RMF provides a variety of electroplating, coating, and related services and holds a number of certifications, such as the IATF 16949 Automotive Quality Standard, to comply with the requirements of its customers.

Prior to launching the company, Founder Donald Roy worked with a company that did metal finishing on parts for textile equipment manufacturers. He saw the need for a good electroplater, mainly for the textile industry in the Southeast. There was an opportunity for someone to do it better, and Donald Roy was convinced that he was that someone.

In 1961, he moved south to Greenville, South Carolina and started his own business. It was very much a family business in the early days, as the workforce consisted of Donald and his wife Cecile.

Donald instilled a company culture that focused on a commitment to customers, quality, and the environment. His early analysis found that to serve the textile industry, a company would need to offer exceptional customer service, quick turnaround time and high quality. Successive leaders in the company continued to incorporate these values into the company’s method of doing business.

Roy Metal Finishing offered quality metal finishing to textile producers along Interstate I-85 and Interstate I-65. The strategic location was part of the vision that has served RMF throughout its history, and that vision was critical in the 1990s. Textile producers closed their mills in the Southeast U.S. and moved to Mexico and other locations overseas. Empty textile mills told the story of these decisions to move.

However, the early vision of Donald Roy to set up near I-85 and I-65 was significant, since the location, more than luck, brought new opportunities for continued success. In 1994, automotive manufacturer BMW moved to within 16 miles of RMF. Previously, most of the automobile manufactures were located in the Northeast: Michigan, Ohio, and the Rust Belt.

BMW was the beginning of a cluster of automotive manufactures to settle in the Southeast with RMF conveniently at the center. Those manufacturers include Mercedes, Toyota, Hyundai, Kia, Honda, Nissan, Volkswagen, and over four hundred Tier I and Tier II suppliers that have settled in the area that RMF refers to as its ‘circle of influence’.

The growth of the automotive cluster over the last thirty years has, as President and Chief Executive Officer Dean Davidson states, “allowed RMF to grow from a small, family-owned job shop to one of the largest independent metal finishing companies in the Southeast [USA]. This growth required RMF to develop the engineering expertise along with a world-class management system that can meet the expectations and requirements of these automotive [original equipment manufacturers].”

“We work with a lot of international companies,” he says, noting that RMF has worked with most of the automotive companies in North America. “We work primarily through their Tier 1 or Tier 2 suppliers. We work with everything from suspensions and brake components to exterior components such as grills and brackets and tubes that are found under the hood.”

There is more to remaining the award-winning company that is RMF than just being in the right location. The company uses innovation, efficiency, and process technology to be recognized by an industry reviewer for excellence in surface finishing for five consecutive years. It was also the November 2020 recipient of a Renewable Water Resources (ReWa) compliance award.

“Ever since Mr. Roy started the company, the environment has been important,” Davidson says. “Electroplating can be rough, especially when it comes to wastewater and hazardous waste. We committed a large portion of our resources to having world-class wastewater treatment facilities inside our production facilities and have established high-level relationships with our state and local agencies. Our record-keeping and compliance with federal and state regulations is important to us and is part of our sustainability initiative. Our commitment is to not have an impact on the environment.”

Davidson explains that the success that the company has experienced is a result of measures that are part of its heritage and ideology. “We have consistently committed at least fifteen percent of our annual revenue to reinvesting in our technology and process innovations. Our goal is to make each new line or process better than the last one through our ‘lessons learned’ process. We provide corrosion-resistant metal surface finishes that are functional coatings with a high aesthetic quality such as zinc and zinc alloy electroplating, electrodeposition and powder coat painting as well as zinc phosphating that meet the stringent requirements of the automotive, agriculture, and industrial markets.”

“We put our customers first. Every order is important. In order to provide the level of service that our customers expect, we developed a world-class management system that is certified to the IATF 16949 automotive standard. We focus on standardization and visual management to assure repeatability,” Davidson says.

“We offer our customer the latest and greatest, and a lot of that has come along with mistake-proofing and trying to build quality into our processes versus trying to inspect quality into the parts after they’ve been processed,” he explains. RMF aims to build that quality into its processes so that they are stable, consistent, reliable, predictable, and very highly automated.

Quality is an important value here. The major turning point in the company’s commitment to quality was the shift from textiles to the automotive industry which is demanding, with high quality standards and very discriminating customers.

