A highly evolved fab shop

Modern Machine Shop, March, 1996 by Chris Koepfer

Through natural selection, living things adapt by evolving ways to cope with changes in their environment. Manufacturers also must deal with numerous changes to their environments by continuously exchanging old ideas for new. In the process, they too change, often evolving into a more sophisticated business.

AJL Manufacturing, Inc. (Rochester, New York) is a fabrication job shop that has evolved into a business that in many ways represents the best of its species. Its ability to embrace the vagaries of today's manufacturing environment by recognizing and then applying the appropriate technology has helped this shop not just to survive but to thrive and prosper.

This job shop has managed to design its manufacturing to fit the extended needs of their current customer base of 105 companies. Not only do they manufacture parts, but in many cases they help design and then assemble complex components for their customers. In effect, they've become a manufacturing extension for many of the customers they serve.

The results are a job shop that selects the work it does based on well defined parameters. Getting the company to this point wasn't easy. We talked to Rick Ponticello, AJL's vice president of sales and marketing, and Ed Sigel, company president, about how this shop evolved from very simple beginnings to become an example of what a job shop of the future may look like.

Origin Of The Species

AJL Manufacturing is a fabrication job shop specializing in making parts and assemblies for the paper processing industry - for copier, computer printer and check processing equipment makers. The business started with three people some 25 years ago. It originally built progressive dies and fixtures. The three partners would build the dies at night and service customers during the day.

AJL is a job shop. They take raw material, add value, and ultimately ship a usable product to a waiting customer. It's a very simple formula followed by every job shop. But AJL took that formula and refined it. Early on, the partners understood the importance of keeping the customer happy. They also learned that keeping the customer happy requires in depth understanding of jobs the shop should and should not quote on.

Although the three initial partners in AJL were die makers, it soon became obvious that commercial parts production had a better future for these guys than commercial die making. It was a natural progression. Because part of the die production process involved trying out the die sets, it was agreed that the young company could run some parts on the try-out presses too. Although the company still makes dies, they are used for producing customers' parts at AJL.

That early decision put AJL on a road that has led to 145 employees and a new 165,000-square-foot building, opening later this year. As the fabrication business grew, some customers asked AJL to do some simple assembly work. Simple assemblies grew more complex, and soon the company was supplying complete and complex assemblies for its major customers.

When the company decided to move beyond just bending parts, a pattern was established that continues today. They invested in the equipment and personnel to make good on the jobs they quoted.

For example, AJL has a screw machine department. It is captive to the fab shop and was installed to make the many fasteners and small parts needed in assemblies. Because leadtimes and quantities were not compatible with local suppliers, AJL set up its own department. AJL also owns a plastics processing company, which makes covers, buttons and other parts needed to manufacture line-ready assemblies for AJL's customers.

Understanding intimately the industry they serve allows the company to focus their investments. In effect, AJL is vertically integrating making as much in-house as possible - to become an alternative source for jobs its customers no longer want to manufacture.

Filling A Vacuum

So how did AJL become such an integral vendor to its customers? Part of the answer is timing. There is a national push among many industries to move away from doing any but the most proprietary manufacturing in-house.

This has been particularly true in AJL's traditional markets, which include paper processing companies like Xerox, Kodak, the computer industry and others. Much of the general manufacturing work these companies once did themselves is now contracted out to shops like AJL.

These contract shops have become, quite literally, extensions of the OEM. It makes sense, particularly when there is a shop with well defined expertise, like AJL has developed. The company is a job shop, true, but it's a job shop serving a specific industry and providing specific skill sets - precision fabrications and assemblies for paper processing equipment manufacturers.

"We don't solicit simple angle brackets," says Mr. Ponticello. "We couldn't compete in many fabrication markets. Our niche is high precision metal parts and the capability to carry the work from prototype through production. This shop is set up to provide design, engineering, machining, stamping, welding, with mechanical and electro-mechanical assembly for that industry. A shop must be very aware of its own abilities. It must define its capabilities and be very careful to work within them. An unfulfillable promise to a customer is much worse than saying no."