A case study in urgency and flexibility

At The C.A. Lawton Co., we take pride in our culture of flexibility and urgency, integrated offerings, dedicated customer advocates, and our focus on quality and on-time delivery. In this post, we’d like to highlight our culture of urgency.

Knowing that our customers’ needs can change daily, we look to respond with urgency and flexibility to continually meet their expectations. Here’s an example of a past project.

The Challenge:

• The OEM’s parent company in Germany provided all of the company’s castings previously.
  • They were under the impression there were not quality castings available at competitive pricing or with reasonable lead times available in the United States.
• The Detroit plant had a last-minute, customer-driven design change that compromised the ship date of a large system.
• There was no pattern available for the parts required, and the castings required extensive machining, annealing, and painting operations to be completed, all of which added to the time required to produce the assembly-ready parts.
• The shipping queue from Germany added more than three weeks due to the transfers and the crossing.
• In addition to the obstacles above, production schedules were being affected by holidays, and the OEM’s budget and schedule were blown out of the water.

The Solution:

• We roughed out a very aggressive schedule and firm costs to produce the pattern and castings. The schedule provided a three-week ship date from the time the order was received to the shipment of raw castings to the next machining operation. The Detroit OEM placed the order, and we beat our own compressed ship date by two days!

The Results:

• Our new customer was able to get all of the final operations completed and got the final parts to the final assembly on time. With immediate integration, this meant the new parts could be added inside of the parent schedule’s original timeframe.
• Our castings and pattern base costs were competitive, and no unfunded costs in time or money were expended due to trans global freight.
• The first-quality castings were delivered with no surprises or hassle.
• The new customer showed their parent company that there are, indeed, responsive foundries producing quality castings in the United States.
• The project was a big win for the OEM’s purchasing manager who made the connection with us at the C.A. Lawton Co.

Are you looking for a responsive U.S. foundry providing castings at competitive pricing and with reasonable lead times? Contact us today!