The agricultural equipment supply chain: Kinze Manufacturing

WILLIAMSBURG — A flatbed semi wheels through the Kinze Manufacturing warehouse door, to an enclosed receiving dock where Craig Reeves's team unloads 20 tons of steel tubes.

An overhead 7.5-ton capacity crane descends and two men affix clamps to a beam about 40 feet long. The crane slowly lifts the piece and stacks it into a pile to be collected later for assembly.

It's the mainframe, or toolbar, of the Kinze model 3600 planter.

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For the last three weeks, reporter Brian Morelli will be looking into how agriculture planters are built. For the third part of the series, Morelli visited the Kinze Manufacturing plant in Williamsburg.

Mine cart icon by Creative Stall. Steel icon by Pedro Martínez. Factory icon by Krisada. Tractor icon by Bernar Novalyi. All icons from the Noun Project.

'We get a flat bed of tube about one every day, and another of steel sheets and plates,' said Reeves, group leader for steel receiving. 'We buy as much steel as we need, but not so much we are stuck with large volumes.'

The name of the game at Kinze these days is streamlining. Streamlining operations. Streamlining shipments. Controlling inventory. Reducing waste, whether time or material.

Materials come from far away to Williamsburg, an agricultural town of about 3,100 people in Central Iowa, where the Kinze 3600 comes together.

Kinze was founded in 1965 by Jon Kinzenbaw, a welder and farmer from Victor with a knack for innovating more effective farm equipment. Kinzenbaw's products, such as a folding planter that eased moving the implement from field-to-field without unloading seed, gained popularity, and the company expanded.

A new headquarters was opened in 2010 on Interstate 80. The Kinze Innovation Center — a company history museum of sorts — opened in 2013. The same year, the warehouse expanded and an overseas operations plant in Lithuania opened.

But more recently, Kinze has struggled, as have many in the agricultural industry, such as DuPont Pioneer, Deere and Caterpillar. Soft demand for equipment due to low commodity prices has strained business.

Since last June, the company has let go 336 employees, including 121 last month. Corn prices were at $3.48 a bushel in February, which is down $1.85 compared to the five-year average, and soy at $8.36 a bushel is down $4.11, according to data from the Iowa State University Extension Office.

'When you start to get down around $4.50 a bushel, farmers start to lose money,' said Richard Dix, the supply chain coordinator for Kinze.

Kinze production has slowed, but workers are still manufacturing planters and grain bins.

'Factories like to go fast, and people like to work,' Dix said. 'The hardest thing to do is slow down a factory.'

Steel is the primary material in the 3600 planter, which is a farm implement used to plant 12 or 16 rows of crops at time, 30 inches apart — primarily corn and soybeans.

Kinze estimates 90 percent of the steel it uses is domestic. The majority originates due north in the Mesabi Iron Range in upper Minnesota. Michigan, Utah and Alabama also produce iron, and steel from China, Australia, Canada and Turkey also has flooded the market.

Iron is mined from pits, shipped as taconite pellets, and melted in mills, such as ArcelorMittal's Burns Harbor, Ind., plant, which produces about 15,000 tons of steel per day.

Mid-sized manufactures such as Kinze don't buy the volume to purchase directly from steel making giants. Instead, ArcelorMittal, U.S. Steel and others sell to steel service centers, such as Steel Warehouse in South Bend, Ind. and Maruichi Leavitt Pipe & Tube of Chicago, which sell to Kinze.

Kinze has been working with Steel Warehouse since the 1980s.

The turn around between Kinze and Steel Warehouse is fairly rapid, but further up stream in the supply chain, Steel Warehouse anticipates Kinze's needs and orders from steel mills six to 12 weeks in advance.

Kinze buys customized steel coils, steel plates and frame tubes. Steel Warehouse 'slits' the steel to the desired width and levels or flattens the steel in a temper mill.

'We provide intermediary processing to get it into a form Kinze can work with,' said Randy Parsons, Steel Warehouse director of steel procurement and logistics. 'We can take the memory out of the steel and provide a very flat sheet.'

If the steel isn't as ordered, it can be devastating for high-dollar machinery at Kinze.

'Today's modern laser travels very quickly across the sheet,' Dix said. 'The sheet needs to be very flat or it can destroy the laser. It can crack, and then you have lost machine time and tens of thousands in damages.'

At Kinze, the steel is cut down further and shaped into components specific for the planter. Steel tubes are lugged to saws to be cut to length. Coils go to a stamper the size of an elevator shaft. Sheets go to the laser cutter.

During a visit to the Kinze facility by The Gazette in October, Eric Sanders, a hydraulic welder from Montezuma, was controlling a three-axis robotic laser to etch notches for a component of the planter. When the machine kicks to life, it can maneuver 360 degrees around the steel in about 30 seconds to complete the cut.

'This has cut my weld times in half,' Sanders said. 'I get a lot more done.'

Hiring, training and retaining welders has been the biggest workforce issue for Kinze, Dix said.

The laser was new, and Dix said despite the downturn Kinze invested 'seven figures' in the upgrade.

'Our unswerving belief is this market is coming back, and when it comes back Kinze will be ready to supply that demand,' Dix said. 'We are driving out the variances that exist in the business at every single level — whether it's the machine level, human level, infrastructure level.

'We want to solve the problem.'

The company has been redesigning production lines to improve efficiency, eliminate downtime and promote a lean manufacturing standard to reduce waste. They do this by examining every step of processes to identify inefficiencies, he said.

Separate production lines are being created for each product to avoid lags when changing over a production line from one product to another.

"Some of the processes we do today took 25 minutes when I started, and now it takes five minutes"

'It means we are flexible enough if a customer orders something today, we could have it ready by tomorrow,' said Mike Buswell, value stream manager for the 3600, 3660, and 3200 production lines. Buswell also farms, as do many employees here.

After the parts are created, they are painted the signature Kinze blue on a constantly moving clothesline through an oven. Then they move on to cells where components are welded into sub assemblies.

Next, it's on to the primary assembling.

The long squared steel tube is the centerpiece of the planter. Operators attach hoses, wiring and tires to the mainframe.

The hydraulic and drive systems are built and installed and powered up to test. The hydraulic system, which helps distribute the weight, is a selling point, Dix said.

The planter moves to final assembly where the rotor discs, seed readers, bins and electronic systems are attached per custom order. It's audited for quality again and readied for shipping.

In total, roughly 3,000 parts go into the 3600.

The crew uses pneumatic torches and air wrenches to build on the mainframe tube. Chris Van Patten of Oskaloosa, who has worked at Kinze for 22 years and now supervises the 3600 assembly line, said the job is hands-on.

'Some of the processes we do today took 25 minutes when I started, and now it takes five minutes,' he said.

As the implement moves through the warehouse, it looks less like individual pieces of steel and more like it's ready for the farm field.

The 16-row planter extends about 41 feet, 2 inches wide, is 24 feet long and is 8 feet, 2 inches tall when bulk seed bins are installed. The planters are rolled to the shipping dock, where it eventually will travel by truck and then rail or barge to a dealer or a specific customer.