Companies use upgrades to vie with low-cost Chinese labor

ceiving orders for commodity products that can be done cheaply and in large quantities, such as shower door trim and picture frames.
Aerolite can retain more complex work because it operates separate fabricating and painting businesses in Boardman, Hutch said. Those businesses employ about 80. Aerolite paints about half and fabricates about a quarter of its extrusions.
It also manages inventory for its customers and sets up just-in-time delivery. Chinese companies also are starting to offer such services, including opening warehouses in the United States, Hutch said.
"They're going to get better every year. They're going to get better with quality, and they're going to figure out how to turn around product quicker," he said.
Domestic competition
Just up the street at General Extrusions, Herb Schuler Sr. also is facing pressure from China's booming aluminum plants.
The threat isn't coming directly from the Chinese, however, the company president said. Domestic companies who have been knocked out of commodity markets such as picture frames are trying to enter General Extrusions' markets, such as automotive, appliances and medical equipment, he said.
To keep itself ahead of its new competitors, General Extrusions has hired two control engineers to design systems to make operations more efficient.
Part of the solution is creating work cells, where a worker performs multiple tasks on a piece of aluminum. Instead of doing one task and sending the piece down the line, employees in a work cell might drill a hole, thread the hole and punch a slat into the piece.
Schuler said General Extrusions began adding work cells 10 years ago in a more simple form. Work cells continue to grow and become more complex, with about 25 percent of the company's production coming from them, he said.
Some automation
Sometimes, the company has a large enough order that it goes beyond work cells to buying robotic equipment to produce the extrusion. Schuler said this equipment is more expensive but makes financial sense if the job is large enough and has a repeatable feature that can be done better by machines than humans.
Automation is reducing the need for employees but can't be avoided, Schuler said.
"Automation is prolonging the life of products made here in the United States," he said.
General Extrusions is on pace to have a record sales year but will do it with no extra employees. It has 310 employees between its plants in Boardman and Leetonia, with about 40 workers laid off.
In Girard, business is so strong at Indalex that it has added 36 workers this year and now employs 425.
Partnership with Chinese
Scott Langdon, a spokesman for the Chicago-based company, said the success of the local plant is partly due to Indalex's decision to partner with a Chinese company, Asia Aluminum Group. Indalex officials decided they couldn't stop customers from seeking lower-priced aluminum from China so they bought an ownership stake in Asia Aluminum and also have production agreements with other companies, Langdon said.
Indalex considers the Chinese plants as extensions of its 16 North American plants, so it can send work to whatever plant best fits a customer's needs.
Indalex, which is owned by a English company called Novar, has been able to increase its business, he said.
The company also has been investing in the Girard plant so it can be more efficient and increase the quality of its products, he said. In less than two years, Indalex has invested $3 million to upgrade the paint line, improve presses and install new equipment to heat aluminum billets.
Despite the changes it has caused, the industrial explosion in China won't be the last market force that pushes domestic companies to improve, area executives said.
Schuler said the first foreign threat came 30 years ago from Japanese extruders. Next, it was low-cost producers from Mexico, and now it's the Chinese.
"We have to try to stay innovative and creative so we can keep the edge in the marketplace," Schuler said.
shilling@vindy.com