Attached to Scrap

If you go looking for Pemberton Inc., you might have a hard time finding it.

The headquarters—and sole facility—of this Longwood, Fla.-based equipment attachment manufacturer is hidden from the main drag, located just off Highway 434 in the Longwood Industrial Park. 

And even if you know where to find the Pembertons—Todd, the firm’s president; his brother Bruce, vice president; and Todd’s son Luke, sales manager—you’d probably have a hard time tracking them down. With three new products set to be unveiled at this year’s ReMA convention and exposition in nearby Orlando, the family and its company are extremely busy.

Yet, while the firm’s location and principals may be hard to find, scrap recyclers should have no such problem finding the exact Pemberton attachment they need for their processing and material handling equipment. From grapples to shears to buckets, Pemberton seems to make an attachment for everyone. In fact, the firm prides itself on just that—its ability to offer a complete line of attachments. 

“We offer diversity, a complete package,” says Todd, the company’s founder. “We’re a one-stop source for the scrap industry, and that’s the best reason in the world to come to us.”

Building Equipment—and a Name

Being a one-stop shop has advantages for both Pemberton and its customers. “We can put together package deals for scrap processors, whereas otherwise they might spend more money going to four different vendors for four different products,” notes Luke.

For the company, the one-stop shop approach enables it to make repeat sales to customers. As Luke explains, “We can go into a scrap operation with a set of car-body forks. If that customer likes our forks, we then have the flexibility to go in and say ‘Since you like Product X, have you thought of using Product Z?’”

While Pemberton has been a recognized name in the scrap processing and handling equipment field for years, it wasn’t founded to serve the industry. Back in 1975, when Todd started the business on the very site it sits today, Pemberton specialized in the construction of folding ramps for lowboy trucks.

As his company grew, Todd branched out into making other parts, namely land-clearing attachments for front-end loaders and bulldozers. He got to the point where he had the manufacturing capability to produce attachments with greater hold tolerance, and that enabled him to get into other niches. Among those niches were scrap processing and handling attachments.

Todd realized that in order to grow the company, “he needed to get into something more recession-proof,” explains Luke. “That’s why we first started producing grapples, buckets, and shears.” In short, Todd steered his company toward the recycling market because he “saw it as a niche that needed to be filled,” Luke says.

While Pemberton makes equipment attachments for many industries—including demolition, material handling, underground utilities, marine, forestry, rock quarries, and railroads—the firm has a definite interest in expanding its presence in the scrap processing market. Not a bad idea since, as Todd observes, “Waste and recycling are always going to be here.”

To that end, the company has been hard at work designing new-and-improved attachments to add to its current lines, the majority of which are built to fit 40,000-to-70,000-pound hydraulic excavators. “We make attachments for 10,000-to-200,000-pound excavators, for front-end loaders with buckets from 1 cubic yard to 10 cubic yards, and every size in between,” Luke says, boasting, “We have more shear sizes than any other manufacturer.” Pemberton, in fact, offers 17 shear models (seven rigid, seven rotating, and three mechanical) and six grapple models (each of which comes in three sizes). And that’s not all.

In March, Pemberton plans to unveil two new grapples, both of which are firsts in the industry, the company says: One, a cast-tooth grapple, is manufactured from high-tensile, high-manganese alloy and features a parabolic side-pin and replaceable tooth and tip; the other is the first scrap grapple to be made of all-cast steel, Pemberton says. Among the features of this four-tine, orange-peel grapple—which will be offered in rigid, knock-around, and 360º continuous rotation models—are parabolic side-pin teeth located at the end of each tine.

In the case of the former grapple, “this cast tooth will eliminate all weld seams as well as the continued maintenance that all fabricated grapples require,” notes Todd. “And with side-pins, it makes it much easier to replace the teeth, so there’s less downtime.” Each attachment will carry a three-year, 3,000-hour warranty (excluding wear parts) against structural failure—the same guarantee that’s behind all Pemberton equipment.

As for price, suffice it to say that Pemberton’s new grapples will be competitively priced. “Everyone in the industry is real close in price,” says Luke, noting that “in order to build a quality product, you have to charge for it. We don’t try to be the cheapest because we have to stand behind our product. You can’t just go in with the lowest prices and expect everyone to buy your product.”

Tined and True

One reason that Pemberton is able to stand behind its products is because it has control over its manufacturing process “from start to finish,” a fact that eases a lot of its suppliers’ and customers’ minds, says Renato Rey, plant manager. “Our original equipment suppliers want to know that we have the machining capability to maintain the tolerance,” he explains. “Here, we use all CNC equipment lathes. We have the full line of MAZAK equipment because it’s the only thing that can give us the accuracy and precision we need.”

When the company receives an order for an attachment, the order heads first to its engineering department, where a team of four engineers designs connection adapters and, if necessary, tweaks the attachment design. “We’ll get on the phone with the factory that manufactured the adapters and get the most up-to-date information on what we’ll need to engineer to make sure the attachment will fit the customer’s piece of equipment,” explains Rey. Having a close relationship with OEMs helps Pemberton’s sales, adds Luke, noting that customers like the fact that the company “has the kind of factory support to which other companies may not have access.”

