September/October 1998
A tour of the Owens Corning Metal Systems’ Bellwood #44 facility near Richmond, Va., shows how a company can succeed at both aluminum sheet production and employee relations.
By Kristina Rundquist
Kristina Rundquist is an associate editor for Scrap.
Just off the I-95 corridor between Richmond and Petersburg, Va., on a flat, treeless parcel of industrial land divided up between several corporations, sits the Bellwood #44 plant. It’s a place where, by mid-July, under a punishing sun, the grass has long since traded in its cool green for a crackling, dusty brown. All-in-all, an unlikely spot for the main production facility of Owens Corning Metal Systems, the newest division in the Owens Corning (Toledo, Ohio) corporate family, and an even less likely place to find managers and union employees engaged in the kind of team-based efforts that many companies just talk about—especially when much of the work involves long hours and stultifying heat.
Still, that’s exactly what you’ll find should you ever drop by for a visit. The Bellwood plant manages to combine high productivity with a high degree of employee involvement as it produces more than 100 million pounds of coiled aluminum sheet annually. This sheet, most of which is used in the residential building and construction industries as trim coil, downspouts and gutters, soffit, fascia, siding, and accessories, gives the company a significant share of its secured market.
How does the Bellwood plant maintain this success? By placing a great deal of importance on employee empowerment and by believing that employees who have a stake in the end product, along with the necessary responsibility and authority, will do their jobs well. That, in turn, makes for a better work environment and a top-notch product. Quality begets quality, in other words.
Power to the People
The most unusual aspect of the Bellwood facility, aside from the fact that it’s the only facility in the world to make aluminum sheet from compacted shot rather than molten metal, are its management practices.
The concept of ART—authority, resources, and training—is key to the firm’s success and focuses on management and operation through teamwork, says Freddie Copeland, area manager for receiving, casting, and hot mill. “You have to give employees all these things [the three ART principles] for them to do their jobs well,” he explains. “Then they’ll accept the responsibility and work for continuous improvement. Every employee works together in making this place work because we trust them to do their jobs and repair and handle disruptions.”
Each piece of equipment is run by a “natural work team,” and everyone in the plant is a member of some sort of team. These teams can be interdepartmental and include both salaried and hourly members, such as the one in charge of making hiring recommendations. Teams meet regularly and map processes on a flowchart to maintain uniformity from shift to shift, with overtime schedules and breaks systematically negotiated with area managers. Moreover, plant employees have been cross-trained, so each is able to do every job within a given area. “No one comes in and does the same thing every day,” notes Copeland. “You’ll keep a particular job throughout your shift, but the next day you’ll be assigned another job on a rotating basis, and except for the lead person, the money is the same.”
The lead person takes over when managers aren’t at the facility, such as at nights and on weekends. Similar to a supervisor, this person is an hourly employee who has been formally trained to take a leadership role, a practice that has strengthened the bonds between management and hourly employees, most of whom belong to the International Association of Machinists.
Phil Taggart, lead man for the finishing plant, admits that trust wasn’t always something hourly employees associated with management. “Now, we have the avenues and direction where we can go in, do our jobs, and effect change. It’s a good thing to know where you stand with management. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s a really good one,” he says.
Irv Lampkin, area manager for the finishing plant, agrees and adds that it’s the team concept that “makes this place tick. It improves the quality of our life immeasurably. We’ve trained people to where they know what they need to do and have given them the authority to do it.”
The Road to Coil
Teamwork at the Bellwood plant begins before any aluminum scrap is purchased. The metal planning team, using a computerized blend model, determines the various amounts and chemistries of scrap to purchase to satisfy advance orders and inventory requirements. From there, the scrap purchasing team goes into action, developing a purchasing plan that typically results in two-thirds of the scrap coming directly from processors and a third from brokers.
Most of the Bellwood plant’s scrap is purchased from suppliers within a 500-mile radius of the facility. “We like dealing directly with processors,” says Allan Garner, manager of aluminum sourcing and procurement, who works out of the Raleigh, N.C., corporate offices. “It’s good for both parties—they know our requirements and we know what to expect. And since there isn’t a middleman, we’re able to come to quick resolutions as far as what we need.”
Bellwood’s aluminum sheet is made almost entirely of scrap aluminum—98 percent, in fact, with alloy or prime making up the last 2 percent—that arrives by the truckload five days a week. Of the trucks that pass through the Bellwood facility each day, most are carrying bales or briquettes of painted siding, UBC, mixed low-copper clips, foil, and segregated scrap.
With 20 trucks arriving at the receiving area each day, deliveries can’t be left to chance. So Bob Spence, receiving manager and a 20-year company veteran, plans each delivery. “Everyone is personally contacted,” he says, referring to the fact that he calls to schedule deliveries, usually working two to three weeks out.
Before hitting the receiving docks, each truck must pass over the scale (and again, upon departure) and through the company’s new radiation detector. If everything checks out, Spence and his team conduct a visual inspection on the docks and, when necessary, take a sample for analysis.
Every delivery must be accompanied by a purchase order giving the net weight and total piece count. From there the process assistant creates a load sheet, which includes an order number and other pertinent information such as vendor name, date and time of arrival, and weight. Then, bar-code tags are attached to every bale or container in a load, with the material then being stored as a group as it awaits melting.
The reason for all this identification? Traceability. “Vendor information, load number, weight per piece, and the type of scrap are all recorded on the label,” explains Tony Highe, plant manager of the Bellwood facility. “We scan the tags in as the material is charged. Since we charge by load and each load has been tagged and stored separately, if contamination is discovered we have the paperwork to trace it back to the source.”
