September/October 1993
Here's a look at a grapple and bucket maker that's reached out of its rural Louisiana base to grab the attention of customers with demanding materials handling needs worldwide.
BY JEFF BORSECNIK
Jeff Borsecnik is assistant editor of Scrap Processing and Recycling.
The monster grapple pictured above seems symbolic of Hawco Manufacturing Co.'s ambition. The Slaughter, La.-based firm has already built some of the biggest and toughest grapples and buckets around, but it's eyeing a new position: to be recognized as "the number one supplier in the world" of these material handling tools, says Peter F. Prinz, Hawco's vice president and general manager.
The company has already come a long way. Founded in the early 1960s in the same sleepy, green, and humid town north of Baton Rouge where it's still headquartered, Hawco started out as a small machine shop that fixed, then eventually built, general purpose buckets for customers in its home state. Since then, it has steadily extended its reach, diversifying its product line and growing into a major manufacturer of sophisticated grapples and buckets serving demanding industries in many parts of the world.
While it basically makes only two products—buckets and grapples—the mutations covered by these two fill an astounding range of equipment for a wide variety of customers. In fact, from scrap grapples to two-tined car claws to massive digging and dredging buckets equipped for utterly spill-free operation, Hawco products serve the materials handling needs of ship owners, stevedoring operations, firms moving sand and gravel, incinerators, coal-consuming utilities, logging companies, dredging firms, and heavy construction contractors, as well as scrap processing facilities and steel mills.
Even within each specialized product for specialized industries, there are variations on the themes. In addition to hydraulic grapples, for instance, Hawco produces cable-operated mechanical grapples as well as electrohydraulic units for cable cranes. Its buckets also are offered in similar configurations, as well as recently introduced radio-activated electrohydraulic models especially designed for ships, which generally use cable cranes.
Meeting Extreme Demands
The products the manufacturer is probably best known for, however, are its biggest buckets and grapples and those designed for extremely severe duty, according to Prinz. After all, a scrap grapple that nearly fills a ship's hold or a glacial till-dredging bucket that weighs as much as hydraulic excavators common in the scrap recycling industry certainly should make for strong impressions.
That doesn't mean the company has ignored smaller equipment needs. But it does mean that in the case of scrap products, for example, while Hawco makes the common 1- and 1-½ cubic-yard grapples, it dominates the market for slightly larger grapples, says Prinz. "When you come across anything over a 2- or 3-yard capacity, there's a pretty good chance it'll be a Hawco," he says, attributing this position to the firm's emphasis on top-notch strength, design, and material.
In the dredging business, one of few industries Hawco serves that apparently demands more from its equipment than scrap recycling, Hawco likewise has the upper hand in particularly tough applications, says Prinz. "In dredging operations worldwide, anything that has to take serious abuse—that will be digging in rock—will be a Hawco bucket because that's a 24-hour-a-day, 365-day-a-year job, and the costs of operation are expensive so they can't afford downtime so they'll buy a Hawco. Hawco has proven itself in the most abusive conditions." He describes as an example a 90,000-pound bucket the firm developed for dredging the hard-rock bottom of Boston Harbor for that city's new harbor tunnel. Typically, he explains, the dredging company will alternately dynamite and dredge until the appropriate depth is reached, a time-consuming and costly operation to say the least. Hawco built a massive bucket—it's not so much large as thick—tough enough to perform the dredging after a single round of dynamiting, resulting in huge savings for the client, according to Prinz, who says the lessons learned from such extreme applications are applied to all of the firm's grapples and buckets.
Hawco's skill in mastering such demanding jobs is partly due to its effort to keep abreast of changes in materials and technology, especially the hydraulic cranes that are equipped with its grapples and buckets. "In the past, we had a lot of cylinder problems because the equipment companies kept modifying their rigs to get higher and higher pressures. We had failures because of the pressures on this equipment overrating our cylinders," admits Prinz, who explains that today Hawco's standard cylinders can handle working pressures—not just peaks—of up to 5,000 pounds per square inch (psi). "We've now reached the point that our cylinders will take the abuse that any rig in this country will give it." Still, the company is already pressing ahead with what will be its fifth-generation cylinder, designed to handle hydraulic systems running at up to 7,000 psi. "There's nothing in United States that does that now," Prinz points out, but the company plans to stay ahead.
Eliminating Blame, Cutting Mistakes
Hawco's team of 70 high- and medium-skill employees represent a regional work force whose work ethic and pride are matched in few areas of the country, according to Prinz, who has 18 years of scrap processing experience in various regions. A vital aspect of ensuring that this quality work force operates as a team is treating each worker as an important individual and removing blame when things go wrong, says Prinz. "A worker needs to know that if he does something wrong he doesn't get fired, he doesn't get fined. We show him where the error has cost us money and how to correct it if it happens again." If managers demonstrate a real work-together, blame-free attitude, he maintains, production problems will gradually be eliminated and mistakes will not be repeated. "If the hourly people see that that is management's attitude, they'll enjoy it, they'll relax, and get confident working," says Prinz. "It goes back to a lot of pride in all the people we have."
Hawco's 10-acre operation includes 140,000 square feet of manufacturing and storage space, enough elbow room to allow the firm to take on rush projects without significantly dislocating regular production. As an example, Prinz describes the case of a ship that was coming into a nearby port and needed two new buckets to replace damaged ones. Ships cannot afford to languish in port, says Prinz. "They needed them in a week, so the buckets were on the floor, cut, and shipped within that week."
