by Joe Romanowski
Chairman & CEO

The one thing that I might enjoy more than anything else about our industry I found in the essence of Advanced Machine & Engineering (AME), www.ame.com .  The company was started 40 years ago by its immigrant patriarch, Willy Goellner.  As a young man, Willy always had a strong engineering skill set and entrepreneurial spirit he was able to maximize in the U.S.  Today, AME is managed by its second generation of family and is a manifestation of the American Dream.  It is a $55 million company, employing 450 worldwide.  I love that the U.S. provides the environment so the “best” can excel if they choose to do so, and our industry provides the environment for this to happen.

I was pleased to have had the opportunity to sit down with Dietmar Goellner, President & CEO, of AME (video link).  Dietmar is a 50 year old high energy charger.  Besides running and driving AME and Hennig (a second stand alone company owned by the holding company Goellner Inc.), Dietmar is a devoted family man and Christian (Dietmar is an occasional preacher and church elder).

I think to the outsider, AME/Hennig must look like a complicated organization.  Each company has six business units (BU) (for a total of 12), and as Dietmar emphasized, each BU services a particular market niche.  So what do all these niches have in common?  Well, much of what they produce are many low volume custom products.  Many of these products have a significant global partner or alliance.  How could Dietmar possibly keep these twelve niche businesses under one organization and make sense of it?  I kept saying to myself — “there has to be a common thread here.”  Then Dietmar gave me the clue I was looking for.  Dietmar said, “We target any company that builds machinery.  Even better, it’s the business unit manager that makes this seemingly unassociated group of companies work”.  As Dietmar explained, “Each business unit manager must find the customer, customize the product to meet or, hopefully, exceed the customer’s expectations and manufacture it profitability and deliver it at least on time.  The people who run these business units are bright, seasoned entrepreneurial types.  Generally, they have been grown and nurtured within our organization as business people, engineers, sales, marketing, as well as operations and manufacturing specialists.”  It now came together for me — customized engineered products for machinery equipment manufacturers.

I asked Dietmar what are his three biggest shop floor challenges.  Dietmar quickly responded, “Scheduling, one piece part flow and queue time.  We’re always working to reduce queue time and make lot sizes in economic quantities as small as one piece and, of course, to make this happen scheduling is a big part of what we do on the shop floor.” 

As an example, of one of the solutions Dietmar and his staff have recently implemented illustrates how serious they are about eliminating these problems.  They recently upgraded an entire process (one of their high volume parts) with one new Mazak Multiplex 6100Y.  They attacked a part that required a cell of six people (3 per ten hour shift), three lathes, two machining centers, several secondary operations plus assembly (that had to be done at another location in the plant). This cell was relatively efficient, producing parts in 6 minutes.  However, with the new Multiplex they complete all operations on one machine in one set-up in 4.5 minutes.  Why bother for 1.5 minutes?  Well, they reduced cycle time, but in this solution we must call it throughput by 25%.  They reduced labor content by 67% (6 people to 2) and floor space by 55% (from 900 sq. ft. to 400 sq. ft).  And finally, assembly is completed by the operator at the machine site.  Throughput has been accelerated with reduced labor content — a great formula for increased cash flow.

Scheduling is certainly easier because it’s just one set-up, one first piece inspection and lightening throughput.  Queue time has been reduced and work-in-process inventory has been slashed because raw material goes in and finished product comes out.

I then asked Dietmar to rate his best supplier.  Dietmar said, “It’s someone we never have to call, who provides quality product, delivers on-time and gives reasonable after sale service and good pricing.  It’s somebody who overall helps us run our business better.”  I then surprised Dietmar by asking him to rate us, based on the criteria he just listed.  Dietmar said we were an 8.5 out of 10, with 10 being the best rating.   Dietmar also said, “I don’t give these kind of high ratings lightly.”

As we concluded our meeting with a walk through the headquarters plant, I was again reinforced with Dietmar’s fire and passion as he pointed to different projects throughout the plant where they were implementing the Toyota Production System (TPS).  We enjoyed a quick lunch and he was off.  I can still see him as he turned out of the parking lot with his cell phone already to his ear, headed to one of their other plants.  I’m proud to know Dietmar, his family and that they have been one of our customers for over 20 years.