Manufacturing : From the Production Floor

Home » Steel eNotes - Spring 2010 » Manufacturing : From the Production Floor

Greetings from the Aegis manufacturing floor! We have recently passed the one year anniversary of our move to the Edenton, NC facility and everything here is continuing to go very well.

The Aegis manufacturing team has remained very committed to our company and our goals. We are looking forward to celebrating one year accident free on 5/13/2010, a substantial accomplishment for any manufacturing location. Our lineup of roll form operators and support staff continue to make incremental improvements to their overall productivity levels as they become more and more familiar with the “tricks” of running each product combination successfully. These increases in productivity have helped keep our overall manufacturing cost per pound down, enabling us to offset some of the astronomical price increases that we have realized in raw material costs and various manufacturing supplies since late last year.

We also have continued to invest capital in upgrading our roll tooling and equipment to insure our long term success. Some of our most recent capital expenditures include new ink jet machines for product marking to decrease the amount of downtime which was being caused by our aged units, new 2-1/2” USC tooling to provide better and more consistent part forming, and a backup flying hydraulic cutoff along with eight backup sets of cut-off inserts covering the various USC/USD profiles. The justification for these expenditures is to lower our current machine downtime rates as well as do our best to eliminate the possibility of extended machine downtime in the future.

Our manufacturing team has also continued to work with the engineering group on possible innovative product developments to help our fabricators remain competitive in this very difficult non-residential construction marketplace. We are very close on a couple of products that will help our system’s overall performance and we intend to be manufacturing at least one of these products later this year.

The Aegis team realizes that any success we have is directly related to the success of our fabricator partners. We truly feel that we have a fantastic group of partners and will continue to do what we can to support their efforts. I hope the late spring/early summer season is a great one for all! Thank You for your business!

Ryan Cook
Operations Manager