Bar-coding doesn’t just help with identifying a source—it also helps with inventory. “When the bales are being charged, the ticket is removed and scanned and the information that the material has been released from inventory enters the system,” explains Copeland.
Charging of the Bales
Charges of roughly 12,000 pounds each are made to one of the firm’s three gas-powered reverberatory furnaces (two with a capacity of 80,000 pounds each, the third with 110,000 pounds). After each charge, a sample is taken and its chemistry analyzed. “Every time you add a bale to the charge you sample it so you can detect any trace deviation,” says Garner.
Data concerning the load’s furnace and sample time are automatically entered into the company’s computer system, and if the charge is acceptable, it passes to a 30,000-pound holding furnace.
The next stage of the molten metal’s journey is the shot pot, which doesn’t look like a pot at all. It’s more of a cylinder whose surface is honeycombed with more than 5,500 holes, each 0.052 of an inch in diameter. Molten metal is poured into the pot as it turns at roughly 680 rpm, forcing droplets of aluminum through the holes. As the droplets make the 60-foot drop into the collection pit, ambient air is passed over them, cooling and solidifying them prior to reaching a two-tier shaker system that will separate the good shot from the bad. The bad shot, which constitutes a very small portion, returns to the furnace, while the good shot proceeds to one of four 250,000-pound-capacity silos.
Because the hot mill consumes twice the cast capacity each hour, it’s necessary to allow the silos to fill to a certain level, explains Copeland. “By storing the shot, it gives the cast pot a running start and allows more extended runs in the mill.”
Once the appropriate level has been reached, the shot is transferred pneumatically to the hot mill through large pipes. The airborne pellets are heated to approximately 860oF, the point of elasticity, as they make the 12-second fall to the mouth of the hot mill’s hopper.
Upon arrival in the hopper, the pellets are then basically compressed into sheet in a system reminiscent of an old-fashioned clothes wringer, says Copeland. “The material passes through two rollers, and like the clothes, the pellets are compacted and extruded into a flat shape.”
As hot sheet emerges from the hopper, it’s trimmed and coiled onto mandrels. These behemoth coils, weighing in at nearly 30,000 pounds each, are then assigned a lot number and stored for cooling before being transferred by truck to the cold mill.
Quality is measured at each stage of the process through a quantometer analysis (which analyzes the chemistry of a melt) and a micrometer check for coil gauge, while width is also checked. Employees in the hot mill area, as well as throughout the plant, are responsible for monitoring the quality of the product under their watch. Because some means of identification is maintained at every stage, any quality problem can be traced back to a particular stage and shift.
Cold, Hard Aluminum
After a cooling period, coils that aren’t sent as reroll to Owens Corning’s Roxboro, N.C., site (for details on the firm’s plants, see “A History of Change” on page 101) enter the Bellwood plant’s cold mill. It’s here that strength is added to the coils through reductions in gauge and where further rolling takes place. Explains Highe, “We’re looking to establish certain properties at the end of the process, so we work backward. The coils exit the cold-rolling process at full-hardness, then they’re annealed and brought back to the customer specifications of either 1/4-,1/2-, or full-hard.”
In batches of eight, coils are passed through one of the company’s two 240,000-pound-capacity batch annealing furnaces to stress-relieve the metal and develop better forming characteristics. After annealing, the coil heads for the tension-level line. Here, as aluminum sheet races by at 1,000 feet a minute, the metal is leveled, slit to customer specifications, and rewound. At this stage, samples are taken and sent to the company’s on-site lab for physical testing.
While the maximum coil width at this stage is 50 inches, “no matter how many cuts you can get out of it, it’s going to cost the same to run. If, for example, you run 36 inches wide, you won’t be as profitable, so we combine the width to maximize throughput in all cases,” notes Highe. “We can get up to four cuts.”
A Matter of Control
At the Bellwood plant, personal and environmental safety is first on everyone’s agenda, say both Copeland and Lampkin. All employees are given up to eight hours of training with an outside contractor and must pass a series of tests before they can report to their assigned department. Mandatory monthly safety meetings may include a lecture or video on topics such as OSHA regulations, crane usage, and the operation of any new piece of equipment.
Employee comfort is also critical. In the hottest work areas, air-conditioning vents are trained directly on the affected employees. And ergonomics plays a role, too. “We want employees to leave work the same way as they came in,” Copeland stresses, adding that the employees will let management know if something isn’t right. Teams discuss changes they want to see addressed in their work stations, adds Lampkin, and everyone must agree before any changes are made. “It’s not just for one person, but for the group,” he says.
As far as environmental controls go, the Bellwood facility has been extremely conscientious, says Highe. “The environmental safety process has been in place since day one. We’re very proactive and very capital-intense here.”
Further, Buddy Parker, environmental manager, has been instrumental in keeping the facility abreast of federal and state regulations, as well as recent developments in environmental control. Parker walks the grounds daily to be certain that no one is “blindsided by a leak or spill” and stresses that the site has been exceptionally vigilant “in removing all things that fall under process safety management.”
For instance, the plant’s oil and cooling systems are both closed loops, with the new cooling system reducing water usage by 1,500 gallons a day and the oil system now using a more environmentally friendly oil. Each furnace is permitted, and repairs and modifications are made whenever a furnace is shut down for any reason. And the baghouses have been modified to increase the capture of smoke.
It’s a lot of work to stay compliant, let alone exceed what’s required. But as Parker points out, “We’re interested in doing things right and being environmentally responsible citizens. No matter how you say it, we do a lot of good here.” •
A tour of the Owens Corning Metal Systems’ Bellwood #44 facility near Richmond, Va., shows how a company can succeed at both aluminum sheet production and employee relations.