Smith & Wesson's Springfield, Mass. factory is a plant in transition.
After housing production for the past 63 of the company's 160 years in Springfield, the factory floor has collected a mix of technologies spanning the centuries working side-by-side to produce the company's iconic firearms.
"Some areas look like a factory that just opened yesterday and some areas look like a factory that we opened in 1949," said Mark Smith, vice president, Manufacturing & Supply Chain Management at Smith & Wesson. "It's an interesting contrast."
For those attending the Excellence in Action Tour of the 575,000 square foot facility on July 24, this will provide a rare glimpse at some of the machines and practices that have made the company great -- including at least one machine with a Pratt and Whitney asset tag from 1906.
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| "We're standardizing what equipment we buy, which makes maintenance a heck of a lot easier, which makes spare part storage easier and spare part planning easier." |
The opportunity for this glimpse will soon pass, however, due to a company-wide initiative to update production to modern standards and to create the flexibility it needs to compete in today's ever-shifting market.
"The firearms environment is volatile, as is any retail environment," said Smith. "So we're subject to all the whims of the market."
For that reason, Smith & Wesson began an aggressive modernization process in 2010 to pick up production and provide the tools it needs to cope with those whims.
"A lot of the activity we've been focused on in the factory in the manufacturing environment these last two years has been around flexibility, both in terms of mix -- making our machines and our processes more capable of shifting between product lines depending on market demands -- and flexibility in throughput -- being able to react to the peaks without going bankrupt in the valleys."
To satisfy the first step of this has meant upgrading those old machines to multi-function, standard equipment capable of flexing to fit demand shifts.
This initiative doesn't end with machines, though. Smith & Wesson has committed itself to bringing the whole of its operations up-to-date to provide utmost flexibility. This includes taking out another vestige of past production: the gunsmiths.
