By "Continuously Reinventing," 4th Generation Steel Manufacturer Successfully Adapts to Shifting Metals Market Demands
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This article is sponsored by Ulbrich Stainless Steels and Special Metals, an AS9100D:2015 and NADCAP certified worldwide custom manufacturer and distributor of special metals and alloys.
“We’re a capabilities-driven company, so we’re also a technical support partner,” explains Gregg Boucher, president of distribution at Ulbrich Stainless Steels and Special Metals. “As our customers are trying to come up with solutions to make new parts, we want to be able to be there to support them, to help them come up with a product that they can create consistently.”
According to Boucher, custom manufacturing has to come with customer support in order to ensure longevity, especially in the steel industry. He’s been working with Ulbrich to create custom metals for clients for over 35 years and believes that this approach has been vital to the company’s continued success. The company has continued to use its multigenerational knowledge of steel and special metals to apply an experienced perspective to working with customers in the steel industry.
“A lot of customers get themselves into problems by coming up with a raw materials specification that isn't realistic and can't be produced on a consistent basis,” Boucher says. “We work with them to engineer something that will be able to meet those needs without any supply challenges.”
Alongside Jonathan Ulbrich, vice president of the service center group, Boucher sat down to describe Ulbrich’s unique approach to educating both customers and employees on how to stay on the cutting edge of steel and special metal production.
Thomas Insights (TI): What sets Ulbrich Stainless Steels and Special Metals apart from the competition?
Jonathan Ulbrich (JU): I’m the fourth generation of a 97-year old family-run business. There are not many companies in general, let alone steel companies, that are four generations long — the longevity that we have is what’s really unique about us. In the 1960s my great-grandfather went out and procured government contracts to fill his mill before the mill was finished, and that got us into the light gauge reroll business.
He had a vision for where we were going. There was a market need, and my great-grandfather developed the equipment and the relationships to fill that market.
We’ve proven we have the ability to continuously reinvent ourselves within the market ever since, but the real reason we’ve been successful for so long is our commitment to making sure our customers and our markets are serviced with the products that we support.
Gregg Boucher (GB): What our founder, Fred Sr., saw was that there were a lot of companies in the industry that wanted the opportunity to buy smaller quantities, and Ulbrich was one of the only market players that offered that option at the time. As the organization has progressed, there has been more of a focus on our capabilities and, with that, the type of product offering that we have.
It's an evolution going from small quantities to a very capability-driven organization that can produce very unique items. In many cases, there are very few people who can do what we can do.
If you look at our business, whether it's our precision reroll capabilities producing light gauge strip & foil, our Shaped Wire division doing titanium and other special metals, the precision fine wire manufacturing we produce in South Carolina, or our service center in Chicago, there are many different examples within Ulbrich of where we saw a market need, and because of our functionality we were able to position ourselves to fill those market needs. We've been very successful as a business because of it.
The fact that we are family-run and privately-held — and for a steel company, we do have a very progressive mindset on making sure the market needs are met — makes what we bring to the steel market really special.
TI: How has your status as a multi-generational family translated into Ulbrich’s business practices?
GB: A lot of people look at us as a corporation, but what they don't really understand is that Ulbrich is a very family-oriented organization that has very little turnover. When you look at the skills required to produce these metals, those years of experience are really what differentiates us from a lot of other companies.
JU: We have more people that retire every year than quit every year. Some of our 40-year guys and gals have retired over the last couple of years, but the average age of longevity right now for our employees has to be over 15 years.
What's amazing about our industry is that there is a sort of magic to making metal, buying metal, and servicing customers who need to use metal. A lot of it is tribal knowledge, you can’t just read in a textbook or and pick it up. Because we have low turnover and we work hard on succession planning and knowledge transfer in general — whether it's through digital means or experiential training — we're able to create continuity within our workforce, which is one of the main reasons we've been able to be successful.
TI: What do you think is the biggest challenge facing industry today, and how is Ulbrich working to overcome it?
