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This coming October, Singer Steel Company will fire the engine on the next phase of its decades-long drive to anticipate and adapt to customer needs. That’s when an RBI Stretcher-Leveler and SCS Sheet Line will begin producing ‘laser-flat’ SCS sheets up to 0.500” thickness for Singer customers.

While Singer is new to SCS production, the company has a long history of processing premium quality flat rolled, both low carbon and high strength, into slit coils and cut sheets. Founded in 1923 by Albert Singer, today’s Singer Steel has 50 capable employees working in its 101,000 ft2 facility in Streetsboro, Ohio, a suburb of
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Cleveland. At the helm are Bruce Alexander, President, and Eric Shaw, Vice President and CFO. They are the third generation to lead this proud family business. David Alexander (Bruce’s son) and Valerie Stern (Eric’s daughter) are fourth generation family members active in the business.

“Being a part of the founding family, we haven’t simply worked here; our lives, our reputations and our families’ future are all tied to the performance of this company,” explains Bruce Alexander. “What does that mean? It gives us intense focus on the needs of our customers. And our company has the size and flexibility to adapt to those needs – something the big chain service centers have trouble doing.
Our JIT programs are an example. JIT
     All In The Family: fourth generation Singer Steel Company family members
     David Alexander and Valerie Stern share a laugh with their (apparently)
     camera-shy fathers, Bruce Alexander and Eric Shaw.		       customers can order from us today
     and it will be on their production floor
      tomorrow morning. We know their
      specs, their quality requirements and
      their demand patterns – sometimes
better than they do! We carry a bigger inventory and process ahead of time to meet that need, or even put steel in their shop on consignment. Service like that creates loyal customers.”

Who are those customers? “We supply contract fabricators and lasers shops, but OEMs make up the bulk of our customers," relates Shaw. “We are constantly in their plants to stay in touch with their needs, and as laser cutting was becoming more popular with the OEMs, we worked with them to make sure we were supplying sheets that gave the product quality they want. Well, lasers want flat material which has always meant temper pass. Problem was many of the mills we buy from don’t temper pass any longer and the temper passed we could by elsewhere is pricey. We needed a solution and buying a temper mill wasn’t it. We knew of the Red Bud Stretcher Leveler technology and went to meet with them to get the full story.”

David Alexander recalls, “While we were in Red Bud we saw the SCS Sheet line at The Material Works. It was interesting, but we were skeptical of some of the claims. Still, we took some samples back and one of those samples ended up sitting out in a garage in Florida. In humid salt air. And you know what? After six months the only rust on that sample was in a couple of deep scratches. Now that got us intrigued.”

The Singer team began investigating the SCS fabrication advantages of cooler welding (less amperage), stronger welds, great paint finish with leaner prep and, especially, faster laser cutting. Then an unusual thing happened. Valerie Stern explains:

“While we were studying SCS some of our customers came to us, completely unsolicited, asking about SCS – what we knew about it and could we get them some to try out. Fortunately, we were able to respond. So we took into account our own research, plus this growing customer interest in SCS, plus some impressive success stories we heard from people already using SCS, and sealed the deal for the SCS Sheet Line.”
Valerie’s father adds, “In the end, we knew we had to offer SCS to our customers, so why not produce it ourselves? Easy decision. Not a trivial financial decision since the SCS and Stretcher Leveler lines are an investment much larger than anything we’ve done before. But the decision for SCS was pretty straightforward because we’re convinced it will bring us new customers in addition to improving service to our longtime customers.”

“This company has been around for 84 years because we continue to anticipate our customers’ needs and adapt to meet them,” concludes Bruce Alexander. “We’re doing that again by putting ourselves on the front of this SCS growth curve. That’ll let me and Eric turn over the reins of a stronger, healthier Singer Steel to the fourth generation, and them to the fifth generation, and so on. That matters to us because remember, we don’t just work here; Singer Steel is in our blood.”

At any major construction site you’ll see several big ready-mix concrete trucks coming and going. Even the smallest of these can deliver 18 tons of concrete. Moving big loads of concrete this way is efficient . . . can you imagine hauling it a ton at a time in pickup-sized trucks?

Of course not. But think about running a big order on a typical cut-to-length line. Say you’ve got 96,000 lb order to run and the bundles are to be 4000 lbs each. Every time you cut a stack of 4000 lbs, you stop the line, shuttle out the stack, shuttle in a new pallet, restart the line and run more material while you move the bundle out. Kinda like hauling concrete in pickup trucks.
    These stacks and bundles illustrate how fewer, larger stacks from a CTL
     line feed an SCS Line. Compare the thickness of the stacks from the CTL
     line (no paper wrap or straps) to the finished, wrapped bundles of SCS.		       Instead, if you could run out bundles
      of 16,000 lbs you’d stop the line less
      often, giving efficiency a nice bump.
      Except your customer doesn’t want

      16,000 lb bundles, they want 4000 lb
bundles, so line efficiency suffers . . .unless those bundles receive further processing on an SCS Sheet Line.

Let’s work through an example. Say you’re running that 96,000 lb order to be shipped in 4000 lb bundles. In the course of running this job on your CTL line, you’ll stop the line 23 times (don’t count the last bundle as an interruption). If you’re just moving out the stack and putting in a new pallet, the idle time is only about 2 minutes per stack, but if you’re fully banding and possibly paper wrapping the bundles, it’s probably closer to 5 minutes. So that’s either 45 minutes or two hours the CTL line is idle while stacks are off-loaded.

But if you’re running 16,000 lb stacks you pause the CTL line just five times over the course of the order, so the idle time drops to ten minutes. The six 16,000 lb stacks get staged at the SCS Sheet line, processed and bundled into twenty four 4000 lb bundles. Meanwhile, you’ve taken between 35 and 110 minutes of down time on the higher cost CTL line and made it available for production. That’s a sweet deal.

If all the sheets cut on the CTL line will be processed on the SCS line, you haven’t really gained anything since you just moved the material handling “dead time” further downstream. But in reality, you will run other non-SCS jobs on that CTL line, because (1) your order mix will contain non-SCS orders and (2) the typical CTL line runs faster than the top speed of an SCS Sheet Line (like 175 fpm versus 100 fpm).

Reality is what counts, and the reality is companies running SCS Sheet Lines have the opportunity to boost the overall efficiency of their Cut-to-Length equipment by using part of its capacity to feed an SCS Sheet line. Sweet deal, indeed!
   Copyright 2007 The Material Works, Ltd.