About Andrew Ratner

Chief Communications Officer for Marlin Steel, former business technology journalist

The Fast Company we keep

Posted on June 17, 2013 by Andrew Ratner

Author Charles Fishman interviews Marlin Steel President Drew Greenblatt for article in upcoming FastCompany magazine.

A well-told tale about how Marlin Steel came to be, written by business author Charles Fishman, appears in the upcoming July/August issue of FastCompany. The magazine, which focuses on technology and business, hits newsstands next week. “A little maker of metal baskets shows how U.S. manufacturers can thrive against all comers” is how FastCo. summarized the piece.

Fishman’s article, “The Road to Resilience: How Unscientific Innovation Saved Marlin Steel,” is long, but this passage spoke volumes, we thought:

Even in the much more unforgiving world of high-tech factories, Marlin is earning a reputation for quality that is unusual for manufactured products today. Tom Salvador is a senior manager with Power Systems Manufacturing, in Jupiter, Florida, a small division of the $20-billion-a-year global energy conglomerate Alstom. PSM reconditions gas turbines for large commercial power plants, and it needed wire baskets to hold finished parts during a demanding inspection process. The baskets had to be made of stainless steel and able to withstand high temperatures and hot water. “It’s a manufacturing environment,” says Salvador. “We don’t baby the baskets.”

Marlin’s goods held up where the competition’s didn’t. “There are a lot of welds on these baskets,” he says. “We haven’t had a single weld on a single basket cut loose. Not one. I’m actually shocked.” Salvador has placed two orders with Marlin in five years but doesn’t need any more now because, he says, “I can’t seem to break them.”

Comparing Man of Steel, Marlin Steel

Posted on June 14, 2013 by Andrew Ratner

Comparing the Man of Steel and Marlin Steel, here is a “tale of the tape” (We use more than a tape measure these days; our equipment measures in microns — a millionth of a meter — but you get the picture):

Superman: Able to bend steel with his bare hands.

Marlin Steel: Able to bend steel 20,000 times an hour (with help from industrial robots.)

SM: Mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper.

MS: Not-so-mild mannered, ISO quality-obsessed manufacturer in a great metropolitan city, in fact one of the 100 fastest growing inner-city companies in America (Named to “Inner City 100″ by Cambridge-based Initiative for a Competitive Inner City.)

SM: X-ray vision

MS: Simply visionary. Leading U.S. manufacturing comeback as 162^nd fastest growing private manufacturer in U.S. (Inc. 5000 list)

SM: Faster than a speeding locomotive

MS: Faster than if you tried to get the same job done in China or Germany.

SM: Able to lift several cars at once

MS: Able to punch sheet metal with force of 66 cars (132 tons) with fastest metal press in the world.

SM: Able to pierce steel

MS: Able to cut steel 0.6” thick with state-of-art sheet metal laser.

SM: Able to circle the globe

MS: Able to circle the globe exporting material handling containers to customers in 36 countries around the world.

SM: Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.

MS: Our leaping still needs some work.

SM: Stopped by Kryptonite.

MS: Unstoppable

Promising future for metalworking graduates in Baltimore, but what about their school?

Posted on June 13, 2013 by Andrew Ratner

Edrick Smith, a Marlin Steel machinist and new graduate of the Magna Baltimore Technical Training Center, with Marlin Steel President Drew Greenblatt and Marlin Production Manager Andy Croniser

There were no caps, no gowns and the setting was a machine shop training facility, but the graduation ceremony at the Magna Baltimore Technical Training Center yesterday was as inspiring and heartfelt as any commencement this season.

One graduate spoke of being homeless and sleeping in his car while attending the tool and die machinist apprenticeship program, a secret he kept from others there. He said he now works for a major manufacturing company in town. Another graduate had enrolled at age 45 fearing that he’d fail because of his lack of algebra and trigonometry in school. He credited the center’s instructors for getting him through the course. Yet another emotionally told the organizers the program turned his life around after he was laid off as a newspaper printer a few years ago: “Because of you I can help my kids. I’m grateful. I’m on my way. You changed my life. You changed my family’s life.” The students who had come through the course oozed admiration for the faculty and program directors.

Marlin Steel President Drew Greenblatt applauds Edrick Smith, a Marlin employee, during graduation processional at Magna Baltimore Technical Training Center

Drew Greenblatt, the president of Marlin Steel, was keynote speaker for the event. He spoke about how his company had to endure its own transition from making commodity bagel baskets, which became an unprofitable enterprise, into one that builds custom material handling containers for the automotive industry and many others. It has become one of the fastest-growing private manufacturing companies in the country in recent years.

