Raglan Industries celebrates 60 years of changing with the times

Raglan Industries owner John Michel (far right) with son Jonathan Michel, who runs the company's fab shop, and daughter Erin Bowen, who manages finances and administration, with a completed tanker ready for delivery.

Anyone who has worked in manufacturing for a long time has stories to tell, some good, some bad. Visiting a company like Oshawa, Ont.-based trailer and truck box manufacturer Raglan Industries and speaking to second-generation owner John Michel is no different. The family company celebrated its 60th anniversary in September, and Michel has been there for both the successes and the bumps in the road. The company’s ability to adapt to both opportunity and adversity is what has made it the success it is.

While the company began and grew by attracting strong, skilled local tradespeople, over the past 20 years it has had to react to a shrinking pool of talent by making operations and processes leaner. The efficiencies found in the process have set the shop up for growth despite the smaller head count.

Necessity is the mother of invention, as they say. John Michel and his family continue to invent a way forward.

Farm Beginnings

Raglan was established in 1959 (as Raglan Welding) by Bert Michel as a welding shop primarily to serve the local farming community. The reputation of the company was established on providing quality work at competitive prices. This ethic is still part of the company’s stated mission.

Bert had nine children, and all seven boys worked at the company at some point.

“We all started working very young on Saturdays and during the summers, gradually learning the trade,” said John.

Through the ‘60s, beyond repair work, the company began building farm machinery such as bailing and hay-moving equipment. Eventually they were putting in stables and started making tagalong floats for construction machinery.

“But already in the early 1970s the family farms were starting to disappear,” said Michel. In 1970 Raglan built its first gravel hopper, a bottom discharge road spreading trailer. The company had been repairing trucks, so when another local business owner asked if they could do it, it wasn’t a huge departure.

“That first hopper worked well, and the business grew from there,” said Michel. Throughout the 1970s the aggregate business grew. The company produced hopper dumps and end dump trailers and gradually expanded its reach and variety of products. Eventually it expanded into mining equipment and began conceiving of innovative designs. For instance, by 1980 Raglan was producing its trademarked U-Body dump trailers – a shape that simplified removal of materials from the truck.

Cranes, jigs, and fixtures are a key part of creating efficiencies on the Raglan shop floor. The use of them allows one person at a time to work in a station, which Michel says is the most efficient way for the shop to run.

Now the company not only does all its own fabrication work, but also has several finishing bays for hydraulics, pneumatics, wiring, washing, and painting.

Trade Changes

The trade and the materials have changed a lot over the years.

“In the 1960s through the 1980s, everything we built was primarily in steel,” said Michel. “Through the 1990s we saw the shift to aluminum truck boxes, tankers, and flat beds because of the weight savings. Today almost everything is aluminum. When the shift happened, we had to learn how to work with aluminum quickly.”

With the growth of the company’s reputation came a boom in the shop. By 1980 Raglan employed about 60 people – up from just six family members in the 1960s. Over the next 10 years, the company expanded its reach across Ontario and Quebec, finishing the 1980s with more than 100 employees. In the 1990s it employed between 150 and 170 people and was shipping internationally. But around the year 2000, Raglan pulled back from the international business as it became more challenging to find skilled tradespeople. The key was to maintain quality, even if it required operating on a smaller scale. The shop now has 50 employees.

“Through the 1970s and 1980s it was relatively easy to find the right people,” said Michel. “There were many workers from farming families who were used to working with machinery and were handy and easy to teach. If you ask me what the biggest challenge is today, it’s finding skilled tradespeople. Because what we do here isn’t assembly line work, it’s a skilled trade. While I need a few welders in the shop, what we need more of are people who can weld, fit up jobs, read blueprints. We need thinkers, people who have the ability to see a project through from beginning to end. And that’s hard. It takes experience, which most young people coming out of school just don’t have. They have been introduced to the trades, but they don’t yet know the trade. But if there’s a desire to learn, we can make it work and get them there. It’s just hard to find enough people like that.”

Lean Processes

The challenge of finding skilled tradespeople has changed Michel’s perspective of the types of jobs he aims to do in the shop.

“We try to get more jobs that are repeatable, jobs that we can set up jigs and fixtures for efficiently,” said Michel. “Twenty-five years ago I wouldn’t have been interested in that work because I’d consider it production line work. Custom was where the interest was. We still do custom work, but I had to diminish that and expand the other. That’s where we’re going.”

Raglan hasn’t been immune to shifts in technology, of course. The shop runs two plasma tables, one for steel and the other for aluminum. And a relatively new DAVI 12-ft. plate roller speeds some of the shop’s forming processes. But it’s the process changes in fit-up and welding that have made the biggest impact.

