This month, Manitowoc started work on a $7.4m upgrade of its Port Washington plant in Wisconsin, USA. The 23,000 sq ft (2,100 sq m)?addition will house a new machining centre and a 4,000 sq ft painting area. With this new addition, the facility will be responsible for building the entire lower works of Manitowoc’s Model 16000, among other models.
Central to the new addition is the installation of a new boring bar, a large metal cutting tool. The boring bar at the Port Washington facility will machine crawler side frames and carbodies. Physical construction of the expansion began in early August and will be complete by January 2008. Installation of the boring bar will complete the project in June 2008.
The new addition will add 25 employees to the 106 people currently employed there. Larry Weyers, executive vice president for the Americas region, said, “This new machining centre at the Port Washington facility means that Manitowoc Crane Group can add capacity and more advanced capability to our US-based manufacturing operations,” he says.
Manitowoc has also begun plans to increase capacity at its Shady Grove, Pennsylvania plant.
Its fellow American builder, Terex, has just completed its own plant upgrade, at its Waverly, Iowa plant. This project demonstrated that expansion isn’t just about building production lines, but bringing in new work processes. The firm invited press and customers to an open day last month, and correspondent Stuart Anderson walked round the plant (see also p17 for a report).
Anderson reports, “Few anticipated the radical changes they witnessed as they toured the plant. The initial impact was the bright cleanliness and orderliness of the facility. Concrete floors had been ground down and polished to a shiny finish that reflected light, enhancing ‘under-machine’ visibility. New lighting and ventilation systems and interior painting further improved the work environment. In addition, the entire offices have been totally refurbished to a spacious open-plan layout.
“Production lines have been shortened from 27 to just 11 stages and the distances travelled by cranes within the manufacturing process reduced from more than 4mi (6km) to a couple of hundred yards. Team members have been empowered with new jigs and fixtures, dedicated tools and instant support from team leaders to address any quality issues, parts shortages or other delays.
“Andon systems [a system of lights used at each workstation to signal problems] allow workers to stop production when a defect is found. The in-plant parts warehouse has been transformed into a ‘supermarket’ delivering parts to the point of use on a ‘just-in-time’ basis. Over the past two years numerous ‘Kaizen’ continuous improvement initiatives have eliminated manufacturing problems by tracing them to source, rather than just simply addressing an immediate issue. In the process Terex Cranes’ engineering team has become much more deeply involved in resolving manufacturing issues resulting from product design.
“Quality control has been beefed-up and provided with new tools and Terex has introduced the ‘4×4’ system that designates the four suppliers that cause the most production downtime and the four suppliers with the most rejected parts.”
Link-Belt has reordered, and is expanding, its Lexington, Kentucky mobile cranes factory–see next month’s issue for a full report.
Across the Pacific, crawler crane manufacturer Kobelco has announced that it too would be building new capacity at its domestic production facilities. It will spend up to JPY3bn ($25m) on a threefold increase in capacity at its Okubo and Takasago plants, both in Hyogo prefecture, western Japan.
The building work will take place over the next two years, and is aimed at keeping up with worldwide demand, particularly in the US and Middle East. The firm has an order backlog through the end of its next financial year.
Fellow Japanese manufacturer Tadano has also increased domestic production, building an entirely new 20,000 sq m truck loader factory in Tadotsu, Nakatado district, Kagawa, Shikoku, Japan. In the 20,000 sq m two-story factory, about 90 employees produce 900 cranes per month. In total, the factory cost JPY 2.7bn (USD 22.7m), half for the building and half for the equipment.
The new factory will help shorten the production time and component stocks, the company said. The company said its goal was “to raise the production of the mainstay construction cranes by over 50% in the targeted year 2008, compared with 2004.”
In Europe, Liebherr has laid out plans for its own expansion project, at its Ehingen crawler crane, where it will build a new 18,000 sq m erecting shop for crawler cranes, to be commissioned in 2009.
The company has established a company in Nizhniy Novgorod, Russia, west of Moscow, and has plans for what it calls a ‘major investment’ in a Russian factory making construction and aerospace components. Most of the company’s plants are in western Europe.
Earlier this year, Manitowoc announced that it was equipping a new production plant at a factory in Saris, Slovakia, acquired from Valcovna Profilov a.s–turn to p8 for full details. Manitowoc’s recent acquisition of Indian dealer and licensee Shirke will allow it to increase its capacity in the company, and provide another source for supplies to the booming markets in the Middle- and Far East.
News analysis
Maybe these capacity increases will allow manufacturers to make the most of the boom. However, mortgage lenders worldwide have woken up to find themselves holding billions in potential bad debt. If this home-buying wobble spreads to construction, maybe some of these investments will be harder to justify.
