Back to the Future

A foundry shop uses outmoded technology to create state-of-the-art production and better service.

Tweet

Pentz Design represents a new breed of manufacturer that relies on outmoded technology and discarded equipment to create a state-of-the-art product

Pentz Design is a foundry that can give us a window on some of the changes in the world of business. Using an ancient process, it takes advantage of the marketplace's demand for more specilaized tasks, shorter production runs, and better service. It's a company that probably could not have survived 15 years ago, yet today it's thriving. -- E.O.W.

Down by the water in Seattle where the fishing boats come in sits a functional, low-slung building, home to Alaska Diesel Electric Inc., maker of engines for fishing boats and yachts. At the heart of the building the engines sit, assembled and primed in shiny school-bus yellow, rising like sculpture from the shop floor.

Alaska Diesel relies on a constellation of foundries to cast its engine parts, and the relationship is at times uneasy. Casting hot metal is as much art as science, offering ample room for error and misunderstanding. If a customer decides to go elsewhere, he must often pay for the tooling of a new mold. He must watch painfully as the new foundry struggles to master the inevitable quirks that arise in casting an unfamiliar part. "When you move your pattern to a new foundry, you start the learning curve all over again," says Dick Gee, vice-president and technical director of Alaska Diesel. "Manufacturers hate that. The tendency is to stay where you are."

Nonetheless, two years ago Gee decided he wanted a divorce from the foundry casting the valve covers for his engines. The quality wasn't there. Gee gave the job to a fellow named Larry Pentz, who ran a small foundry across Lake Washington and up in the foothills of the Cascade Range. Pentz, who casts precision aluminum parts in sand molds, had been quietly courting Gee for a year. Gee liked Pentz. He found him bright and straightforward. He was willing to give him a try.

Then the valve covers came back from Pentz, the engine's name crisply raised in block letters across the top. Gee marveled at the effort and all that has followed since from Pentz's shop. "The quality of his work is outstanding," says Gee. "It's art grade, really. It's better than it needs to be. He takes great pains not only with how the part works, but how it looks."

Pentz Design now casts more than half of Alaska Diesel's aluminum parts in a relationship Gee calls "symbiotic." It routinely gets so involved in the development of Alaska Diesel parts it might as well be a subsidiary. In one case Pentz suggested design changes that made the part easier to cast and less prone to failure. In doing so, it saved Gee 35% on tooling costs.

Larry Pentz, 39, attended the Cleveland Institute of Art, where he studied sculpture and industrial design. For the past 18 years he has been pouring all manner of metals into molds of all shapes and sizes. Pentz is an artisan. Yet, last year, Pentz Design Pattern & Foundry Inc., in Duvall, Wash., did $1.7 million in sales. Its five-year growth rate of 1,266% placed it 215th on the list of INC. 500 companies. Pentz now employs 38 people, and has 60 customers, the bulk of them in high-technology industries such as electronics, medical equipment, and aerospace. His production runs tend to be limited -- as small as one piece -- his service is not. Most foundries cast a part and let the customer take care of the rest. In addition to offering extensive design input, Pentz Design casts, machines, finishes, tests, and inspects virtually all the parts it casts. It is a one-stop shop.

Pentz Design, a company that looks and feels like it belongs in a cottage, has turned into a mainstream success. Mass-production techniques now yield to more specialized tasks, shorter production runs, better service. Flexible specialization, as this trend is called, is characterized by a more collaborative relationship between supplier and customer. Information is shared. The customer does not squeeze his supplier on price, for what he seeks is quality work. The supplier, meanwhile, exploits his own skills. He revives dated techniques and materials, imbuing them again with value.

Two MIT professors, economist Michael Piore and political scientist Charles Sabel, have expounded the concept of flexible specialization in their book The Second Industrial Divide. (See Face-to-Face: "The Second Industrial Revolution," September 1985.) They believe that the industrial economies have saturated the market for mass-produced goods. Most Americans, for instance, have cars, TVs, and stereos -- products that continue to be cranked out of low-cost factories in developing nations.

Manufacturers in developed nations have scrambled to compensate. One means has been through artisanship -- which flourished a century ago, before the first industrial divide, when mass-production techniques took hold. "Manufacturers have been forced to switch to strategies based on product differentiation and innovation," says Sabel. "As product cycles have shortened and the pace of technological development has picked up, even the largest firms have found they have to collaborate with expert suppliers to design and manufacture crucial sub-assemblies and components." The rush to differentiation and collaboration is happening in virtually every industry, "from autos to apparel," says Sabel.

Sabel and Piore foresee no letup in this trend. Markets, they believe, will grow increasingly fragmented, demand more specific -- the need to outsource work to expert suppliers will become ever-more urgent.

Larry Pentz is a laconic sort, given to quiet utterings and occasional flashes of a bone-dry sense of humor. Move him down amid the hum and heat of the shop floor, though, and the man comes alive. Here Pentz can't keep his hands off things: neatly poured parts, machine tools bought at auction and rebuilt.

Pentz Design at its most elemental can be found over against a far wall in the foundry. That is where mounds of sand, dark in color, chalky in texture, rise from the floor. "This is our lifeblood," says Pentz. "For us sand is a living, breathing thing."

 1 | 2 | 3  NEXT 

Read more:

Sign-up for our Small Business Success Newsletter

Email Address: