Getting Grounded
British company JCB finds a home in Georgia
When JCB head Sir Anthony Bamford set his sights on the booming construction equipment market across the pond from his company’s home base in England, he knew his products needed one specific label to guarantee sales: “Made in America.”
“It is JCB’s plan to strengthen our position alongside the giants of our industry in the U.S.,” Bamford said when the company broke ground in 1998 for its first-ever American plant, located near Savannah, Ga.
“To do that, we need to manufacture here, to be accepted as a local company… That is our aim in opening the first JCB manufacturing plant outside of the United Kingdom,” Bamford added.
Achieving that goal would not be without its challenges. JCB was to start manufacturing in the U.S. for the North American market with a totally new workforce. It wouldn’t be easy, but Quick Start would make it look like it was.
“We were bringing in a known product, but we had a completely new team,” said Gordon Cooper, JCB’s general manager for manufacturing at the Savannah plant. “The plant here was designed to be an all-American operation, so everybody had to be recruited, and everybody was new.
“The particular skills we were looking for weren’t available in abundance in this area, but with Quick Start, we were able to recruit new team members who had very little experience and set up the basic skills training,” Cooper says.
Cooper adds that Quick Start’s training services are above and beyond what’s available in the United Kingdom. “In the U.K., a company can get financial aid, but with Quick Start, you don’t even have to leave your factory. As managers, we’ve got a lot to do to set our standards and get on with production. Quick Start takes a lot of the strain out of the process. The first thing you know, you’ve got people in who have been trained by professionals.”
Teaming up with Savannah Technical College, Quick Start provided JCB’s initial workforce with training in core skills – including blueprint reading, hazard communications and safety – as well as job-specific training in welding fundamentals, a critical skill in a business based on fabricating earthmoving machinery from raw plate steel.
“Quick Start stepped in to get people up to speed,” says Cooper. “Once they had learned the basics, we were able to then show them what the specific JCB standards are.”
Understanding JCB’s specific standards are critical, because every step in the production process takes place at the $62 million facility, beginning with raw steel in sheets. JCB team members use state-of-the-art laser technology to cut the pieces; assemble the pieces with gas metal arc welding; clean the parts with an eight-stage zinc phosphate pre-treatment; and paint the parts with JCB’s trademark yellow, sealed with a high-durability urethane powder topcoat. And everything has to be perfect: More than 1,250 quality control checks are performed on each piece of equipment as it’s put together.
Recently, Quick Start teamed with JCB again when the facility added a new product line, the Robot skid steer loader, a compact, all-purpose machine with a unique single-loader arm design that, according to Compact Equipment magazine, “has yet to be matched in the skid steer marketplace.”
“Last year, we had the migration of a new product into the plant with the skid steer, and we needed help,” says Steve Hooper, vice president of human resources. “And Quick Start was there for us again.”
“The skid steer turned out to be a successful project,” Hooper says. “We couldn’t have done it without help from Quick Start.”
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