Because Pemberton offers such a broad variety of attachment models and sizes, it’s rare that a customer will need one that the firm doesn’t already offer. Should that happen, however, “we can certainly design something very specific,” Luke says. The firm, for example, has worked with a Los Angeles company to design a specific grapple for breaking bales of cans so they can be inspected more easily.

For standard orders, “we usually give an eight-to-nine-week turnaround, if everything is in stock,” Luke says, noting that “we have the more common parts in stock. It’s death if we don’t because you can’t tell someone it will be a week before you can send them a part. After all, we’re up against our competitors who are selling the same way.”
Wear parts are always in plentiful supply, says Rey. “Although we have six models of grapples, three or four of them are the most popular, so we keep those parts on the shelf. For the others where we may build one every couple of months, customers have to order the parts in advance.”

To keep a steady inventory, Pemberton maintains two distinct inventory bases—one for replacement orders and one for the assembly of new attachments. Says Rey, “Our employees have to keep the banks separate—in other words, replacement can’t be pulling parts from the manufacturing side.”

Once engineering has finished its job, the order heads to the production floor. Pemberton’s manufacturing division runs two shifts and is broken down into three shops, or mini-plants, each with about 12 employees and each specializing in its own set of products. “Each mini-plant has its own team of fitters and welders, and each is designated to build only certain products,” notes Rey. More experienced, senior employees are assigned to teams charged with building more complicated products such as shears and rotating grapples.

The first production stop is the burning department where all shape products are formed. “Patterns are downloaded from the computer to either a six- or eight-head burn table and then are burned into the metal plates,” Rey says. The cut shapes are then stored on pallets before being sent en masse to their respective shops. Accompanying the shapes is the order itself, and every piece that will go into an attachment is labeled with the work order number.

In the shop, shapes pass through either a 500-ton press that bends plate steel to specific angles or over a plate-forming roll, depending on the shape’s final purpose. Machining comes next. Here, parts are machined to precise measurements on one of two five-axes lathes or a 30-tool CNC machining center that’s used to make shear components. The fitting department takes over from there before sending the parts for welding.

Quality control is the final stop prior to painting and cleaning. In reality, however, quality control takes place at every step of the production process, Rey notes. At every stage, not only must each employee sign off on the job, but the shop foreman and someone from the quality control department must as well. “There are three signatures required for every stage of production,” Rey says. “If a weld ends up being bad, we want to know who did it and who checked it.”

Pemberton extends its quality control into the field through its network of dealers, who are authorized to repair the firm’s equipment. “Throughout Latin America and the United States, each dealer has been given approved hourly repair rates to pay for their costs,” Rey says. “The dealers take care of the repairs themselves and then bill us. We’re dealer-oriented, so that’s how we service our attachments and how our warranties are taken care of.”

The reason behind this dealer-repair approach, he adds, is that Pemberton purchases its OEM parts from, for example, Caterpillar, “so they’re authorized to do repairs. If you’re talking about the nearest service location for a Pemberton shear, go to your nearest Cat dealer.” In almost every instance, Rey notes, it’s quicker for Pemberton customers to head for their nearest dealer than to wait for the company to dispatch a repair team. That saves Pemberton from having to maintain a mobile repair department of its own.

That’s not to say Pemberton never makes house calls. “There are a lot of times when we’re doing business with the end-user and will go out and take care of a problem that way,” Luke says. Not long ago, he notes, the company sent four employees to Costa Rica to repair some of its equipment.

Running a Tight—and Safe—Ship

As for taking care of business in-house, Pemberton strictly enforces its company rules, with safety being of prime importance. All plant employees are required, for instance, to wear hard hats and safety goggles. If they work in a department that requires more extensive gear, the company provides it free of charge. With that comes the caveat that employees must wear their protective equipment at all times. “If they don’t, it’s grounds for dismissal,” says Rey.

An eight-member safety committee meets monthly to review accident reports and get updates from each area of the company. Quarterly, production areas with high accident rates are closely reviewed and a plan is developed to improve their safety records. Each area is represented on the committee, and it’s up to the representative to take the information back to his or her department.

Training is a critical aspect of Pemberton’s safety plan. For instance, only employees who have been trained in the proper operation of forklifts and overhead cranes are allowed to use them, and all new employees must take training sessions on all the equipment they’ll be using, even if they’ve used similar machines in previous jobs.

Pemberton is also extremely serious about maintaining a drug-free workplace and conducts pre-employment, state-certified tests to that end. When an accident occurs, “that same day the person or persons involved undergo a drug test. It’s mandatory,” says Rey. “If they fail, they lose their job and are responsible for paying the health care bills.”

While that approach may seem strict, Pemberton—with its ever-expanding list of products and overall corporate growth—can no more afford lost time than its scrap processing customers. Success, according to Luke, “boils down to how you treat them as customers and how quickly they can be back up and running if a piece of equipment breaks down.” •