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Recruiting, retaining welders with dollars and sense

Trailer manufacturer takes on the skilled-welder shortage

Do you run a farm and need a trailer to take hogs to market? Trailer manufacturer Featherlite®, Cresco, Iowa, can help you with that. Are you a celebrity chef and want a trailer full of commercial cooking equipment so you can take your show on the road? Featherlite can help you with that. Own a racing team and need a trailer for entertaining your sponsors? Have a small fleet of snowmobiles that you want to haul from place to place? Do you work in military procurement and need to put together a mobile machine shop that can deploy worldwide? Featherlite can help you with any and all of these too.

Founded in 1973 in Oklahoma, the company developed the first all-aluminum gooseneck trailer, and as the name implies, aluminum continues to be its material of choice. While the company has a large number of designs that are ready to go, it isn’t limited to any specific product line or niche; it makes custom trailers for essentially any conceivable use. The spectrum runs from hog haulers to luxurious travel accommodations, but the retail price range of the trailers does a better job of describing them: $2,000 to $2 million.

The company’s recent history tells an extraordinary tale of a crisis, a period of consolidation, and a comeback.

2009 Two Years Early

The Great Recession took nearly everyone by surprise, but warning signs had cropped up long before GM declared insolvency, the Dow Jones industrial average lost half of its value, and the residential construction market collapsed. The commercial trailer industry isn’t necessarily a harbinger for the rest of the economy, but indeed it had a sudden change in fortunes in 2007.

At Featherlite, the canary in the coal mine was horse trailer sales. Horses are expensive, and the costs associated with feeding and hauling them escalated rapidly in the early 2000s. Hay averaged $84 per ton in 2000 and $108 per ton in 2006, an increase of nearly 30 percent. Much more critical were the retail prices for fuel. Gasoline increased 72 percent and diesel fuel was up 81 percent from 2000 to 2007. Many horse owners stopped hauling their animals, which caused new trailer sales to fall precipitously; many others sold everything, clogging the market with used trailers. Featherlite scaled back its operations and stopped hiring. When the industry started to revive, the company started hiring again, but it had to relearn a few lessons.

First, it didn’t have a solid evaluation process for job applicants. Other than the applicants’ own words, management had little idea of their capabilities. Second, because it hadn’t hired any new welders for a couple of years, it hadn’t trained any new welders for a couple of years. Third, new hires usually want to do more than just lay down weld beads.

“Without a clear and comprehensive vision of the company’s operations and goals, they don’t see how their work contributes to the company’s success,” said Project and Costing Manager Randy Ellingson. “It also leaves them without any understanding of the many other opportunities in the company, like plumbing, electrical, and woodworking.”

In its haste to get its new hires up to speed, management didn’t focus much on these areas. The upshot was that many of the new hires didn’t establish careers at Featherlite. Few resisted the pull of the higher pay and other opportunities offered by manufacturers in the Quad Cities or Des Moines, both of which are just 200 miles from Cresco. The sky-high wages energy companies in the Bakken oilfield of North Dakota offered drew many others away.

The management team could have taken the easy way out, blaming the attrition rate on its workers’ youthful impatience and its competitors’ compensation—better benefits and winsome wages—but it didn’t. It took the difficult first step when it took a hard, unflinching look at itself. Then it took the relatively easy second step: Management did something about it. It developed a comprehensive plan to recruit, hire, train, and retain new workers. It hasn’t stopped attrition, but the torrent of workers it used to lose has become a trickle.

Training and Retaining Workers

After taking a good look at what it was doing, and making some comparisons to other employers, the management team came up with a plan. It has no secret ingredient, no special sauce. The company transformed itself by offering a little more pay, developing a top-flight orientation process, and creating a progressive training plan. Along the way Featherlite management created, overhauled, or improved many of the aspects of how the company runs, especially regarding how it gets new employees up to speed in understanding the manufacturing environment and performing their duties.

A typical car hauler is a double-decker. The cars are stored on the top deck, while tools and equipment are stored in the bottom deck. Left to right: Training Coordinator Gary Jensen, Process Engineering Manager Michael Laue, and Project and Costing Manager Randy Ellingson.

Job applicant evaluation:

  • Old way: Without a welding evaluation, Featherlite found that hiring a new employee was like shooting in the dark. An old rule of thumb applied: an applicant’s description of his welding skill level usually is inversely proportional to his actual capability. In other words, steer clear of showoffs and hire the humble. The main problem is that this is just a guideline; it’s not a rule.
  • New way: Featherlite puts every welding applicant through an evaluation to determine, as objectively as possible, his experience level and therefore his likelihood for success. Every applicant is ranked as a trainee or welder level 1, 2, or 3. Most experienced welders are categorized as level 1 or 2, depending on their welding ability.

