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Integration Services Support Pursuit for Perfection at Eagle Manufacturing
We make at our facility in Florence, Kentucky engine blocks and cylinder heads for two of
the three big OEMs in North America. We have high volume production and we typically use
a lot automation, robots and gantries, in order to produce our parts for our customers.
Typically we’re operating with takt times of 30 seconds or less due to the high volume
nature of our business.
We rely heavily on our vendors in order to come back to us with a creative solution that
meets our needs and will allow us to succeed, and we expect a high level of performance
from them in that regard, with regards to creativity and performance.
Working with Makino is great. I typically measure all of our other vendors against their
level of enthusiasm and workmanship. For example, their strategy of attacking the job with a
large group of installation technicians combined with their expertise of doing it right the
first time gives Makino an advantage, for us, on short lead time jobs of being able
to get up into operation quickly, which means we start making money sooner. With the increase
in demand recently in manufacturing the lead times for certain vendors have become extended,
which means getting into production takes longer and longer. Makino has been successful
in that regard by producing machines now so they’re always available for the short lead
time projects, which helps us win business but also helps us get up and running quicker
and provides a win-win situation for us and Makino in this business environment.
In our high volume production environment we need our machines to be up as much time
as possible so that we can make as many parts as possible for our customers. And Makino
equipment is robust and allows us to run it as long as possible.
The bottom line for us is that we need equipment that is robust and runs, and allows us to
be competitive in the marketplace. The Makino equipment is economical for us, yet it also
provides us with a high OEE so that we can achieve our goals and objectives as a corporation,
one of which is getting to $10 billion in sales by 2020, and in order to do that we
need to continue to expand. Partnerships with companies such as Makino allow us to put together
competitive proposals for our customers in order to win more business and achieve our
goal.