Auburn Manufacturing: Innovation on fire
2009 file Photo / David A. Rodgers
Kathie Leonard, president and CEO of Auburn Manufacturing Inc.
MECHANIC FALLS — Auburn Manufacturing, a 50-employee business founded in 1979, develops, manufactures and markets textile products for extreme-temperature industrial applications.
At one time, production and shipping took place at three facilities in Mechanic Falls and Auburn, a system that evolved organically and worked perfectly well toward achieving a great reputation.
Still, founder and CEO Kathie Leonard was aware of inefficiencies: They weren’t getting product out the door as quickly as customers needed. Product development was slow, too. But she was unable to identify the bottlenecks.
“Say a customer needed 500 rolls of high-temperature tape to be used as door seals in equipment,” Leonard says. “We would weave the tape in one plant, then truck it to get coated at our other plant. Then it would come back to the first plant to get pressure-sensitive adhesive applied. Then we would truck it to our warehouse, to be stored or shipped.”
In 2012, they started to work with Wayne Messer, project manager with the Maine Manufacturing Extension Partnership, a fee-for-service organization that helps small and medium-sized manufacturers become more efficient, productive and globally competitive. With Suzanne Hamlin from Transformational Knowledge Group, the team used external assessments and a baseline financial forecast to analyze market dynamics, company priorities and corporate-wide operational metrics. Leonard worked with Messer on a strategic planning process that included developing new space, new markets and new products.
The result?
“We’re a lot more focused in terms of where we’re going,” Leonard says.
For example, to solve that production tangle, the team walked through the production process, tracing materials through the three facilities.
“That’s just the way we grew,” says Leonard. “It turned out, we were going around in circles many times.”
Ultimately, the solution was to ditch the leased warehouse and invest $1.4 million to expand the Auburn plant from 30,000 square feet to about 50,000 square feet, and purchase an additional oven system that speeds capacity for coating and heat-treating fabrics, enabling the company to develop products more quickly.
Leonard credits Lewiston-Auburn’s business-friendly environment for obtaining financing easily.
“I think the banks understand what manufacturing needs,” she says. “They’ve been with us all along.”
Leonard had thought about expanding, but MEP helped clarify its usefulness for the company’s growth.
“If you stand still in business, you tend to start going backward,” she says. “This needed to be a 21st century business.”
The company expresses its renewed drive in a new tagline, changing it from “The safest name in high heat resistant textiles” to “Innovation on fire.” It hired a vice president of innovation and engineering. And it is indeed on fire. New products include a pre-assembled valve insulation kit, marketed to institutions and municipalities — the first time the company moved beyond industrial customers.
Leonard and Messer continue to work together.
“Had we not invested in the training we obtained from MEP, we may now have been wondering what to do next,” she says. “Instead, we’re setting in place another three-year plan.”
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