing very specific component parts for heavy-duty trucks and automobiles.
“We’ve been in business for 20 years making parts for the heavy trucking industry,” says Carl Christensen, operations manager for Glueckler. “Specifically, we make components that engage the brake drums.”
As of late, though, the company has moved in a new direction — which is manufacturing components that go into the decoupler of an automobile, which itself is attached to the alternator.
Asked how the company came to hone in on such a specific component, Christensen says that these parts had been made by another company located literally across the street from Glueckler. But when the company went bankrupt, it left its primary customer in need of a manufacturer. Glueckler was in a position to produce these parts and before long it had won a contract to pick up where its neighbor had left off.
“The folks across the street tried to grow too fast and went bankrupt,” says Christensen. “The lesson we learned from that is that it is important to grow as fast as the market requires, which has been a great lesson for us.”
Currently, that particular component is included in 3.5 million vehicles, which Christensen says could soon grow to 12 or 14 million.
“It’s an ideal part for a four to six-cylinder car because it helps with the fuel efficiency,” he says.
As to its trucks business, Glueckler manufactures three to four million parts each month, which translates into two parts for each brake installed onto a new truck.
While the fairly specific nature of the company’s manufacturing may seem to preclude having much in the way of competition, Christensen says that is not the case. Glueckler competes with a number of North American companies as well as from overseas companies based primarily in China.
Chinese companies represents something of a particular challenge, as they are able to produce the same parts at a considerably lower price.
“It’s true that China’s cheaper, but we supply all of the OEM manufacturers and they haven’t decided to go with the Chinese suppliers,” says Christensen. “The aftermarket segment of the business does tend to go with Chinese made parts though.”
However, Glueckler is not without a few advantages of its own.
“With the truck parts, we use a process where we are able to eliminate the final operation a steel company would use to produce materials for us,” says Christensen. “We are about the only company that can do this.”
Essentially, the steel mill that provides the company with its raw materials does not go the final step to take a hot milled bar and process it into a cold drawn bar. The bar is of the same quality as a cold drawn bar, but it is not completely rounded. This results in a bit more wear on Glueckler’s machines, but skipping this last step enables the company to save 20 percent on the cost of each part without compromising the quality of the finished product, says Christensen.
As to the machines, the company replaces three to seven machines each year, but mitigates the potential cost impact by buying used machines and basically renovating them to fit the company’s needs.
“Then we basically run it until it falls apart,” he says.
Christensen goes on to add that it took the company approximately three years to figure out how to make this process work for them.
“However, China — with its subsidized steel mills and cheap labor — can still do the work much more cheaply, but they simply don’t have the same quality as we do,” he says.
Producing a quality finished part also depends on having strong relationships with companies that provide heat treating services. This is a process that uses heat to harden the parts so they are more durable and longer lasting, says Christensen.
The primary heat treater used by the company is based in Southfield, Mich., with the other in Toronto. The critical aspect of these companies is that each has furnaces with the capacity to handle the company’s demanding workload, which Christensen says is approximately 400,000 to 560,000 pounds per week.
“They need to have furnaces that can handle our volume and still remain competitively priced,” he says. “For a time we struggled to find heat treaters that could do the volume at a good price.”
However, before long, Glueckler found its primary treater in Michigan, which has since dedicated its facility to handling Glueckler’s work. As the company continued to grow, it needed to find another heat treater closer to its Barrie location to handle the overflow and to provide a backup source, which led to bringing on the Toronto outfit.
The company’s new automotive line, however, relies on a fairly different manufacturing process from its heavy truck work. That led the company to equip itself with new CNC driven machinery. In particular, the company purchased a number of CNC lathes from Japan with attached robotic arms for picking and placing parts, as well as CNC mills and machine centers.
The company also uses a Coordinate Measuring Machine (CMM), which measures each part as it is made to ensure it fits within the tight tolerances demanded by the company’s customer. If a part reaches the limit of the set tolerance, the CMM will essentially tell the machine to correct the dimensions it is working to. With ten machines in the company’s automotive manufacturing cell, one CMM can monitor each of the machines and identify the specific machine that may be slightly off.
The company currently is working with one cell, but Christensen expects to add another cell by March of 2008.
“One cell can do 2.5 million parts per year,” he says, “and by having these machines we have been able to in large part remove human error. These machines have also helped us cut our labor cost, which is our way of competing against the low labor costs in Asia.”
The company also takes the welfare of its employees seriously and has made a significant investment in a comprehensive employee assistance program. The program includes counseling, communication skills, leadership, stress management, family counseling, and addiction counseling.
Looking to the future, Christensen says the new cell the company expects to bring online will be able to handle the overflow of its automotive business, while also having the flexibility to manufacture other parts as well. This will enable the company to bring on new customers and broaden its product base.
“Car parts is the direction we are going,” he says.