“Usually the only people who get rated a 3 are former Featherlite employees,” said Training Coordinator Gary Jensen. “It depends on how much they remember about our processes.”

Company orientation:

  • Old way: Orientation was very basic. A meeting with a human resources representative to discuss pay and benefits, the safety briefing, and other orientation elements were brief at best.
  • New way: The company gives new hires a weeklong orientation, a program that management calls “onboarding,” to discuss the company, its goals, working in a manufacturing environment, and safety.

“For some employees, this might be their first or second job, so we go over everything—proper tool use, ergonomics, and the buddy system they can rely on for guidance, two-man lifting, and anything else related to safety,” Jensen said. A separate safety briefing is more comprehensive than in the past, discussing proper attire, the use of personal protective equipment, first aid, blood-borne pathogens, and hazard prevention.

Training program:

  • Old way: Your supervisor will show you how to weld. If you run into a problem, he’ll fix it for you. If he’s too busy, he’ll find someone else to fix it. You might learn something; you might not.
  • New way: Training is everyone’s job. Jensen oversees the training program and has a prominent role in conducting it, but a good, comprehensive training program for a company that makes nearly 20 to 30 trailers a day is far too much for a single person.

Quality control:

  • Old way: Do your best. If some of your work isn’t up to par, don’t worry—someone over in the quality control department will catch it. In the meantime, if you need help, flag down a supervisor.
  • New way: Maintaining a high standard of quality is everyone’s job. Simply doing a job isn’t enough. Everyone gets an orientation to understand what conforms to Featherlite’s standards and what doesn’t.

“When every stage of a process includes a quality control check, nonconforming work doesn’t get very far and it’s easy to trace it back to its origin,” said Process Engineering Manager Michael Laue.

Industrial chemicals:

  • Old way: Most companies have dozens of material safety data sheets (MSDSs) in binders stored here and there, so finding a specific MSDS can be a hassle. Updates are frequent, making it difficult to know if the information in the binders is current.
  • New way: The company refers to the globally harmonized system (GHS), which is essentially the same thing, but it’s online. It makes finding the necessary information and eliminates the risk of following out-of-date instructions.

“What’s the best way to …?”

  • Old way: Watch the other workers to see how they do it.
  • New way: Use the buddy system. If you need to move something too large for one person, need to lift something that weighs more than 50 pounds, have to weld something that looks nearly inaccessible, or any of a few dozen other difficulties that a new employee in manufacturing typically encounters, don’t worry. The company uses a buddy system, and your buddy doesn’t charge for answers, so you can ask all the questions you want.

Everyone feels like a fish out of water when they are new to an activity, and it’s especially acute when learning to use new tools and perform new processes when it seems like all the veterans—that is, everyone in sight—are watching.

A trailer takes shape. Although manufacturers have used programmable CNC machines for decades, assembling a trailer is old-school fabricating, relying heavily on hand tools and manual processes.

“Most of the new hires were frustrated,” said Ellingson. “Management was frustrated. The attrition rate was horrible. More than anything, the buddy system is really changing things. It helps new hires feel welcome, they fit in more quickly, and they stay longer.”

The buddy system was a big help, but even more so is the training program developed by Featherlite in 2013.

Training Then and Now

In the old days, going back to the 1970s, it was common to show a new hire how to weld. It wasn’t comprehensive, but it was enough to get a welder started. For years it was enough to keep a welder on staff, and they could pick up some tips from welders with more experience, but this isn’t enough these days.

“The welding culture is changing,” Laue said. “It used to be that workers wanted to weld. These days they want to understand how to weld. They want to understand concepts like bond line and penetration and the role of amps and volts in making a good weld,” he said.

When management realized that the lack of welding knowledge was a primary source of frustration, it partnered with the staff at Northeast Iowa Community College in Calmar, Iowa, about developing a course tailored to Featherlite’s needs.

It starts with some basic math. Adding 3⁄32 to 5⁄8 isn’t really an intuitive process, and most of us left that behind in grade school anyway. Who needs to add fractions in an age when nearly everything is digital and every mobile phone has a calculator? After tackling some math topics, the course works through welding terms and drafting symbols, culminating in blueprint reading.

Its training program also includes a lean manufacturing seminar, which isn’t just for the rank-and-file employees; members of the management team also attend. One of the class projects consists of assembling a circuit board without any lean practices; learning about lean manufacturing; then implementing lean concepts to build more circuit boards. It’s not an elaborate exercise, but even so, it’s an eye-opener and more than enough to show steep changes in output and the amount of work-in-progress.

