Down with downtime: General Industry Coverage

END USER: Suburban Manufacturing Co., (440) 953-2024, www.submfg.com.
CHALLENGE: Reduce downtime on three aging horizontal machining centers.
SOLUTION: Replace them with two new HMCs.
SOLUTION PROVIDERS: Gosiger Inc., (877) 288-1538, www.gosiger.com; Okuma America Corp., (704) 588-7000, www.okuma.com.

In business for more than 3 decades, Suburban Manufacturing Co. has a 30,000-sq.-ft. CNC machine shop, employs 65 workers and is doubling in size every 3 years.

As a result, the Eastlake, Ohio, company is quickly moving up the ranks in the Weatherhead 100, an index of northeast Ohio’s fasting growing companies. In 2011, Suburban ranked 69th, and moved to 41st last year. According to Rick Grice, company president and founder, the essential ingredients in keeping Suburban successful and competitive are its innovative people and that the company is employee-owned, which it has been for nearly 10 years.

Courtesy of Suburban Manufacturing

One of two new Okuma MB-4000H horizontal machining centers at Suburban Manufacturing.

In addition, Suburban’s equipment helps it handle whatever comes through the door. Vice President Brian Nuibe likes to call the company a “true job shop.” He said: “We have vertical and horizontal machining centers, single- and multiple-spindle CNC lathes, saws, hones, sand blasting, part marking—a huge array of operations. We run all grades of aluminum, stainless, brass, Hastelloy, Inconel and titanium. We run bar, plate, castings, forgings and extrusions. We tackle a mixture of prismatic and cylindrical parts. We do everything from prototyping to production.”

Three of the shop’s HMCs, however, were aging and needed a lot of repair, Nuibe noted. Although Suburban paid thousands of dollars for parts and labor, downtime was a more significant cost. “Toward the end, a couple of those machines were down about 20 percent of the time,” he said.