A Christmas wish list

Modern Machine Shop, Dec, 1995 by Tom Beard, Mark Albert, G. Chris Koepfer

With today's communications technology, however, suppliers such as Force no longer serve just local or regional markets. They are seeing increasingly stiff competition from suppliers all over the world. While nobody loves competition, Mr. Force has no real problem with the geographic liberation of supply channels -- after all, it's worked well for his business too. But he does wish that customers had better metrics for evaluating potential suppliers than just a quoted price on one extreme and an extensive in-shop audit on the other.

So what Mr. Force would like for Christmas is an international standard by which the performance of machined parts suppliers could be rated. Such a rating would take into account not just pricing and equipment lists, but also quality levels, on-time delivery, responsiveness and whatever other factors differentiate the total value a supplier can bring to the table. This would help buyers more fully appreciate just what kind of shop is behind the quote, and help prevent "apples" shops from being compared to the "oranges."

Mr. Force is not holding his breath for such a gift, however, but is concentrating instead on making his shop ever more productive. "It really comes down to continually coming up with more efficient processes that give you good quality," he says. That's the best way of all to deal with competition, wherever it resides.

Uncle Sam As Santa

"Right away I knew what our company would like to have and my dad had the same idea, too," is how Jim Sekely responded when asked what Sekely Industries might want at the top of their Christmas wish list. Jim, a company vice president, and his father, Richard Sekely, who is company president, both agree that they would like to see the investment tax credits reinstated along with the accelerated depreciation program.

Sekely Industries, in Salem, Ohio, is best known for "no handwork" die manufacturing, in which high-speed machining produces auto panel stamping dies with surfaces so smooth and so close to the design defined in the CAD file that little or no polishing or other handwork is required. The high speed machine tools and their superfast control units that are at the heart of this capability represent major capital investments.

"When we bought our first high-speed machine in 1980, the $700,000 price tag was four times larger than any single investment our company had ever made up to that time," Jim Sekely recalls. "We might not have jumped into this technology so early, or have been so aggressive at that time in developing it, without these two investment incentives in place in those days. It's what got us started on this road in the first place." This road, by the way, has taken Sekely Industries to several top supplier awards, including the Platinum Pentastar from Chrysler, for example.

For the Sekelys, reinstating the investment tax credit would have an immediate impact by generating working capital, money that can be put to work elsewhere to make their business grow. Last year, the company invested close to $4 million in new equipment. A 10-percent tax credit on this investment represents another machine tool they could have purchased during this same time period. The accelerated depreciation program would allow additional infusions of new technology in the next couple of years or so, and at the rate technology is changing, such a pace is not out of line with how quickly companies have to move these days.