“It’s interesting to watch the employee interaction,” Ellingson said. “Suddenly a light turns on when they get it. In the assembly session without lean, they’re all business, but they struggle and fall short of their goal. Later, when they incorporate lean, they chat among themselves and start to have fun with it—the pressure’s off at that point—and they meet or often exceed their goal.”

In addition, the company looked for a comprehensive welding program.

Welding trailer components sounds straightforward, but it’s not. First, Featherlite uses more than 220 roll-formed profiles in its products, so the work isn’t as simple as welding flat plate or tube with a consistent radius. Welders at Featherlite have to work with a huge number of contours. Second, assembling a trailer requires welding in all of the positions: flat, horizontal, vertical (up and down), and overhead. Third, the components are made from any of three alloys and the company joins them with two filler metals, so the welders have to keep all of the products straight to weld successfully.

Rob Krause and Thomas Pfaller, representatives of AlcoTec Wire Corp., have been conducting welding classes at Featherlite’s Cresco facility since 2013. Graduates from the welding program

at Ferris State University, Big Rapids, Mich., and American Welding Society certified welding inspectors (CWIs), they use a course originally developed by AlcoTec and taught at AlcoTec's headquarters, subsequently modified for Featherlite.

Many of the profiles are made from 6063-T6; the others are either 6005 or 6061, which Featherlite considers to be essentially interchangeable. “The 6005 alloy polishes up a bit nicer, whereas the 6061 is a bit harder,” said Laue.

The process starts with matching the filler wire to the base material.

“In the aluminum families, the 4000 series is alloyed with silicon,” Krause said. “The 5000 series is alloyed with magnesium. The 6000 series has some of each, but this combination of materials is susceptible to cracking when heated to weld temperatures, which is why nobody makes a 6000-series filler metal.”

“Featherlite uses two AlcoTec products—4043 and 5356,” Krause said. “The first floods the weld pool with silicon. Of the two, it typically makes a better-looking weld. The second one floods the weld pool with magnesium. Featherlite uses this one mainly for structural welds.”

Welders who have experience with steel need to learn a couple of key points about aluminum before they pick up a torch. First, as far as contaminants, aluminum isn't as forgiving as steel. The material must be cleaned, and cleaned thoroughly. Second, exposure to oxygen causes steel to rust, which slowly destroys the material. On the surface of aluminum, oxidation acts as a protective layer, which isn’t necessarily a problem, but welding through it requires an arc that can break up the oxide layer: alternating current (AC) for gas tungsten arc welding (GTAW) or reverse polarity (direct current, electrode positive [DCEP]) for gas metal arc welding (GMAW). Last, unlike steel, aluminum doesn’t turn red when it's heated, so handling it takes a little extra care.

Despite the many differences between these metals, the techniques for welding aluminum are broadly similar to those used in welding steel.

“Puddle control when welding aluminum isn’t much different from welding steel, if the machine is set up correctly,” Krause said.

If the machine is set up correctly. This is critical, and even though it can be complicated, students want to know how to do it. In fact, at the beginning of every class session, Krause asks the students what they want to learn, and this is the most common response. It starts basic—voltage provides the contour, current provides the penetration—but to be sure the students understand, they make a series of welds, changing just one parameter each time. The students start by increasing voltage, adding just half a volt each time, and then do the same with the current, adding a little at a time so they understand how much is enough to change a weld’s characteristics.

They also do destructive testing.

“We set up a T joint and they make a fillet weld, and then we do the fillet foldover test,” Krause said, a test that stresses the weld joint and the base material. A fracture can appear in either, both, or neither.

The course isn’t rich in metallurgy, but it touches on the topic in a personal way, allowing the students to look at the structure of welds they made.

“We also cut through the weld and then do a chemical etch so they can see the difference between the parent material and the weld,” Krause said.

However, the lessons aren’t all about metals and machine settings. Many are beginners, and some are experienced welders who have picked up a bad habit or two, so Krause and Pfaller teach the basics, like proper body position. Some welders have a free hand when welding, but the dominant hand benefits from a guide, and supporting it with the free hand is a big help. It’s a good way to start welding at the beginning of the day, and it helps prevent fatigue from affecting weld quality as the day wears on.

Keeping a close eye on the weld pool is another critical point taught. Some novice welders don’t get into the best position to view the weld puddle along the entire length of the weld. A partially obstructed view isn’t uncommon.