Davidson elaborates on the impact of the evolving quality philosophy. “That required us (RMF) to look at our whole management system and our organizational structure. How we ran the business to be more systematic and be more deliberate and have a different level of discipline on the shop floor and how we do business. Some people might describe that as a transition from a ‘mom and pop shop” to a big company, but it was an evolution for us, and the automotive industry brought about that evolution along. We were better prepared than any of our competitors to meet the requirements of the automotive industry,” he explains.

“We solve problems for our customers by taking on projects that others could not figure out. Providing solutions along with exceptional customer service, quick turnaround, and high quality has helped RMF establish a favorable reputation in the metal finishing industry.” Today, the company leaders have expanded on those principles that Donald Roy believed in when he started the company and, in so doing, have helped keep it a viable entity.

These leaders saw that there were other needs that customers had that were not metal finishing in nature. Fifteen to twenty years ago, RMF put in place a transportation service to pick up the parts that the company needed to have finished. Later, it moved into other value-added services which Davidson says “makes it convenient for them [the customer] to do business with us.”

Those other value-added services have grown to include warehousing, relabeling, repacking, and direct shipping finished product to the end customer (OEM), which saves the immediate customer (the Tier I and II suppliers) time and logistics expense.

Davidson explains that this required RMF to “have systems within your management system so that you are doing those things correctly. Quality again is of utmost importance. We had to build that into our management systems as a complement to what we do as our core competencies.”

The company’s leaders recognized that new technologies and value-added services brought with them the need for expansion. Over several years, a thirty-acre parcel of land was acquired to build a corporate campus that, when completed, will have 500,000 square feet of space under one roof and accommodate three hundred employees, allowing RMF to consolidate the work now being performed in three facilities into its one space.

The company recognized its remarkable achievement of sixty years in business in 2021 with lunch and gift bags for employees, and downtime was arranged so that they could get together. The management team attended each of these sessions for every shift in each production facility. Because of the pandemic, things were somewhat low-key. A bigger event is planned for next year to include a focus on family and employee appreciation

“Over sixty years, we have had difficult times and challenges. We’ve also had a lot of reasons to celebrate over the last sixty years. But when the dust settles, we say ‘We win with our people,’” shares Davidson. “It’s our associates who show up to work every day to help us meet our customers’ needs; that is really what makes Roy Metal Finishing special and possibly differentiates us from some of our competitors. We have a saying: ‘None of us is as good as all of us!’”

Given the company’s principles, policies, framework of innovation, and caring for customers and employees, it is no wonder that RMF is a leader in the metal finishing industry.

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The strategy, in essence, is to arrange the orders of raw materials such that goods are delivered only when required for production. The theory of Just-In-Time inventory management comes from Japanese management philosophy, and was first adopted by Toyota manufacturing plants in the early 1970s.

Advantages and disadvantages of JIT
This strategy provides a number of advantages, ensuring that materials are available when needed while minimizing the amount of storage space required. The approach also helps in reducing waste and loss. Materials are not left in storage for long periods of time and so aren’t subject to spoilage, loss, or obsolescence. And of course, JIT helps to lower inventory costs.

Certainly, the strategy also comes with its disadvantages. JIT inventory systems mean that a company only keeps a minimum amount of inventory on hand until it gets to the next delivery date. If a restaurant uses this system, it may only have enough food to last an average of four days. If a main competitor unexpectedly goes out of business, the inventory on hand might not be sufficient to meet the increased demand of new customers. On the other hand, the restaurant could see a sudden drop in business and food could spoil before it is used.

Links in the chain
A supply chain will consist of a number of elements—or links in a chain. At one end of the chain is a producer, who makes a particular component for their customer. In order to fulfill the order, they must have the necessary materials to produce the component, the workforce to create the component, and the means to transport the finished component to the customer. Each source for each part required may have its own distinct supply chain.

In order for any supply chain to function effectively, all the elements must connect smoothly. Over the years, there have been issues that have disrupted the orderly operation of supply chains. Trade wars, earthquakes, plant closures due to fires or tsunamis, labour disputes, transportation interruptions and shortages of raw materials have all had negative impacts, at times, on otherwise effective supply chains.

Goods must be able to be moved along the supply chain, and they must be able to be unloaded from ships, trains or transport trucks and put into warehouses on the docks or terminal until they are moved to their next location. Because of various issues associated with COVID-19, there is currently a shortage of dock workers as well as truck drivers, and this can cause a backlog for goods awaiting the next phase of their journey.

