In a particularly green, winding section of South Carolina sits a city called Westminster that is also a particularly thriving manufacturing center. Boeing, BMW, Caterpillar and BorgWarner have plants in the vicinity, and the competition for workers is fierce. Global metal-cutting tooling manufacturer Sandvik Coromant has a plant here, too, a 328,000-square-foot facility that over the past decade has steadily established itself as a real workhorse. The plant’s performance, and the people who drive it, distinguish Sandvik Westminster as a 2022 IndustryWeek Best Plants Winner.
Sandvik Coromant’s Westminster plant, which came to the company during its acquisition of cutting-tools maker Valenite in 2002, primarily manufactures cemented carbide inserts—over 2,300 types—for aerospace, automotive and oil and gas tooling. In addition, Westminster produces over 50 different grades of ready-to-press (RTP) powder and customized round tools for industry and refurbishes those round tools for its customers, many of them big names in industry. It has a competitive advantage by being the only plant in the Sandvik Coromant family that produces inserts, round tools and the materials used to manufacture them.
A years-long push to refine processes, strategically invest in automation, develop new business and upskill workers has paid off in increased productivity and profitability, a stellar safety record and outstanding quality metrics. Total manufacturing time (number of days from the start of an order until it is shipped from the plant) is down 19% in the past five years. Productivity as a percentage of sales is up 23% in the past three. Customer complaints are at 1.2 per 1 million inserts. Average machine availability rate was 97.26% in 2021. And the manufacturing rejection rate in the powder and blanks department has decreased by 46% since 2010, resulting in significant cost savings and setting the benchmark in the Sandvik Coromant group.
Empowerment at every level of the organization is evident in Westminster’s robust safety culture, with team members self-reporting hazards (and, when appropriate, immediately fixing them) and over the past five years making substantial progress in reducing safety incidents. A year ago, the plant celebrated 1,000 days of zero lost-time safety incidents. While that streak was recently broken with a slip on a mat, the plant continues to have a respectable OSHA incident rate of 1.23 for 2021. Employees reported 396 hazards last year, 90% of them resolved within 90 days.
The can-do spirit is also on display in the blanks department, where that team recently took the initiative to build a vertical wall storage area for a continuous improvement project. It saves precious floor space, prevents operator mistakes by making labels more visible and substantially reduced inventory-on-hand by limiting storage capacity to what can go on the wall.
To hear more from Sandvik Coromant and other IW Best Plants winners, attend the Manufacturing & Technology Show from Oct. 18-20 in Cleveland. All four winner's of this year's awards will participate in a panel discussion on Oct. 19 to discuss how they approach continuous improvement and strive toward manufacturing excellence.
Westminster’s lean journey began in 2012. The plant is currently focusing on signage and flow throughout the shop, with supervisors and production workers taking charge of the labeling and organizing for their own departments.
Visit the round tools shop, a growth area for Westminster, and you’ll see teamwork and flexibility, as seasoned machinists with a cross-section of expertise work smoothly together and share know-how. Sandvik Coromant recently acquired tooling company Precorp about an hour away in Greer, South Carolina. Westminster leadership saw huge value in the Precorp workers’ tooling knowledge and offered all 40 of them relocation to the Westminster plant. Seventeen took the deal, pulling up stakes and moving their families, and now work as a team with the machine operators in the round tooling shop.
New automation at the plant strategically focuses on freeing up workers from the most repetitive tasks and moving the line along faster. The biggest recent investment is a Sandvik Coromant-built wet blasting machine, called the BoxER, which is replacing three “end of life” machines and has more production and R&D capabilities and better results. Other investments—including an ethanol recycler—both generate substantial cost savings and help meet sustainability goals that are planned out through 2030. A new water-based coolant system saves $75,000 per year annually. Scrap recycling yielded 219 tons in 2020.
Lindsey, who has been at the plant for 29 years, starting as a grinder, has transformed into a self-made data analytics expert (partly through a slew of YouTube videos) and built a system of automated daily push reports that go to supervisors, managers and upper management every morning. He has also built individual departmental reports and created an app to easily share data on the shop floor via phones and tablets.
Despite the competition for manufacturing workers, Westminster’s human resources department has had decent success recruiting for the shop floor and even engineering with periodical weekend job fairs they’ve hosted for the past three years. But partnerships with local technical colleges and the public schools are especially important for talent development. Sandvik Coromant Westminster funds college scholarships and has an internship program; its team members are guest presenters in STEM classes and are working with a local elementary school on building a greenhouse. The Westminster team also donates meeting space in its facility for community groups like Girls in Engineering and Manufacturing (GEM) and a STEM summer camp.
Westminster is in the process of re-evaluating its benefits to see where they can improve; an on-site gym and a part-time on-site nurse practitioner are strengthening wellness initiatives. Management is also tapping into the knowledge of older workers by bringing back retirees to work part-time to train new recruits on machines and processes.
Key to the increase in productivity is cross-training workers on new jobs and new machines to alleviate bottlenecks. Worker flexibility has not only increased engagement but helped keep production on track during COVID labor shortages. Workers, many with long tenure at the plant, talk about being part of a family and like that they are challenged and respected by their bosses.
Boatloads of initiative and a well-thought-out and executed vision have brought rewards—and profits— for this hardworking team in Westminster.
