A match made for metal fabrication expansion

These stamping presses in Bennett Tool & Die’s Gallatin facility are symbols of the company’s history as a metal forming services provider.

In 2013 The FABRICATOR named A&E Custom Manufacturing as its Industry Award winner. The Kansas City, Kan.-based company, which survived some tough challenges in the 1990s and two major recessions in the 2000s, was well on its way to growing its business, introducing lean concepts to maximize production efforts, cross-training employees to get the most out of the workforce, and investing in new automated fabricating technology that allowed it to be more competitive in job quoting. The company had topped $9 million in sales in 2012.

Two years later, others recognized A&E’s potential. Bennett Tool & Die Co., then located in Nashville, Tenn., acquired the metal fabricator. Bennett Tool & Die was looking to grow as well and deemed the addition of metal fabricating capabilities as a key way to service its customers.

The plan so far seems to be working out pretty well. Bennett Tool & Die reported $30 million in sales in 2019 and is taking steps to be ready and responsive to customers’ needs coming out of this current economic slowdown. In a way, the plan is to grow during uncertain times.

New Ownership, New Direction

Bennett Tool & Die, founded in 1951, was owned by the same family until it was sold in the spring of 2013 to its current owners, a collection of private equity partners. Like many family-owned manufacturing companies, Bennett Tool & Die had reached a point where none of the younger members of the family showed an interest in taking over leadership of the business.

The new owners named John Lanier as president and CEO later that summer. Lanier, a veteran of stamping and welding operations management for Tier 1 automotive manufacturers, said he looked forward to applying some automotive manufacturing systems to another type of production environment.

“I’ve always wanted to take a company in the nonautomotive field and apply the quality systems and the lean techniques,” Lanier said. “I believe that some of the techniques used in automotive manufacturing would help any company be more competitive.”

When Lanier arrived on the job, he found a company with a good culture, one open to new ideas and not locked into the ways that things had always been done. He also found a company with no real fabrication business, mostly focusing instead on stamping, tooling, and assembly.

“We built a lot of dies and in some cases made millions of parts for customers, but we weren’t able to service customers that had low- to medium-volume business effectively. To meet the needs of those types of customers and then also attract more customers, we needed to add fabrication to our lineup,” Lanier said.

Welcome to the Family

So the search for a metal fabricating company to acquire began shortly after Lanier started his job at Bennett Tool & Die. The company wasn’t going to rush into a purchase. It believed it was important to find a shop that would be a good fit culturally. Lanier had worked his way up from the shop floor during his career, and he knew that a company that had the respect and trust of its workforce was one that was ready to hit the ground running with new goals and would be receptive to implementing the corresponding processes to achieve them.

When Bennett Tool & Die’s private equity owners came across A&E in 2015, it met most of Lanier’s goals. He specifically pointed out how the company’s management had done a good job of engaging the shop floor workers, whether it was making them responsible for tracking production costs, having them contribute to shop improvement efforts, or simply promoting cross-training to boost skills development and career advancement for those that participated. A&E had a strong management team who valued their employees. Lanier felt the fit was good.

The Bennett Tool & Die logo greets visitors to its Gallatin, Tenn., headquarters. The company prides itself on being a small company that delivers the benefits of working with a larger one. The company also has locations in Kansas City, Kan., and Maryville, Tenn.

Also, the fact that A&E was located in the Midwest was a plus. For those customers looking to dual-source work in an effort to mitigate risk, Bennett Tool & Die was going to be able to offer them an alternative to that strategy. Instead of seeking out two companies, located in different parts of the U.S., to provide metal fabricating or forming services, customers could rely on Bennett Tool & Die with its two facilities, one in Tennessee and one in Kansas. If something should happen to one facility, Bennett Tool & Die would be in a position to shift production to its other facility and maintain delivery commitments.

Additionally, some customers like the idea of a metal fabricator/former being able to deliver goods from multiple geographic locations to shorten delivery windows. Having facilities with footholds in the manufacturing-heavy Midwest and the growing Southeast put Bennett Tool & Die in a good position to serve a variety of Fortune 500 manufacturing companies.

The acquisition also benefited Bennett Tool & Die’s stamping business. A&E, which originally began as a tool and die shop, had some stamping presses and specialized in low- to medium-volume forming jobs. The company’s tool- and diemakers had a talent for building tooling that matched the requirements of the job. A die used to form 10,000 parts per year over a 10-year span was designed to last 100,000 strokes, not 1 million strokes.

Bennett Tool & Die, on the other hand, had a history of building large and robust dies for high-volume jobs. It also had a lot of experience with draw and head dies for deep-drawing applications.

That toolmaking flexibility comes in handy for job quoting, particularly as the company considers more “hybrid” approaches, as Lanier described it. Such a scenario might call for a laser-cut blank that is then sent to a press where a cost-effective tool and die set form the parts, either because of tolerance requirements or part complexity.