Of course, plant closures due to worker shortages can also disrupt production. Lack of materials needed to produce the product due to unavailability of a means of transport—truckers, shipping containers, or vessels—will mean that even if plants aren’t closed and have an available workforce, nothing can be achieved at desired levels if materials can’t be moved to where they need to be.

CBC News, in an October 2021 article, describes how “the COVID-19 pandemic waylaid the usual trends of supply and demand by wiping out both in early 2020 as factories shut down to keep workers safe, and consumers weren’t in the mood to buy anything but the essentials anyway.” Now that demand is on the rise again, suppliers are having a difficult time attempting to meet the increased demand for a wide range of items—from cars to appliances, iPhones and PlayStations.

The computer chip crisis
Supply chains for certain items have proven more precarious than others. Matthew Sparkes, in an article for NewScientist from March 2021, writes that, “The world is experiencing a computer chip shortage due to a perfect storm of problems including a global pandemic, a trade war, fires, drought and snowstorms. It has coincided with a period of soaring, unprecedented demand—in January alone, chip sales reached a record $40 billion.”

Computer chips, of course, are used in a wide range of electronic devices, perhaps even more than we may realize. Dishwashers, microwaves, refrigerators, mobile phones, medical equipment, watches, factory machinery, toys, laptop computers, and vehicles all take computer chips to function. In the wake of various disruptions in production, chips are not currently able to be produced fast enough to keep up with the demand.

As more workplaces moved to have employees work from home, and students of all ages began to study from home, new demands for technology increased. Home offices or home classrooms were being created and equipped. Office workers needed laptops, printers, scanners and webcams to work from home. Students also need digital technology to participate in online classes from home. And as people were required to follow ‘stay at home’ orders from health authorities, many also sought to beef up their home entertainment suites—in typical times, a welcome source of new sales for chip producers.

Originally, the shortage in computer chips was a direct result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Workers in China and other locations were unable to work, so plants closed and production ceased, which resulted in supply issues. As items were produced, tighter restrictions at ports and international borders slowed their eventual movement to customers.

Impact on auto manufacturing
In the auto manufacturing sphere, companies will source parts from a breadth of suppliers; no auto manufacturer produces all the components needed for a vehicle in-house. In fact, an automobile is put together in what the industry calls an assembly plant. Engines, body components, batteries, tires, microchips and other parts must be delivered on time to the assembly plant.

“When the pandemic hit, the automobile industry girded for recession and cut back on orders to their suppliers, including chip manufacturers,” writes Bill Conerly in a July 2021 article for Forbes. “That would turn out to be a mistake, but for old-line car industry purchasing managers, it seemed pretty reasonable. When business picked up, their suppliers would ramp up production. The managers who were experienced ordering dashboards and bucket seats knew that their suppliers have nobody outside the auto industry to sell to, so they were always ready to restore production after a downturn.”

In May 2020, car sales returned and auto manufacturers began calling their suppliers looking to increase delivery of parts. For the most part, suppliers were able to step up and provide what was needed—except, that is, for computer chip suppliers.

As the pandemic had led to a great deal of remote work and online learning, chip companies pivoted to create chips for these devices since they were not producing them for the auto industry. When chip manufacturers were eventually asked to increase the supply of chips for the auto industry, they had to decline since they had committed to other customers—and the auto industry hit a rather large speed bump.

“The automotive industry has been hit particularly hard, illustrating perfectly the scale and complexity of modern supply chains,” writes John L Hopkins for GCN. “A car is made of about 30,000 components, sourced from thousands of suppliers around the world. If even one of these components isn’t available at the time of assembly, the system grinds to a halt and new cars can’t be shipped.”

The shortage of computer chips for the auto industry has led to some less than desirable solutions by manufacturers. “GM has sold some of its newest pickups and SUVs without advanced gas management systems or wireless charging features,” Hopkins shares. “Renault stopped installing the large screens that sit behind the wheel of its Arkana SUV models, while Nissan left navigation systems out of thousands of cars. Tesla even turned to rewriting its vehicles’ code so that the company could make use of the chips it did have at its disposal. But even that hasn’t completely spared Tesla from the shortage’s impact. The company was finding it particularly difficult to secure chips needed for its airbags and seatbelts, essential features for a car.”

The way forward
As we well know, the manufacturing industry is innovative and resilient. There is no doubt that lessons have been learned from the crises that have arisen during this pandemic. Methods and strategies that have worked in the past will need to be re-examined to explore ways to avoid such significant impacts. Hopefully, the result of this research will mean fewer disruptions in the complex and interconnected process that brings products to market.

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