“A weld might look good when it’s finished, but that’s just how it looks from the outside,” Krause said. “If you could look inside, what would you see? If the weld puddle wasn’t centered in the weld joint for the entire joint, it’s typically not a strong weld.”

One thing Krause and Pfaller don’t have to worry about is motivating the students. In Krause’s experience—more than a decade in the hypercompetitive automotive industry—employees’ desire for more welding knowledge has been a constant, but most employers don’t address it. Classes like the ones at Featherlite are a rare luxury.

“The supervisor has production goals to meet, so when a welding problem comes up, he calls over a more experienced worker to deal with it,” Krause said. “The knowledge doesn’t get passed along.”

The supervisor rarely has the time and likely doesn’t have enough specific welding knowledge to do much teaching, and it wouldn’t matter anyway because the production floor isn’t a classroom and the supervisor isn’t a welding instructor. His job is to get parts out the door, and that takes precedence over everything else.

“My hat is off to Featherlite for organizing these classes,” Krause said. “It’s not common, and it’s a pleasure to work with a forward-thinking company like this one.”

Leading the Way in Trailers

The onboarding process and training components aren’t the only recent developments at Featherlite. The company has instituted a few other changes as well. For example, the trailer industry is still lagging, so Featherlite isn’t making quite as many trailers as it did before the downturn. Because it doesn’t need as much assembly space, it stores its inventory indoors, which means the material needs less cleanup and prep work than it did when it was stored outdoors.

Second, it used to outsource horse trailer living quarters, but Featherlite decided to bring this activity home, adding more than 40 positions.

“More people in Cresco have construction experience than welding experience, so it’s easier to fill woodworking and interiors positions,” Ellingson said.

The staff also has come up with a modular approach that it uses whenever possible, which compresses the build time. Rather than make a cabinet or install a sink or assemble a plumbing system in a trailer as it is being built, Featherlite tradesmen have begun to assemble these items ahead of time—and, in the case of plumbing, they do pressure checks too—and install them as entire units. It’s faster because more work is done simultaneously rather than sequentially, and it cuts down on the number of tradesmen working in the trailer, relieving congestion.

Featherlite executives are confident that the company is in a stronger position than it was before the downturn. Focusing on the new hires has improved retention; instituting the welding classes has helped with productivity and consistency; and the modular construction strategy has shortened lead times, all of which make the sales force’s job a little easier. The company is in a good position to capture more market share as the industry recovers.

The company’s educational efforts have started to pay off in another measureable way. In 2014 welds were the main source of deviations and abnormalities. By the end of 2015, welding had improved considerably and it was no longer at the top of the list.

AlcoTec Wire Corp., 2750 Aero Park Drive, Traverse City, MI 49686, 800-228-0750, www.alcotec.com.

Featherlite Trailers, Erickson Industrial Park, 816 7th St. W., Cresco, IA 52136, 800-800-1230, www.fthr.com

No Horsing Around

Featherlite isn’t a household word, but some of the company’s customers have names that are instantly recognizable: Racing legends Dale Earnhardt and A.J. Foyt used Featherlite trailers, country music star Zac Brown has one, and beverage-maker Anheuser-Busch InBev uses one too. Anheuser-Busch doesn’t use its trailer for carting around cases of beer, though. It’s the traveling home of the Budweiser Clydesdales.

An indispensable asset and the chief component in the company’s marketing strategy, the iconic horses travel in style. Their trailers are equipped with heating and air conditioning, extensive soundproofing, and cameras with monitors in the cab so the handlers can check on the horses at any time.

Not all of Featherlite’s horse trailers are so elaborate, but most of them need quite a few features that set them apart from other trailers: racks for saddles and blankets, troughs for food and water, a place to store hay, a window for a change of scenery to alleviate the animal’s boredom, and so on. At the same time, great care goes into the design and assembly of every horse trailer, whether it’s for Anheuser-Busch or anyone else.

The dimensions have to be just right—the width, length, and height of the stall have to be sufficient for the animal. Sharp edges are unacceptable. Every square inch is scrutinized for trouble. Something as innocuous as a gap between two components can be problematic if it snags a swishing tail.

“A bad trailer experience can spook a horse,” said Michael Laue, Featherlite process engineering manager. “When that happens, the horse doesn’t want to get back into the trailer.”

Coaxing a ton of reluctance to walk into a trailer is easier said than done, so Featherlite does everything in its power to provide a comfortable space and a smooth, quiet ride.

About the Author
FMA Communications Inc.

Eric Lundin

2135 Point Blvd

Elgin, IL 60123

815-227-8262

Eric Lundin worked on The Tube & Pipe Journal from 2000 to 2022.