The Wisconsin Family Robinson
Robinson Metal’s approach to fabricating helped it to grow when others didn’t
By Dan Davis, Editor-in-Chief
att Shimmon has worked at Robinson Metal
Inc., De Pere, Wis., for four years and is currently working in the custom fabricating side
of the business. Even with limited experience compared
with the many company veterans walking the floor and
running the business, Shimmon is free to talk with customers when they call.
“I always like talking to them. When you make something and you’re proud of it, it’s good to get the compliments,” he said.
At Robinson Metal, everyone is a customer service
representative. The company pays for more than 140 mobile phones for its employees, pretty much ensuring
someone with knowledge of a project can be reached. In
fact, customers actually enjoy talking with the people responsible for fabricating their parts.
That type of customer interaction doesn’t sound like
rocket science, but the commonsense approach fuels a
lot of the company’s success. Robinson Metal is a $59 million business built around metal fabricators who know
how to approach, execute, and deliver a job in a quality
and timely manner. A majority of the 300-plus employees
have solid fabricating and manufacturing knowledge,
which comes into play in almost every aspect of the business—estimating, operations, and sales and marketing.
The real challenge in the last five years has been maintaining that same culture as the company added close to
140 employees. The key is finding that right person and
letting his or her talents shine.
“They have confidence in you to do a job. They aren’t
watching you over your back,” Shimmon said.
That’s a smart approach because the company doesn’t
have time to micromanage. It needs its people to learn
good habits and business practices. After all, one of them
could be running the place someday.
M
Operating the Store
Keith Bauer, who has been at Robinson Metal for 19
years, is a project coordinator, a key position in ensuring
that quote is accurate and the part is delivered as the
print dictates. He runs a crew of about nine fabricators
and they tackle a daily production schedule in their
“store”—an area of the shop floor where all the final
welding and assembly take place before the job is moved
to finishing or shipping.
Bauer takes a peek at quotes for jobs before they are
sent back to customers, meets with his team members
every day to go over the schedule, and walks the floor for
most of the day, keeping tabs on the jobs. The crew, ranging in experience from two to 20 years, determines who
does which work. Because of cross-training, the same person that sets up a job is likely the same person that will do
the tack welding and the final weld. Robinson Metal
processes a lot of stainless steel (see Figure 1) and aluminum jobs of different sizes, but you won’t find employees who specialize in any one metal. Employees’ multiple
skill sets allow them to take complete ownership of a job.
Robinson Metal also has plenty of fabricating veterans
who can help the less experienced employees if needed. Its
employees can run any sort of CNC fabricating equipment, and its 150 welders are ASME-accredited. That type
of technical knowledge is evident just by touring the shop.
For instance, the company jumped into waterjet cut-
ting about four years ago after dis-
covering it made sense to do the
work in-house rather than out-
source it. Today it has five waterjet
tables from Flow International,
one of which has a 13- by 20-foot
bed and can cut material up to 8
in. thick. Rather than rely on a
vendor’s technology, Robinson’s
own employees designed abrasive
recycling systems for the waterjets
and fabricated abrasive material
feeding towers for them as well.
Figure 1 Because Robinson Metal Inc. works with food processing companies, its fabricators have to be skilled in working with stainless steel.
Figure 2 The fabrication of enclosures and tanks for huge generators is no small feat. A 50,000-square-foot addition was put
on the Robinson Metal building to accommodate the projects,
and the company has a 60- by 40-foot paint booth to put the
finishing touches on those fabrications.
Running a Department
Scott Le Tourneau, Robinson Metal’s estimating manager,
knows about the shop floor. He’s only two years removed
from it. He and the other nine people in his department
all share the same background.
“Every single guy who is working in this area has
worked on the shop floor,” he said.
Such a background leads to quotes that are much
more detailed and realistic than what some other competitors might supply customers. Le Tourneau said customers call any quote the “Robinson book” because the
packet they receive is going to cover all possible aspects
of a fabrication project.
That’s the result of having fabricators prepare the estimates. They have a history log, part of its JobBOSS shop
management software, that provides input in terms of potential cutting times on the waterjet or laser cutting machines, but the experience really comes in handy when
defining projects that involve a lot of welding. Estimators
with no shop floor experience might take into account just
welding time, but the Robinson Metal estimators know just
what combination of grinding and polishing might be necessary to make a customer’s job really meet all expectations.
When asked if he might hire someone with estimating
experience and let him work on the shop floor to get
some real-world experience, Le Tourneau said he doubted
that would ever happen. The seven estimators, including
himself, that work on fabricating projects and the three
estimators for the machining department are able to
work seamlessly with the project coordinators and salespeople, he said, a scenario that wouldn’t exist unless the
estimator had the Robinson shop floor experience.
Fifteen years ago Le Tourneau was hired to help in the
maintenance department and be the gopher. His first job
was to paint an overhead crane at the company’s old location. After several months, he figured he wanted to
tackle more and asked one of the senior fabricators on
staff to teach him how to weld. Soon afterward he was
participating in small fabricating projects.
“Guys that have the ability get to do it,” Le Tourneau
said, referring to just about any position that might be of
interest to a capable Robinson employee.
Overseeing a Division
That’s how Jim Birkholz wound up running Robinson
Metal’s custom enclosure division. Back in 1996 he was a
project coordinator on a job for 100 fabricated generator
enclosures for a rental fleet. Municipal laws require the
enclosures to protect the general public from possible
leaks and excessive noise.