JU: I think 20 years from now, there is going to be a big skill gap if companies don't work really hard to start transitioning knowledge. We’ve found it to be such a critical element of our onboarding and continuous training processes.
We actually transfer knowledge internally as a core part of our training process. If someone has worked here for 30 or 40 years, it's critical that we're able to retain as much from them as possible so current new employees and future new employees will be on the same level as their more senior colleagues.
One thing we've started is an online training platform called UCORE, which is a Learning Management System (LMS) system in which we developed our own lessons. We have over 120 individual lessons right now in our LMS on topics ranging from straightforward things like how to write an email to more advanced, complicated metallurgical principles. The topics are all over the map so we can use them as a baseline for education training across the world.
Since it's a digital LMS system, all of our salespeople from China to Mexico, Canada, and the U.S. are on it.
It’s ingrained in our culture among senior leaders and long-term employees to be very excited to spend time with new people to get them up to speed. We’ve found that in the industry there are a lot of protectionist attitudes along the lines of “I'm not going to tell that new guy how to do things so I'm protected,” but at Ulbrich, we truly have a family atmosphere.
Historically with most companies, the training really depended on how good the supervisor was. The process was usually very inconsistent from individual to individual. By using this system, however, we’ve made sure that every Ulbrich employee has access to the same platform for training. I think it makes us stronger and makes a big difference.
On the customer side, our salespeople are sometimes more educators than salespeople because the new purchasing agents or the new operations people they’re working with throughout the sales process don't always understand the nuances of steel. Ulbrich likely has one of the strongest technical support groups in the industry. We spend a lot of time putting together technical meetings with our customers where we give them classes on topics like procurement, sales, estimating, and tool and die. We really get into the specifics about materials and how they're made and why it performs the way it does. That's something our customers really appreciate.
TI: How do you measure success at Ulbrich?
GB: I define success as exceeding the customer’s expectations. We aim to satisfy our customers while also keeping our organization focused on what it is that we do best, which is engineering the difficult-to-produce items with very demanding properties. We develop specifications so that our customers can successfully make parts without interruption in the source of supply.
We also exceed their expectations with the amount of technical support that we provide, from the amount of education about not only their product but also shifting market trends. We create supply chain management programs for our clients because so much of the product that they utilize is uniquely specific to them and their needs.
Both the technical expertise and the supply chain management that we provide really enable our customers to go after business that they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to reach. We have situations where customers come back and say to us, ‘Without your support, we could not have gotten this business.’
JU: Stainless steel, special metals, and nickel alloys is a pretty small market overall. If we didn't have strong relationships established with our vendors, just like the relationships we build with customers, we wouldn't have been able to navigate the downturns and the ramp-ups currently happening across the marketplace.
We work hard to make sure that there is an open dialogue across the supply chain. Our customers aren’t always familiar with the melt process and the complexity of metals because they're too far down in the supply chain to have a deep understanding of the time required and production work involved in the process.
Because of the size and functionality of our company, we’re able to navigate the waters on behalf of our customers, so we mitigate a lot of supply chain risks that a lot of our competitors aren't able to handle as effectively and proactively.
TI: What can we expect to see in the metals market in the future?
GB: I'm really excited about the future. I've been with the company for 35 years, and when I look at what Ulbrich was like when I joined it compared to what it is today, it's a different company as far as the sophistication of the product that we manufacture and how we operate as an organization. Yet we haven't sacrificed that feeling of community, that feeling of being a family.
To me, the future is going to be even more exciting because we're so well-positioned for the upcoming challenges in the industry, whether that’s the increasingly sophisticated nature of the products we’re making or the increased demand for us being able to support that level of production.
JU: The interesting thing about our market is that it constantly changes. Because of who we are, Ulbrich will continue to be at the forefront of the market changes, whether it's cars becoming electric, alternative energies, new consumer products, or new airplanes being built. It's going to be a really interesting run over the next 20-30 years for us to see what we get involved in and what we support. If we could actually get to Mars, we'll have metal on the Mars shuttle. It's guaranteed.
Image Credit: Provided by Ulbrich Stainless Steels & Metals
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