Page 30 - MetalForming May 2012

Pioneer Metalformers
Invest in Workforce Development
Case Study:
Roll Forming Corporation
Prior to the recession of 2000- 2001, Roll Forming Corpora- tion (RFC) was a $35 million company. Today it’s a still-growing $115 million company that’s added— following the dip-and-recovery growth line followed by most U.S. manufacturing companies—110 jobs since mid-2010 throughout its five plants in three states, three in Shel- byville, KY, and one each in Indiana and Pennsylvania. As many of its new hires were displaced workers, RFC’s been busy teaching its new employ- ees new skills. And, perhaps more importantly, it’s been engraining in them the company’s culture of per- sonal accountability and continuous improvement. Long-term success has come thanks to pay-for-skills initia- tives, career growth for employees, and a continuous-improvement cul- ture braced with a substantive gain- sharing program.
RFC supplies rollformed compo- nents and assemblies to customers in the office-furniture, aerospace, con- struction and solar-energy indus- tries, to name a few. And it offers support services including engi- neering and product development, as
well as inventory management and secondary processing such as tube bending, laser cutting and robotic welding. It’s fastest growing market segment, by far, is solar, which accounted for just 2 percent of its work in 2009, climbed to represent 15 percent of its work in 2011 and may reach 25 percent of the company’s output in 2012.
We asked RFC president Ray Leathers what, if anything, had to change to allow RFC to satisfy the requirements of its new solar-indus- try customers.
“As a result of our experiences in meeting the reduced lead times of current customers, RFC was able to meet the shortened response-time requirements of customers in the solar market on a very large scale.” Leathers says. “This required us to develop a more flexible supply chain, and inhouse we had to become experts in managing production capacity.”
This is where having a workforce motivated to take ownership of their processes, and strive to continually improve them, have led to such quick and profitable growth for RFC
“In manufacturing, we do two things,” says RFC president Ray Leathers: “Launch new products or work on CI. And if you’re not doing either, you’re missing the boat.”
in a market segment as dynamic as solar.
The New Millennium Brings a New Vision
While RFC has been around since 1947, Leathers notes that its mod- ern history began in 2002, two years after being acquired by the Austrian corporation voestalpine. Emerging
Shelbyville, KY
BY BRAD F. KUVIN
Editor, MetalForming magazine, a publication of the Precision Metalforming Association
MetalForming/May 2012 www.metalformingmagazine.com