“One of the things that I feel like we really needed to be able to tell a customer is that we can meet all of your needs from prototype parts all the way to millions of parts,” Lanier said. “For example, if you were launching a project, maybe it starts as a fabricated part and then as the volume increases it gets transitioned to more of a hybrid production model. Then at some point, it’s moved to a progressive or transfer die in a press if the volume warrants.

“We really like to be able to meet all of the customer’s needs regardless of volume,” he added.

Fostering a Positive Culture

The businesses certainly fit together well after the acquisition, but what about the cultures? That’s where practicing lean manufacturing techniques can help, according to Lanier. It doesn’t guarantee an engaged workforce, but it does create an avenue for employees to contribute. When they can effect change in a positive way, they have more motivation to be a part of it.

“Lean training provides our employees with tools to make improvements and allows all of us to speak the same language. That enables all of us to pull in the same direction,” Lanier said.

Everyone in the Bennett Tool & Die family goes through lean training, not just the machine operators, quality technicians, and engineers. That even includes people that bookend production, in the front office and in the shipping department.

This is an example of a Bennett Tool & Die kaizen project tracking sheet. Company management sees lean manufacturing techniques as tools to empower the workforce and improve organizational performance.

The training is one class per week, usually lasting one to three hours. The classes take place over five weeks.

This is where employees can make a difference, Lanier said. They are the experts when it comes to their job functions and how other processes affect the way they can do their jobs.

“I’m still practicing lean. I’m no expert. I’ve been doing it for a long time, and I know some things about how lines should be set up and some general lean principles,” he said. “But it’s asinine for me to come in and tell hourly associates that I know their jobs better than they do.

“We train every employee,” he continued. “Our shared training on lean principles lets communicate with our employees and empower them to improve things.”

With a common language and an education on how to use lean tools, employees can tackle continuous improvement projects by identifying an opportunity for improvement or following up on a recommendation that might come from a supervisor. At that point, a cross-functional team is formed. They share ideas on what needs to be improved, how they can improve the situation, and how they can gauge the success of the effort. Everyone’s got a chance to contribute, and everyone has the chance to have their suggestion picked apart. It’s democracy in action, even with management sometimes acting as the arbiter on whether a suggestion is feasible.

“I’ve worked on the shop floor, and I think that’s somewhat informed my belief that everybody’s opinion is important,” Lanier said.

Standardization in lean training is not the only standardization effort at Bennett Tool & Die. The goal is to get each facility to look and operate alike. If a customer visits or works with more than one facility in the Bennett Tool and & Die family, that customer can be confident of receiving the same service or expertise.

“We’re a small company, but we run it with a corporate strategy,” Lanier said.

That means one enterprise resource planning system for all company locations. That means departments consistently communicate even if they are located in different states. Engineering drawings might originate out of Gallatin, Tenn. (where Bennett Tool & Die moved in 2017 after leaving its longtime home in East Nashville). Programming for fabrication equipment such as a laser cutting machine might originate in Kansas City.

“If a customer has a problem, it’s really important not just to involve the people in one plant to look for solutions. It’s important to tap the intellectual ability of the entire company to look at that problem,” Lanier said.

When Bennett Tool & Die acquired A&E Custom Manufacturing, Kansas City, Kan., in 2015, it gained a different set of manufacturing capabilities. Its new acquisition had experience in serving the low- to medium-volume customers.

Growth Continues

When Lanier references a plant in the Bennett Tool & Die family, nowadays he’s also including a facility in Maryville, Tenn. The company acquired Hurst Tool & Stamping in February 2018.

The newly acquired stamper is only 175 miles away from the corporate headquarters in Gallatin, but it is that much closer to the East Coast, particularly companies in the Carolinas and Virginia. When you consider that most of a metal fabricator/former’s business is from within a 500-mile radius of the facility, the acquisition put several more potential customers in Bennett Tool & Die’s target area.

The company continues to invest in new capabilities. It recently added tube fabrication to its list of core competencies, which are assembly, fabricating, production machining, tool and die building, and stamping. Bennett Tool & Die has a roster of 150 employees trained in lean principles and willing to engage with company leaders to find the most efficient ways to produce parts. The company is ready to take advantage of new opportunities as the U.S. economy emerges from the slowdown caused by the coronavirus crisis.

Lanier said that the company remained open during this time because it was deemed an “essential” business, providing parts to supply chains that were key to keeping transportation and electrical power systems going during the pandemic.

“Our first concern is keeping our employees safe. Our second is maintaining our ability to service our customers,” he said. “Our safety committees, volunteers from our hourly and salaried staff at each of our plants, have done an outstanding job of managing our coronavirus response.”

Even with production being slower than it was before the spring downturn, Bennett Tool & Die employees are engaged in kaizen events across all facilities. Better processes mean better responsiveness to customers’ needs.

“We’ve got to stay focused,” Lanier said. “When the economy turns back on, we are going to have opportunities. We need to be ready.”