What has made Intermatic so unusual today, though, isn't simply its dramatic turnaround 16 years ago. That only kept the business alive long enough to confront the decade in which company after American company fell before foreign competition. Intermatic, which under Miller was concentrating on two product lines, should have been as vulnerable as anyone. Its timers -- used by people to switch lights on and off during vacations, and by industry in a variety of applications -- depended on synchronous motors, inexpensive devices that over the years had turned into a commodity. Worse, the electromechanical technology the motors used was being challenged by microelectronic devices, much as ordinary wristwatches had been partially replaced by digital watches, and microelectronic timers required little of the manufacturing expertise Intermatic had developed. The company's other main product line -- low-voltage lighting used to accent walkways, pools, or gardens -- was similarly vulnerable to cheap-labor competition.
In 16 years, Miller created the company he had had in his mind -- a company that has not only survived but prospered in a hazardous marketplace. The shape of that company can be seen most clearly in the way it operates now -- and in the way employees talk about the man who led Intermatic through so many potential pitfalls.
Take marketing, for example. "Miller's an archetypal marketing person -- part researcher, part analyst, part salesman, part soapbox promoter," says vice-president of marketing Donald J. Ferguson. "He really created the department. Before he arrived, it was three guys in the back room, scratching their heads, saying, 'Well, I guess that's what we're going to do."
Moving out of the OEM market, where pricing and scheduling were the principal concerns, and concentrating instead on product lines sold through retailers and wholesalers required new skills and more resources. Intermatic now carriers three times as many models as it did in 1970, the result of Miller's determination never to send a customer away empty-handed. It also has a cadre of four marketing managers, who supervise the four divisions. Within the past year, the company has produced ("for a ton of money") a series of plan-o-grams, elaborate marketing packages specifically geared to retailers' needs. Before, says Leon E. Vinyard, the company's new president and chief operating officer, "we took products to market. Now we take programs to market."
Intermatic's manufacturing strategy reads like a page from a textbook on up-to-the-minute shop-floor techniques. It has implemented a materials resource planning (MRP) system, introduced a zero-defects program that pays cash bonuses, and has begun to automate, while finding jobs for displaced workers elsewhere in the shop. A few years ago, for example, Intermatic spent $800,000 on an electrostatic powder-paint unit (which eliminates wasted paint), and has recently committed $3 million to a completely automated synchronous-motor assembly line. That, notes Michael J. Coniglio, director of manufacturing engineering, "will replace 35 people. But not one will be fired."
Such improvements have had significant effects. The price of one plug-in timer, for instance, fell from $6 to $4, which makes it less expensive than an electronic equivalent produced aborad. A few years ago, when a Taiwanese company copied Intermatic's low-voltage Malibu lights -- right down to extraneous holes left by machining changes -- Miller took the company to court, obtaining an injunction. But he also sent his engineers back to the drawing boards. They, in turn, came up with a major redesign that cut the cost of the lights from $76 to $38.
"A few years ago, some people from Sankyo spent a few weeks at the plant," Miller recalls with a self-satisfied smile. "When they saw our people working out back, they were amazed. They said, 'We don't want this business. . . We cannot do it that fast." To bolster his claim, he points to Intermatic's market-share numbers: 80% of the low-voltage lighting market, 65% of the consumer timer market, and 50% of the industrial timer market.
What has distinguished Miller's regime more than anything else, though, is the way he works with people -- not only how he provides for them, which has made him something of a minor celebrity, but how he treats them and how he relies on them to bring out the best in the company. It's a manner that's reflected in a number of examples, gathered over a visit of a few days.
* On one of these days, a 26-year-old engineer named Rodger Larson marked his first anniversary with Intermatic. Before he was hired, Larson had received a better offer from Northrop Corp.But Intermatic didn't let go: it sat him down with an engineering manager, Dennis Beaumont, formerly of Northrop, who contrasted the styles and the opportunities offered by both companies. Larson signed on, and is now working on a newly acquired line of electronic products. At the end of the day, company president Vinyard stops by, congratulates him, and asks how things are going. "That," avers Larson, "would never have happened at Northrop."
* Intermatic employs upward of 1,000 people. Yet Kathryn Mahoney, an assembler who has been with Intermatic for 25 years, remembers a time when she approached Miller with a personal problem. Miller, she says, "was the one I turned to; I went to him, and he helped me out." Receiving clerk Wehrstein says, "I knew Jim when he was head of marketing. Even then, when I was just a foreman on the floor, he'd come in -- 'Jeanne, how are ya, how ya doin'?' You'd get a big hug. You wanted to do a good job for him; you wanted to get his product moving."
* For the past five years, in an acoustical vault hidden in the back of the plant, Leslie G. Heyden has been studying the low-level noise produced by timer motors. A gregarious man who is unabashedly enthusiastic about decibels and micropascals, he is the closest thing Intermatic has to a mad scientist. The company doesn't need to make its motors quieter; only a bat could discern the difference between a 10-decibel and a 5-decibel motor. But what Heyden learns makes for less expensive, more efficient, and more reliable motors. A quotation from a prayers book, contributed by Miller, hangs above his desk: "What is good makes no noise. What is noisy does no good."
