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Matandy makes key investments in facilities and equipment to gain better control over production and customer service.

By Myra Pinkham,
Contributing Editor

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During a period when other service centers were striving to keep afloat, Matandy Steel and Metal Products LLC, Hamilton, Ohio, was reinventing itself.

By making a series of strategic capital investments over the past few years, and bringing all of its steel processing in-house, the company has improved its efficiency and productivity and increased its sales, especially from toll processing.

Capital improvements include construction of two new buildings at its business campus, installation of a highly automated new slitter and packaging line, and the upgrading of Matandy’s computer software to provide better information flow from its new equipment to its sales and production staff.

Frank Pfirman, Matandy owner and president, says that while it might have seemed risky, the investment is paying off. He hopes to further boost toll processing this year from about 3 percent to 6 percent of sales.

Pfirman founded Matandy Steel Sales in 1987, buying and selling steel with a card table, a telephone and a fax machine set up in a spare bedroom of a house inherited from his parents. Processing of the steel he sold was outsourced to Blake Steel Service in Middletown. “During the day, I would handle the buying and selling and ship my material to Blake. At night I would go there and watch the metal being slit.”

For three years, Pfirman sold steel from his makeshift office, until 1990 when he leased a larger space and hired some help. That same year, he formed a processing partnership with Brian Williamson of Miami Valley Steel Service Inc., Piqua, Ohio. The two created a joint venture called Lindsey Steel Processing, which operated a slitter at the old Gem Metals plant in Dayton. A year later, the operation moved to a new facility in Franklin, Ohio.

By the late 1990s, Matandy had built two facilities totaling 25,000 square feet on a nine-acre business campus in Hamilton. The buildings housed a Gary Steel 60-inch blanking line, a 36-inch wide slitting line, a Cooper-Weymouth-Peterson trapezoidal blanking line and equipment to make nails for the roofing industry. But Pfirman wanted to expand Matandy’s capabilities further and felt the best way to control the quality was to do all processing on-site.

“Even though Lindsey was an excellent relationship, we wanted to have total autonomy to do all of our work out of Hamilton,” Pfirman recalls.

The first step toward that goal, in 2000, was construction of a $2.2 million, 65,000-square-foot, rail-serviced facility on the same campus. Last year, the company installed a 72-inch Red Bud slitting line capable of processing coated and non-coated low-carbon steel products, as well as some grades of high-strength, low-alloy and stainless steels from master coils up to 30 tons. A PoMaCon Inc. finished coil packaging line—capable of packing slit coils with an outside diameter of 28 to 72 inches for a maximum input weight of 10,000 pounds per piece—cost an additional $2.5 million. Matandy also acquired two Zenar overhead cranes with 32.5 tons of lift capacity and a small fleet of forklifts.

Pfirman is pleased with these investments. “Just being able to walk out the door and look at the product we are running, and having total control of scheduling, has been nice for us.”

Shape correction
Matandy received the slitting line in January 2003 and began operating it in March.

“The name of the processing game is short runs and quick turnovers, yet slitters notoriously take a long time to set up,” remarks Dean Linders, Red Bud’s vice president of marketing and sales. “We designed and developed a system that is continuously self-threading without having to touch the strip, which also makes it a safer system. The automation, the ability to process more tons per hour (with a top speed of 1,350 feet per minute) and quick setup and changeover means a higher degree of savings.”

One feature of the line Pfirman finds helpful is the ability to correct material shape with the in-line Herr-Voss 19-roll, five-high pull-through leveler. “We deal exclusively in secondary material, so there can be some shape problems with the coils. While we don’t go out and advertise shape correction as a separate profit center, it does take material that might be a little questionable and makes it look nice by the time we are finished running it. Flatness is not an issue,” Pfirman adds.

Software solution
Matandy has further improved its efficiency with a $60,000 upgrade of its Enmark computer software. Matandy was already using Enmark’s Command Center Flat Roll system, but “when we became more of a processor, we didn’t have software that was set up for production,” he says.

Enmark developed a new solution, called Pro-Flo (for Production Flow), to boost production efficiency and ensure the timely flow of information between the production staff, the sales staff and the customers. Matandy was Enmark’s test case for the new software.

“Matandy was instrumental in helping us to design this software package, which is now a new standard at Enmark,” says Jerry Krivda, manager of customer support for Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Enmark Systems Inc.

What Pro-Flo does for Matandy is reduce redundancies associated with managing internal processing by tracking, verifying and recording each stage of production. “It identifies each mult that is processed on the slitter in real time and affixes a bar-coded label that allows for easy traceability back to the master coil,” Pfirman explains.

“The use of bar-coding technology ensures timely information flow back to the sales department, which can see the status of all customer orders at a glance,” says Krivda.

Bar coding also helps reduce production errors. “Once the bar codes are adhered to the products, it allows Pro-Flo, through scanners, to verify that the sizes are correct, that the packaging is appropriate and it warns workers if a mistake has been made.”

Matandy takes pride in its low reject rate (2 percent of sales) despite the challenges associated with selling coated carbon steel products that originate from secondary material.

Historical data in the Pro-Flo database is readily accessible and can be used to facilitate logistics, such as scheduling trucks, and sales. For example, when Matandy slits a coil and does not use the entire width, the system “allows us to identify another customer who uses similar widths, thicknesses and types of steel, so we can try to sell them the balance of the coil,” Pfirman says.

Pfirman hopes to gain new business from Ryerson Tull Inc., which placed some regional sales and administration personnel in a new, 6,500-square-foot office building on Matandy’s campus last summer.

While there is no pact between the two companies other than a lease, Thomas Wynn, general manager of Ryerson Tull Coil Processing, has said Ryerson does plan to use Matandy’s processing capabilities, along with the services of other local steel processors. “It will depend on what makes good sense for them logistically, and to whom they are selling,” Pfirman remarks.

Matandy, which ships about 5,000 tons of material per month, may well add more processing equipment in the future, but at present is working to fill its existing capacity. “We will chomp on this investment for a little bit,” Pfirman says. “With the major expenses out of the way, hopefully everything else can just grow and help us foster a better bottom line.” n