Small shop’s high ideals yield big results

Founded in 1999 and located in Amherstburg, Ontario, across the Detroit River from Michigan, PTooling is a small, family-owned business specializing in oil-field component manufacturing. Thread milling and oblique, or offset, features (those off the part’s main centerline axis) are routine for the shop, which has five Mori Seiki turning centers. PTooling’s machines feature live tooling, full Y-axis control and a capacity of 3.6 ” in diameter through the spindle. That capacity means that longer parts can be turned and milled in fewer setups.

Freelance writer Jan Bottiglieri interviewed PTooling President Marv Fiebig, a manufacturing veteran with 35 years’ experience in industries such as oil and gas equipment, gas compression, aerospace and injection molding. Fiebig is an SME certified manufacturing engineer and an ASQ certified quality engineer.

All images courtesy of PTooling

Marv Fiebig, president of PTooling, with his son Tai, head of manufacturing engineering.

CTE: How did PTooling get its start?

Fiebig: We started doing injection molds for the PET (polyethylene terephthalate) packaging industry. We designed and built preform molds used to make bottles. At that time, we also manufactured down-hole oil industry tooling components and work-over tools. Work-over refers to oil-well interventions involving invasive techniques; for our customers, applications included intervention for servicing a well, such as for repair, salvage or temporarily decommissioning a well for a safety, production or environmental concern. The economic recession that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks [and the outsourcing of moldmaking to China] dealt a staggering blow to our business. By 2003, we had stopped making molds and were focused entirely on making oil industry components.

CTE: How did that change the shop?

Fiebig: We further developed our oil-field expertise, with a focus on threading. We started our machine shop with a single CNC lathe. Since our founding, we have purchased six CNC machine tools and our latest and greatest acquisition, which will arrive in July, will allow us to do more complex work on tubular oil-field components.

CTE: You mentioned you identified with Alan Rooks’ column in the July 2011 issue about Mittelstandcompanies in Germany, which are small to medium-sized, mostly privately owned firms said to be the core of Germany’s manufacturing prowess. Why is that?

Fiebig: The German business model strikes me with its practicality. German manufacturers tend to invest more in training and in quality management than their counterparts in North America. We try to structure PTooling along the German model. For example, we focus our energies on being the highest quality supplier for our customers. We want to be the best in their vendor base. When customers visit us, they are always amazed at what we accomplish from what appears to be a small business.

CTE: What’s your quality strategy?

Fiebig: It’s patient worker training. We also compensate our employees with higher wages than other machine shops, large or small. We use the best equipment we can afford. A significant portion of our operating budget goes to manufacturing engineering and we constantly optimize our processes. The result is that, even though we are a small shop, we are a major supplier to our customers.

CTE: What is PTooling’s approach to quality assurance?

Fiebig: It’s our key focus. We strongly believe that productivity—hence profitability—is a function of quality. We achieve quality through our culture. Simply put, we purchase the best and employ the best; therefore, our expectations are for the best. For example, our largest customer is a global completion/stimulation tool manufacturer. The oil-field tools we make parts for are almost exclusively used for fracking horizontal wells, and completion is the process of making a well ready for production. In 2011, our customer tracked its overall nonconformances at 6.2 percent of purchased parts across its vendor base. We produced almost C$4 million worth of parts for this customer and had zero nonconformances for the entire year.

CTE: What else sets PTooling apart?