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Laminations Secures Its Legacy
March 1, 2009 By: Mark Arzoumanian Paperboard PackagingChuck Hanson loves to tinker. In the 1950s he watched his dad, a tool and die superintendent, repair televisions, and as a kid he loved to build electronic radios. Over the course of his 35 years at Appleton, Wis.-based Laminations, he has had the opportunity to build numerous paper converting machines. In fact, his first job there involved making a convolute tube winder.
In December 2006, as director of special projects, he was given the opportunity to prove to his bosses, one more time, his knack for machinery development.
 Laminations' "Legacy" machine for making UChannel® board has 18 roll stands (nine on each side) and features pivoting drive wheels. |
Laminations, a division of corrugated box maker Great Northern Corp., has been making VBoard® edge protectors, which are made out of laminated recycled paperboard, since its start-up in 1973. They prevent damage from happening to stacked products found in the housing, auto, electronic, and kitchen appliance industries (among others) by adding stiffness and support to pallet loads. They're usually made to order.
Three years ago, Laminations learned that on April 12, 2008, ITW, a major competitor, would see its patent expire on Reddi-Crate™, a pre-formed paperboard crate offering an alternative to wood crates (or paperboard tubes) for shipping long, narrow objects. Company executives asked themselves, "Can we build a customized VBoard machine that could operate much more quickly than our current machines to make a product that could compete with Reddi-Crate?"
 Gary Weber, vice president of manufacturing, shows how Laminations uses its UChannel® board to protect a stove before it's shipped. |
Landslide Winner
Laminations takes great pride in its innovator reputation. But in strategic planning sessions, company executives wondered if after 35 years in business the company should continue to make edge protectors or become an even more value-added provider. The latter won in a landslide.
"If we want to be viable, we needed to do something different," says President Gary Hietpas, who has been with the company for 21 years.
Once the company decided to offer an alternative to Reddi-Crate, it had to find a machine to make the components for what it is now being marketed as UCrate®. UCrate is composed of seamless U-shaped channels that fit snugly together to create a sturdy way to ship products such as window blinds and rods, tubing, fragile instruments, and glass products. After making VBoard for years, the company wanted to now take two pieces of this board, make it into a U, and then take what it now calls UChannel board and turn it into an UCrate.
 Leo Begrow (left), special project services, and Chuck Hanson, director of special projects, review documents detailing the "Legacy" machine they helped build under a tight deadline. |
Once Laminations conducted customer research and determined machine parameters, it turned to its overseas VBoard machine supplier. But the company quickly learned that the supplier's capabilities versus the objectives it had in mind for this new machine simply weren't compatible. So it turned to its in-house talent.
In December 2006, Hietpas, Rick Detienne, Laminations' then president, and a number of other senior executives sat down with Hanson and asked him if he could design a machine to develop UChannel board, which would then be made into UCrates. Hanson said yes. Then he grabbed a piece of paper and started drawing out his ideas for this machine, which the company later dubbed the "legacy" machine in honor of Hanson's final contribution to the company; he retires later this year. The executives listened while he made his case for making this machine in-house from scratch.
 Fighting Back with UCrate |
Bending Paper
"If you break [the new machine] down, there's not much that we haven't already tried," says Hanson with modesty. "Bending a piece of paper is bending a piece of paper. As we designed the machine we just expanded on our needs."
Management gave Hanson and his design team the green light on this project within an hour after the meeting ended. They started in earnest in January 2007. They were told the machine had to be ready to produce by the second week of October 2007. Strict timetables were set. Preliminary designs were developed while a team of VBoard machine veterans met weekly to learn how to run a machine that had yet to be built. However, what they knew from the get-go was that they would be operating a machine that needed to run at higher speeds than Laminations' VBoard machines. This new machine would also be handling longer, wider and heavier paper rolls.
One of the main goals of the UChannel/UCrate design team was to implement quick changeover times. Laminations had already concluded that overseas VBoard machinery makers couldn't give it what it needed. Quick changeover and setup times would allow the company to produce all kinds of UChannel shapes quickly.
"Our weekly meetings started with us asking ourselves questions that could result in changes in the machine's design criteria," Hanson says. "We needed time to shake down all our ideas, but we had to have the machine running by October [2007]."
As the machine's design evolved, Laminations realized that to meet this self-imposed tight deadline, it would have to call on local, outside machine shops to make parts. When asked to help, they immediately said yes. But these machine shop partnerships had some trying moments.
Hanson and Leo Begrow, special project services, remember the time when one of the shops they were working with ordered a special piece of steel to make some key UChannel machine gears. The shipment was delayed and it was a week before Laminations heard about it. It turned out that the steel was stuck on a train that was now off the tracks because of torrential rains in Southern Wisconsin. What to do? Another piece of steel was quickly located and delivered to the Green Bay tool and die maker. The employees there worked 80- to 90-hour weeks to make the gears.
"Another time we were working on the printing features of the machine for six weeks before we realized what we were trying to do wouldn't work," Begrow says. "So we had to scrap it and start over again."
Developing a quick changeover drive section was yet another challenge they had to meet.
But even these temporary setbacks and obstacles didn't dampen Hanson and his team's belief that they could pull this project off. Why?
"Most everything we needed this machine to do we had done before on a limited basis," Hanson points out. "We just had to put it all together. There's not a lot of black magic involved."
He notes that every part of the machine was proved out while also admitting that at times he was going only by his gut feeling. But if a part or process didn't work, he was quick to get out a piece of paper, start sketching again, and come up with a solution.
Now retired, Hanson takes satisfaction in having seen Laminations growth over the past three and a half decades; when he started with the company it had three employees.
"I know we need value-added products and I hope we have added something to the company that will move it forward for years to come," he says. "I've always had the backing of the owners, but I wasn't a one-man show. Leo [Begrow] was my right-hand design man. We always would bounce ideas back and forth. That was a huge part of working here. For us it was all about producing products unique enough that customers couldn't go to an outside vendor."
