Staub Manufacturing Sheet Metal Fabrications; reliability

Staub Manufacturing Solutions opened for business in April of 1997. Like all new business, things were slow at first. But we kept focusing on the important values of our business; do the right thing, make quality products and deliver them on time.

In December of 1997 we received a phone call from a local company asking if we could look at a project for them. They said it was urgent and wanted someone to stop by the next morning to see if we could help. When I arrived, they gave me the complete background. This was a brand-new product that had just launched in September and sales were really starting to increase. The problem was their current supplier not only was having trouble keeping up, they were also having a lot of quality issues and a high rejection rate! Frankly, the customer was drowning and looking for a lifeline. They had heard about our quality reputation and wanted to see if we could help them out of this situation.

I went back to the shop, and we immediately began working on a solution. We quoted the project and the customer called us back within 5 minutes of us sending the quote over. They said we were competitive and wanted to know how fast we could produce 10,000 pieces! Business was a little slow at the time, so we were able to start on the project right away. (There were only a few of us at the time. I still remember running the parts all night and delivering them to the customer each day).

As soon as we delivered the last shipment to complete the initial 10,000 piece order, they told us how happy they were with our high quality components, and then they placed another order for 10,000 more pieces! During that first year of production, we made somewhere around 30,000 pieces and that volume continued for several years. I really don’t remember the exact number; that was a long time ago!

A few things have changed over the years with this project. Unfortunately, our original contact passed away about 15 years ago and the company even changed ownership two years ago. One other big thing that has changed on this project are the volumes. Due to the lifecycle of this project, we no longer make 30,000 pieces per year. Today we are only making around 1,500 pieces per year.

However, nearly 27 years later, we still make the part and the part has not changed. Frankly, neither has our focus on making a quality part and delivering it on time. Someday the project will end and honestly, I’ll be a little sad when that happens. Oh, sure we have other projects that we have been running for well over 15 years or even close to 20 years, but this part is different. This part is the longest running part that we have made for a customer, and frankly it was a big boost in business at a time when we really needed it. But that’s ok, even when we stop producing this particular part; we’ll continue doing the right thing, making parts, making them the right way, treating our customers right and doing all that on a timeline that works out the best for our customer.