A Marlin Steel machinist for the past year, Edrick Smith, was one of the 32 graduates honored at yesterday’s ceremony. Continue reading →

When I met the man who helped save my company

Posted on June 11, 2013 by Andrew Ratner

Drew Greenblatt’s latest column in Inc. magazine about a friend and mentor, author Eli Goldratt, who died at the too-young age of 64 two years ago today:

Eli Goldratt and Drew Greenblatt, April 2011

“I ran into a business consultant at a conference — we were the only two folks from Maryland and we started chatting. I asked him about any useful books he’d recommend and he mentioned Eli Goldratt’s. I listened.

Goldratt was a physicist and management theorist whose iconic management book, “The Goal,” had already sold 3 million copies by then. His fictionalized account about how a beleaguered plant manager succeeds by discovering “lean manufacturing” is required reading not just on factory floors but in hospitals, schools, halls of government and corporate board rooms. That book — and Goldratt himself — were transformative for my company.” … Read more

Manufacturing’s past, manufacturing’s future

Posted on June 10, 2013 by Andrew Ratner

Marlin Steel Chief Engineer Tony Witt (left) and Director Marshal (Mickey) Greenblatt (second from left) lead tour of Marlin Steel for the Society of Manufacturing Engineers, June 4, 2013

Interesting bookend articles by Jamie Smith Hopkins in the Baltimore Sun Sunday: One examined the future of industry through tours last week by the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME) at Marlin Steel Wire Products and other local plants. The organization’s national convention in Baltimore helped the region display its potential for advanced manufacturing with its high concentration of engineers and scientists.

“These are … the guys that are on future search committees — where do you put your next plant,” Drew Greenblatt, president of Marlin Steel, said of the visiting SME members.

The other piece chronicled the demise of what was once the world’s busiest steel making facility at Sparrows Point through the eyes of former steelworkers and their families a year and a half after the sprawling factory in eastern Baltimore County closed.

Continue reading →

Manufacturers ask: Does anyone out there want to come to work?

Posted on June 6, 2013 by Andrew Ratner

To hear participants at a forum of the Regional Manufacturing Institute of Maryland tell it, the problem of finding workers for manufacturing jobs isn’t just a “skills deficit” — but also an “attention” deficit.

Speaker after speaker yesterday recounted examples of people, often in their 20s, who’d just stop showing up at their workplaces. The efforts the panelists described about coaxing workers to keep coming to work left the audience slack-jawed, particularly during a time of high and lengthy rates of unemployment.

“I’ve gone out personally recruiting, trying to hire ‘millennials’ and they have interests besides a job,” said William Tiger, manager of General Motors Corp. Baltimore plant. “They’ve been told over and over again that they’re going to change careers five or six times. They’ve become conditioned to that, and the feeling seems to be, ‘This is my first one. Where do I go next?’”

The topic drew a large audience to the RMI Breakfast Series because the so-called “skills gap” has become a major issue for manufacturers nationally. The subject also surfaced when the executive board of the National Association of Manufacturers met with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke this week.

As one RMI panelist said, after a generation of downsizing, American manufacturing now has growing pains in the opposite direction. Many promising young people appear tentative about getting into a sector — manufacturing — that through their eyes seemed stable and rewarding for their grandparents, but rockier for their parents or uncles and aunts. Woody Allen famously said ”80 percent of success is showing up,” but many seem unfamiliar with that theory (and probably with Woody Allen, too.) Continue reading →

How we got from bagels to Boeing, steel wire to sheet metal

Posted on June 5, 2013 by Andrew Ratner

From Drew Greenblatt’s latest column in Inc. magazine on how to find — and serve — the customers who appreciate you:

For its first 40 years, Marlin Steel Wire Products made exactly what its name implied–steel wire baskets. A few years after I bought the company in 1999, we made a major transition from building steel wire baskets used primarily by bagel bakeries to making steel wire baskets for much more specialized, high-tech clients in fields like aerospace, automotive and pharmaceuticals.

That proved much more fruitful, but we kept exploring. We always canvass our customers for feedback and a few years ago noticed that some seemed frustrated because they sometimes had to wait for a second vendor to produce the sheet metal portion of our wire containers. Often, we were just as frustrated ourselves. We’d move like lightning to produce a basket order but then have to wait weeks for someone else to do the sheet-metal finishing touch. All that hurry-up-and-wait was painful.

I’m a big believer in feeding the niches that appreciate you. We pour resources into our strengths and take them from our weaknesses. Discern a pattern where you’re successful and focus on that. Concentrate on how you can be more appealing to those promising niches. Make massive investments in a certain area. Be No. 1 in that zone.

Two years ago we decided we’d had enough. We invested $2 million in machines to laser-slice, punch and fabricate sheet metal. We also bought out own Haas milling machine so we could do our own tooling to speed jobs and wouldn’t have to wait for someone else to make tooling for us. The investment paid off, proving a major contributor to our rapid growth. Read more …

MARLIN RISING

LEADING AN AMERICAN MANUFACTURING RENAISSANCE

Author Archives: Andrew Ratner