Clearfield Metal Technologies is pleased to announce our next round of reinvestment into our company. Our team has been overwhelmingly blessed over the past two to three years with consistent double digit percentages of sales growth. Our customers have placed a great trust in our business and product to the point that we are, again, outgrowing our production capability in a few areas and are in need of further investment.
Key areas of investment:
- Sintering Department: New sintering furnace
- Adding sinter hardened materials to our in-house capabilities
- Increasing our sintering throughput capacity by 30%
- Molding Department: Additional molding press
- Adding capability to small-mid tonnage multi-action product
- 3 lower and 2 upper levels
- Increasing molding throughput capacity by 6%
- Adding capability to small-mid tonnage multi-action product
- Quality Department: New programmable CNC probe tracing CMM
- Adding contour probe tracing capability to department
- Adding ability to correlate with 3D models
In the summer of 2018 our team had purchased a furnace to handle an increase in production due to an increase demand for current product and a series of new projects moving into production at the same time. A little more than a year later, we are in a similar situation and will be adding another furnace to our sintering line. This new furnace will also enable us to process sinter hardened materials; a market of increasing demand and one we have not been able to compete in. Our team has gathered feedback from our customers over the years and have made the decision to pursue this market and invest in the technology to further build our current business relationships while also creating opportunities to build new ones.
Here at CMT, our most notable niche has become supplying a complex structural product (at low-mid level volumes specifically). In order to produce this type, unique multi-action presses are needed to get product as near net shape as possible. We have many multi-action presses ranging from 125-500 tons of pressing force which are able to produce medium to large sized part. Where we have lacked is the small-mid tonnage multi-action area. Our team has purchased this press that will give us a needed flexibility that our customers are looking for and we now can comfortably produce a 5 level part ranging from 1-500 tons. As the market constantly pushes for cost savings, material accounts for a good percentage of the cost and, therefore, our customers are trying to do more with less while designing smaller, more intricate product. Investing in this press will allow us to partner with our customer’s design teams to cut costs in the design phase on smaller product while maintaining our position of “preferred value-added supplier” that we have with many of our customers.
Growing a business is never easy, but businesses can ease their pain by investing and increasing their capabilities to keep up with growing demands from the customer base. Our team acknowledges this and implements this strategy as an integral part of our future growth. We do not want to find ourselves in a scenario where we are excluded from projects because of a lack of capability. Because of this strategy, we have recently been awarded a major automotive project that requires surface contour quality checks. In order to ensure that our customer is receiving a quality product, our team is investing in a programmable, contour probe tracing CMM. This will allow us to import 3D models and inspect product in relation to that model. It is important to our quality team that we are able to check features with the most relevant, effective method, but also be 100% confident in our contour measurements.
The above items highlight our major purchases to add to our capability. There are many more purchases in this wave of investment that will have a focus of increasing our production efficiency and overall appearance within our facility. Outdated equipment will be getting upgrades and modified to bring our processing efficiency more in line with (or above) our competition. Automation will be implemented to eliminate costly, repetitive processes. The office space will be getting a long overdue makeover to improve our customer’s experience while they visit our facility. “Cleanliness is Godliness”, the old saying goes, and the presentation of our facility is a frequent compliment among our customer base. This is one of the main areas where we separate ourselves from our competition and we want to continue that push of professionalism in not only appearance of our workplace, but in all areas of customer-supplier interaction. If we present well and deliver a high quality, on-time, and cost competitive product, our business will continue to grow as it has since we opened our doors in 2011.
