Royal Precision closing doors

[Chieflongtee]

From an Alec Hidell, on www.thesandtrap.com forum..

"I'm a former employee of the Royal Precision/PM Precision plant in Torrington, CT. I still have friends and acquaintances who worked there and among the small group of workers who are staying on as the plant is shut down over the next month or so, dealing with hazardous material disposal, cleanup, etc.

Royal Precision may have had a record year as far as sales goes, but the reason they are closing is that their quality control system was allowed to degenerate to the point that their rejection rate caused them tremendous losses for the past 5-10 years. Simply put, you can sell MILLIONS of widgets at $1.00 each, but if they cost you $1.05 each to make, you'll go out of business.

If your sale price of $1.00 each is a bargain to the consumer, you'll sell LOTS of them, and go out of business FASTER.

Over the past 10 years, the owners and executive board operated the plant in CT by remote control, keeping their corporate headquarters in Arizona. Major decisions were made by people in the plant which increased problems, and were rubber-stamped by the board. The company stock dropped from over $5.00 per share to about $0.20 per share when the president and his family bought up all the outstanding stock at about twenty cents per.

A milestone in this company's failure occurred about 8 years ago, when scrap storage became a problem. Suddenly, the volume of scrap (rejected shafts) increased so much that handling them became a hazard for the material handling people. The engineering staff dealt with this by designing a larger scrap area, with outdoor access. Nobody ever looked into the cause of the increased rejection rate, and how to correct it. Most of the rejected shaft stock had been through most of the processes, all energy intensive operations such as annealing, vail extrusion, polishing and even chrome plating.

Competition and hostility between on-site executives led to lack of communication, and eventually a loss of teamwork throughout the plant.

It should be noted that a work force working in an environment like the one at Royal Precision needs a lot of inspiration. The plant is composed of buildings that date back as far as 1865. It's boiling hot in the summer, freezing in the winter. The air in the plant is fouled by fumes and dust like something out of the 1920's. Most of the manufacturing equipment dates back to the 1950's.

Even the "showpiece" of the Royal Precision shaft manufacturing process, Frequency Matching of shafts in a set, was being done by a very few devices that were falling apart, for which there were no parts lists, schematics, calibration procedures, etc. These devices were invented by a former executive of the company, and the company never obtained the information needed to maintain or replace them as needed.

The biggest problems began to occur in the plant about 5 years ago, when the personell started to be thinned out. Most of this thinning out had more to do with personalities and grudges than with efficiency in mind. People with inspection and quality control responsibilities were looked at as complainers, and gotten rid of, and as a result, the process quality control procedures went to pot. Shafts were being rejected at the plating line, nearly the last operation in the process, for problems which should have been detected at nearly the BEGINNING of the manuafacturing process. Not only did this add to the rejection rate, this type of rejection is very costly, due to the number of operations and the labor time invested in each shaft by the time it reaches the plating operation.

This is a sad event, especially for all the people who will be out of work, with limited or specialized skills that won't help them much in finding new jobs. Don't let someone decieve you into thinking that this plant will be started up again, it won't. If you doubt that, just go up to Torrington, CT and LOOK at the place, then you'll know why.

As someone here noted earlier, if there's any "buying out" it may be in the form of patents, such as the one for the Frequency Matching of shafts in sets, but that's a very small operation at the end of the manufacturing process, and could be adapted to ANY manufacturere's shafts, not just Royal Precision.

If you want to know why this happened, you don't need to look any further than a board of executives who didn't take proper interest as their positions called for......"

'Re-open'? Where? This doesn't fill me full of confidence!

[jvincent]

Announcement today, True Temper has bought the rights to RP.

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060609/clf030.html?.v=52