‘The Haas Way’

California is well known for its scenic coastline, and the traffic-choked highways. Once you start to get away from all that though, you quickly find yourself immersed in desert — the kind of place where you could watch your dog run away for days.

It’s that sprawling landscape that makes Oxnard, California the perfect spot for the headquarters of Haas Automation. Part of the city lies on the coast, but most of it is expansive plains, providing much-needed space for the ever-growing machine tool manufacturer.

The company was founded in 1983 by Gene Haas, in an area of Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley, but they got fully moved into their current location in 1997. The complex takes up the majority of the block it’s on in the city’s industrial park. The dark, gleaming windows and the bold red lettering across the façade give visitors the impression of gravitas as they pull up to the facility.

Inside, the lobby is lined with trophies dedicated to the efforts of the Haas-Stewart racing team, and includes a show room which houses the original VF1 — the company’s first ever machine (It was bought back from the original owner, restored, then given to Gene Haas as a birthday present).

Upstairs, Scott Rathburn, the Marketing Product Manager with Haas, begins to show me around. Rathburn started with Haas in 1996, right on the cusp of the move to Oxnard, so he seems the perfect person to explain the history of the company’s expansion efforts. It’s quite something to see where the company is today, and consider how they’ve progressed over the years.

In essence, it started as a job shop, run by Mr. Haas. As Rathburn tells it, Haas saw two employees using a drill press and with a laborious manual indexer, and figured there had to be a better way. One thing led to another and eventually Haas had a machine tool torn apart on the shop floor and decided that he and his colleague Kurt Zierhut — now Vice President of Electrical Engineering at the company — could build the machines themselves.

Now, the company is one of the largest machine tool manufacturers in the world, employs around 1,000 people at their factory, and has its name on a NASCAR team. Quite the expansion, indeed.

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Up on second level of Building 1, we walk out to a balcony overlooking the yard between the various buildings. Workers move about and fork trucks zip around amongst the pallets filled with castings, or shipments ready to head out.

The dry Californian climate affords them the luxury of planting some of their stock (such as castings) outdoors. In a colder, wetter climate, the need for more building space would be dramatic.

“We moved out here, got started in 1996. There’s 420,000 square feet in this building (Building 1) and it’s split down the middle between machine shop and assembly,” Rathburn says.

“We thought we’d never outgrow it and we outgrew it in a year. Added another 200,000 square feet (in new buildings). We outgrew that in about another two years, so added another 200,000 feet. We were at 820,000 for a number of years, and in ’06 we completed and moved into Building 4, which took us over a million square feet.”

While we’re overlooking the yard, Rathburn points out the miles of land off in the distance, behind the company’s group of buildings. While he concedes the recent slowdown in the industry delayed the need for expansion, the company still has designs on future growth.

“We already have Building 5 and Building 6 planned, permitted — and had them ready to go, then ran into some snags with the state of California. Right now we’re essentially in negotiations.

“We own 86 acres out here, and right now we’ve got about 25 acres under roof — so we have plenty of room here to expand.”

Rathburn leads us back down onto the floor of Building 1. As he shows off the various assembly lines with half-built machines, he makes the point of noting how many Haas machines are being put to work in the shop.

“About 70 per cent of the metal cutting machines in the factory are Haas machines,” Rathburn says, noting they supply machines for small to medium job shops, and simply don’t manufacture some of the larger machines they need.

“We make all of our own shafts and spindles. We make all of our own gears. “That’s kind of the ‘Haas way’. We do as much in-house as possible.”

The company has also made a big push to automate much of the process over the last decade. The move to automation was born out of necessity as they struggled to keep pace producing their spindle shafts.

“You see a number of robotic cells here. All the FMS (functional movement systems), all the stuff like that, they all run basically lights out — pretty much 6, 7 days a week.”

When the robots were first introduced the company found they were so successful that they just kept adding to the original ones. Today, the company boasts close to 30 robotic cells doing various tasks to keep production humming along.

Everywhere we walk, it seems Rathburn finds an example of Haas’ industrious, “do-it-yourself” mentality. At one point he mentions the company’s efforts to recycle leftover swarf, and coolant (they boil off impurities in the coolant to make it reusable). Haas even go as far making their own energy on occasion — but like the gear-making taking that project on was also done out of necessity.

When the land was first bought the company negotiated a heavily discounted price on their electricity for agreeing to be put on an interruptible power supply. For a time, they rarely encountered power issues — then the infamous Enron fiasco happened, and Haas suddenly found themselves in the midst of an energy crisis. True to their spirit, they purchased a 6,000 horsepower diesel turbine generator to keep pace with the incoming orders.

“Every day around two o’clock we’d lose power — and most of the time we didn’t have a warning,” Rathburn said, shaking his head. “That destroys parts, so we had this generator installed, and it was almost every single

day we’d switch over to the generator.”

Those days are long in the past, but the company is fortunate to still have a backup plan in place to keep power outages from ever hurting the business. As we walk through the yard towards Building 4, Rathburn points out the lack of bay doors on Building 3, and notes how they needed to build an improved inventory building for the sake of getting orders to market faster. But the move into the new storage building (Building 4) came a time when the company was filling 1,000 orders

a month.

Rathburn laughs at the concept of moving their stock from one building to another while maintaining business as usual, calling it a “crazy time”. But despite the craziness of it, the company also capitalized on an opportunity to improve the situation.

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Standing on the balcony at Building 1 Rathburn pointed out that the new inventory building was 10 feet higher than its counterparts’. It’s scarcely noticeable from ground level, but seeing it from above, it’s a dramatic addition to the storage space.

The additional storage from the height is also compounded by a unique racking system that Haas employs. Some of the racks are a standard 12 feet apart, but others are a mere 6 feet apart, giving the company twice as much space on the floor in addition to the bit of extra height.

The fork trucks that run between the narrow  aisles are specially guided on a wire, and run back and forth on the line to keep them dead straight, lest they risk a catastrophic crash.

On our way back through the yard, Rathburn points out a number of shipments ready to head out. He notes the increased — and normalized — volume of orders today compared to when the market for machine tools crashed hard in 2009.

“We literally went from 1200 machines a month to about 350. Then at the end of 2011, it started coming back. By the end of 2012 we had got back to 1200-1250 machines. We’d gotten back to pre-recession levels.”

Today, Haas is shipping machines to almost every imaginable locale. Of the ready-to-ship orders, the country names scrawled on the packaging read like the index of an atlas. The locations range from British Columbia, to India, to Russia. The shipments to Russia seem a bit surprising, but evidently the cold war is long dead, because Rathburn says, the American company has a heavy presence there, and in eastern Europe.

“We sell a ton of machines going to Russia — it’s a huge market for us. The former Eastern Bloc countries were so starving for machine tools… they’re really hungry for education and manufacturing, so we’re seriously

involved on the education front.”

Same goes for North America, as Rathburn estimates there are probably 5,000 Haas machines in over 2,000 schools on the continent.

The educational commitment is a clear sign that the manufacturer is not willing to rest on its laurels as it attempts to grow their footprint. All the while the company has managed to do things at their own pace, and to their own standard — the ‘Haas

way’.

And with so many more acres of land to grow, and nothing holding them back but their own ambition, one figures Haas can plan for many more buildings on the plains of Oxnard in the future.

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