Colson Group USA, a manufacturer of casters, wheels and other mobility products, continues to make significant investments to its production and distribution operations while reshoring some manufacturing.

Those investments include adding automation equipment, such as robotic welding cells, at the Oakbrook Terrace, Ill.-headquartered company's two Michigan manufacturing facilities, in St. Joseph and Albion. "That has greatly improved our quality and our ability to react to our customers' needs and has opened up new doors for us in regards to how we are looking at our manufacturing capabilities from a global standpoint," said COO Chris Cummins.

He added that the addition of a laser cutting system enabled the company to reshore manufacturing of the heavy-duty Albion 310 and 410 kingpinless casters from one of Colson's Asian plants, and the company is moving forward with investments to return more manufacturing to the U.S.

A wheel core is machined on a new CNC lathe at Colson. Image courtesy of Colson Group.

To effectively compete with low-cost-labor countries on even sensitively priced products, Colson leverages the benefits of cold heading, or cold forming, to produce from 4,000 to 5,000 parts per hour without any scrap. "When you have automation and precision machining of that nature, you are not worried about a labor-cost-type issue," Cummins said. "You are more worried about how many high-quality parts you are making."

The precision machining also includes the use of CNC lathes and mills to produce wheel cores, for example, and automatic thread rollers and groove cutters to make a variety of fasteners. In addition to steel, Colson CNC-machines nylon billets to produce heavy-duty wheels that are as strong as steel yet don't damage floors, noted Brad Kish, director of marketing and communications for Colson Group.

To help enable the company's manufacturing operations to focus on manufacturing and not distribution, Colson Group built a 176,000-sq.-ft. national distribution center in St. Joseph in early 2016. "We're really proud of our efforts, and it's continuing to get better every day," Cummins said about the distribution center. "It came a long way in this very first year."