Raglan hasn't been immune to shifts in technology, of course. The shop runs two plasma tables, and a relatively new DAVI 12-ft. plate roller speeds some of the shop's forming processes, such as this tanker body.

With the use of jigs and fixtures, Michel has changed the approach to each assembly. Now one person is responsible for all the work on a single stage of a project.

“One man fits it up, one person welds it and another finishes it,” he said. “When it gets to a point where he’s struggling to finish a project, sure we’ll bring another person onto the job, but on the whole, it’s much more efficient to have jobs staged so each person is working alone.”

He didn’t come to this decision without some research, though. At one point he had three people working on the same assembly and decided he see what happened to the efficiency of the job if he took one of those people away. The efficiency increased.

“Then I considered adding all these jigs and fixtures and using our cranes as efficiently as we could. I saw that one guy could do it all, because the jigs and fixtures take out the measuring on the job, which is a challenge for a lot of guys now anyway,” said Michel. “We’ve reduced production hours on a lot of units by 50 per cent or more by doing it that way. It also helps with absenteeism. If someone doesn’t show up for work, it doesn’t slow anyone else down. It also gives people ownership of a job.”

Throughput Focus

As Michel explained, it’s throughput you have to think about.

“We’ve brought the man-hours per unit down steadily year over year through process changes,” he said. “A machine will cut parts the same every time. Where you win or lose is how you handle those parts. I’m not training people how to cut, fit, and weld now. I’m training them how to think. How do you set up your line, where do you put your parts, what’s more efficient, what’s going to be the cleaner way to do this?”

Michel has adopted the ideas of the book The 4 Disciplines of Execution by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, and Jim Huling as a way to view the way forward with his team now.

“Sometimes a book is useful for putting on paper what you already know from experience,” said Michel. “This book formalizes it and is nicely charted out.”

Basically, the book suggests you come up with one or two wildly important goals (WIGs) you want to achieve, come up with some lead measures you want to use to get there, have accountability for those measures, and track your progress on a scoreboard.

A four-axle aluminum tanker built by Raglan. The company has been building tankers since 1987.

“Having goals is great, but if you have 10 to 15 you’ll never get anything done,” said Michel. “One goal might be to hit a specific number of hours to build a truck box. That’s a straightforward goal. The question then becomes, what processes are you going to aim to improve to get you to that goal. That gives you something to measure along the way.”

Accountability at Raglan for Michel is monthly meetings with the lead from every department, to look at what’s been done and what is in process. They call that “half time.”

Having a compelling scoreboard is something that he is in the process of developing further.

“I grew up watching hockey on television in the 1960s,” he said. “Back then they didn’t show the score on the screen all the time, so your interest would lag sometimes. Now it’s always on the screen. The more people are engaged with the scoreboard, the more they are engaged in the game. Letting people know where they stand on the shop floor is similar. A compelling scorecard gets you more engaged. That’s the next leg of the journey. It’s not about welding or fitting but it is a huge part of getting throughput.”

Roots and Branches

With all the changes Raglan has been through, it maintains roots in the jobs that started the business on its way – repair work.

“We still do that because it’s our history,” said Michel. “A lot of it is truck and trailer repair, but it can be a lawnmower, a tractor, a frying pan. As long as it’s made of metal. When we hire someone who appears to have a jack-of-all-trades set of skills, we often put them in our repair department.”

Michel puts legacy equipment to use in the repair department as well.

“I read somewhere somebody saying, ‘Don’t get rid of your old equipment – it doesn’t owe you anything and can be used for odd jobs as necessary.’ That makes sense to me.”

The family ties are still strong in the company as well. One of John Michel’s brothers has just retired from the company but two still work there, although they are all getting close to retirement. Meanwhile, John’s son and daughter, Jonathan Michel and Erin Bowen, are being groomed to take over operations – Jonathan runs the day-to-day operations on the shop floor and Erin manages finances and administration. Both, like their father, have worked in the company since they were young.

An example of an aluminum truck box built by Raglan. The company custom builds every box to fit each truck chassis and to customer's exact specfications.

John Michel, despite all the work that he’s done with his family to move the business forward, is very humble about his achievements, putting much of the credit down to his faith and that of his family.

“It has been a great journey that way, and what we get from it, we give back to missions and to our employees,” he said. “And that’s the reason for existence, and for me to have the business – not to retire, but to give back. God has been good to us over the years and we are thankful for all the blessings and challenges He brings our way.”

Editor Robert Colman can be reached at rcolman@canadianfabweld.com.

Raglan Industries, raglan.ca

Raglan has built hoppers since 1970, whien it was the first to introduce and manufacture these trailers.