The sheer size of some jobs, however, stretch the factory and its work force a bit, but the firm apparently handles such projects with enthusiasm. In one extreme case, the firm was called on to rebuild its one-of-a-kind giant wood-chip bucket, a 69-cubic-yard-capacity clamshell that was not performing to its expected level. After analyzing videotape of the bucket in action in the Port of Mobile, Ala., Hawco's engineers determined that the bucket's lips were briefly slipping horizontally rather than immediately digging when the bucket was actuated, so it would not fill to capacity. The bucket, which measures 14 feet in width, 28 feet in height, and spreads 35 feet when open—filling a good chunk of the factory bay to the height of its crane beams when in the shop—had to be fixed fast to avoid a severe bottleneck at the port. Hawco shipped it home, disassembled it, rebuilt it to correct its performance problem, and increased its capacity to 75 cubic yards—all in 10 days. "This shop can turn things around so quickly its incredible," observes Fred Perreand, Hawco's quality control manager.
Some of Hawco's products are so huge the firm must occasionally rent very large mobile cranes to handle them once assembled. In one instance, the company even had to remove the roof panels from its manufacturing facility to allow final assembly and testing of a giant, 40-cubic-yard dredging bucket, which was suspended from a huge hydraulic crane so it could be completed without removing it from the facility, according to Jon Craft, Hawco's shop superintendent.
Possible future demands for buckets weighing as much as 200,000 pounds have Hawco contemplating installation of an internal 60-ton crane and a building extension to house it. The firm is also already moving forward with plans to install a new computer-directed plasma burning table, which will be capable of cutting thick plate into parts with an accuracy of 5/1,000 to 10/1,000 of an inch—similar to the precision of machining—and a heat-treating facility for hardening wear parts. These additions will improve Hawco's quality and its control over its production schedule, company officials say.
These improvements are part of a bigger trend within the company toward increasing technical sophistication since the firm was sold to private investors by its founder and namesake, Henry A. Watson, several years ago. Driving these developments is a quality crusade that includes an effort to achieve ISO 9000 certification, which the firm has worked toward for more than a year, hoping for certification before the end of 1993. Prinz says the effort has two incentives: "If you have ISO certification and you are an unknown company like we are in some overseas markets, its a way to open doors. And in the United States , it gives your people a chance to say, `Hey, look what we've got. There are a lot of bucket and grapple companies, but look what we've got.'"
For Hawco's workers, the certification will have another payoff—recognition of achievement, a sort of "finish line to the race they've been running," says Prinz. "The only thing is they have to continue that race. It's like an endurance race—you can't just sprint. Every year they've got to be running."
Anther evolving change to the Hawco culture has been a move away from sales reps and distributors to internal sales since Prinz took over managing the company about a year and a half ago. The reason? Customers have become more sophisticated so they really don't need a middleman anymore and don't want to pay the added margin, says Prinz. The move will help Hawco "compete against other products that might be a bit lesser quality, but a bit less expensive," he adds.
As part of this effort, Hawco is striving to ensure its sales people are technical experts. "A salesman has to provide more than a product, he's got to provide a service and provide ideas," says Prinz. "If you can help the customer do something 5 percent better, he'll never forget you."
Prinz, an engineer by training, says he draws on his experience as a scrap processor in directing Hawco's sales effort. "When I look at the years I spent on the other side of the fence, I realize I bought from people who communicated to me, who were able to service me, who didn't want to come in and waste my time and buy me a cup of coffee and a donut. Maybe they weren't going to sell me anything, but they had an idea that could help me do something and I would listen to them and remember them. And when the time came, I would buy from them."
More Scrap, More Grapple
Scrap processors want to handle more and more material at lower cost, so they are looking to grapple makers like Hawco for new and bigger equipment. The ½- or ¾- yard hydraulic grapple has been largely replaced by 1- or 1-½ yard versions, and grapples twice as large as this are becoming more common. Hawco is even developing a 7-cubic-yard hydraulic grapple that will fill 50-ton trucks in two or three bites and cut the customer's loading time in half, according to the firm. Designing a grapple of this size is not a matter of simply extrapolating from smaller designs, explains Prinz. "On a job like this, you are stretching the limits not only of hydraulic grapples, but the pressures and forces are pushing the limits of the boom and the crane. ... The stresses on the equipment are tremendous."
Adding to the pressure on the manufacturer is the fact that the application demands the tool be in constant operation, with no margin for downtime beyond regular maintenance. Hawco's customers are also coming up with new and specific demands as they discover more potential uses for hydraulic grapples, notes Prinz. "We had a customer that wanted equipment to handle pipe and rail exclusively. You talk about biting into rail, that's very abusive, yet we made a special grapple for him to bite into rail using a hydraulic rig and it's standing up and doing the job."
Stretching the limits in jobs like this clearly makes the eyes of Hawco's ambitious managers light up. Says Prinz: "We know there's a lot of things we can't do today, but do know that if we've got an open mind we might be able to do it tomorrow, so we don't throw it away. We just put it to the side, because we are coming up with new things, new ideas, almost every week." •
Here's a look at a grapple and bucket maker that's reached out of its rural Louisiana base to grab the attention of customers with demanding materials handling needs worldwide.