Where customer is king
Feb 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Rick Weber
Manufacturing facilities
The quality starts at the manufacturing facilities in Shiner and Beeville. Shiner, with 127,000 square feet, manufactures front-end replacements, headache racks, steps, rails, and 30% of the back bumpers. Beeville, with 20,000 square feet, manufactures grille guards and the rest of the back bumpers. All products are powder-coated at Shiner.
After the flat steel, tubing, and pipe are bought in truckload quantities and brought in, work orders are made to start fabricating the raw materials through plasma cutting, press braking, and forming operations on tubes and pipes in the fabrication department.
The fabricated parts are moved to the welding department and work orders are generated to pull all parts to bring to the welding booth. The welding process' normal run size is 50 to 200 pieces of one make and model for a vehicle.
The parts are sandblasted to a white finish to take out all the impurities. Then they go through a manual cleaning process in quality control to guard against weld splatters on the product.
In the powder-coating department, the parts are placed on a conveyer through an automated and manual powder booth, then go into an oven at 460 degrees. They finish in quality control to be inspected for any paint flaws or blemishes.
“We design the products not only to be cosmetically eye-appealing but also to be very functional,” general manager Greg Chumchal says. “When we design a new product, the quality starts at design. From the material we use to the welding process to the powder we use to coat the product, quality is always of the foremost importance.”
For example, he says the Legend Series front-bumper replacement is the toughest product on the market and has been field-tested in extreme conditions. The standard front end and the 8-9.5K winch option come with a 4” schedule 40 pipe bumper, and the 15K winch option comes standard with a ¼” formed channel bumper. A 2” receiver hitch is standard on all Legend front-bumper replacements.
“Our company is always looking at new designs of products we currently manufacture,” Chumchal says. “We have a new body style of Jeep Wrangler. We're expanding our new Toyota line. We started two years ago manufacturing grille guards for Tundras, and this year we're coming out with front-end replacements and back bumpers. We have a full line of heavy-duty truck accessories for the Tundra.”
In August, manufacturing in Shiner is going to be stepped up with a 63,000-square-foot addition that will become the new finished-goods warehouse for product that's ready to be shipped out the door. That will free up virtually the same amount of space in the main facility so that production can be increased by 18-20%.
Ranch Hand recently bought a turret-punching machine that added more capacity. And it's also looking at adding more plasma cutting units to increase the capacity of manufacturing on the fabrication side, in addition to more welding booths.
“We'll produce more of what we currently produce,” Chumchal says. “We want to better satisfy our current customers by supplying them products on a very timely basis. Our goal is that when a customer calls in, we want to have it sitting on the shelf for him. Adding this new building and adding additional manufacturing allows us to do that.”
The plan also is to aggressively tap into new markets — particularly the Midwest.
“Our first goal is to go in and find a master distributor, where we can sell it to them, and they can take and distribute it to their area,” he says. “Our product is not very freight-conducive. It costs a lot of money to ship it all over the US. We try to ship it in bulk to one central location and have them ship it out.
“We're starting to see more inquiries to our main manufacturing facility, asking about our product. We monitor the calls coming in. You don't see our product everywhere throughout the US, but it's growing. I call it the ‘bleed-out effect.’ It started in Texas and is slowly growing, bleeding out to other states. They see it, they're interested and want to purchase it. So it keeps us growing from Texas outward throughout the US.”
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