FORGING A PARTNERSHIP ON THE SHOP FLOOR
processing. Tus, work for DOD and work for Electralloy have more in com- mon, and the risk of errors as employees switch between tasks is lower.
LEAVING THE COMFORT ZONE Another lesson learned? Te government needs to think outside the box. When Electralloy first expressed interest in the arsenal’s capabilities, Watervliet had basi- cally one way of dealing with industry, as Turcotte describes it. “We wanted to treat it like a direct sale: We’ll process your work and here’s what we’ll charge for it. Tat wasn’t working. Tracy came back to us and said, ‘We’d like to truly partner.’ Tat’s when we had to work through the authorities and think outside the direct- sales box.”
Getting the authority to formally enter into a partnership was a greater challenge. Te U.S. Army Materiel Command (AMC), the arsenal’s higher headquarters, tried for several years to get the Army’s Center for Industrial and Technical Excellence
(CITE) designation, which
recognizes that an installation has a technical capability not found elsewhere and confers authority to join a P3 to pre- serve that capability. Until 2013, only depots could earn this designation. AMC repeatedly proposed making arsenals eli- gible, starting in 2008.
While they waited for the CITE designa- tion, the partners took a leap of faith and signed an agreement with an understand- ing that it would be renewed every five years.
Tinking outside the box also means being willing to take suggestions from the industrial partner. For example, arse- nal personnel used to be employed under narrowly specific job descriptions: crane operator, welder, heat
treater. Rudolph “prodded” the government, as Turcotte 158
FORGING 101 If you’ve always wanted to take a blacksmithing class, here’s
some background on the rotary forge that Watervliet workers use to forge gun tubes.
Forging is the process of shaping metal with compressive force and some- times heat. A blacksmith, for example, places a heated piece of metal on an anvil and delivers repeated blows with a hammer. The hammer in that case is the “die,” or the surface that comes into contact with the piece be- ing worked. For larger-scale die-based metalworking, the piece is placed in a forge where machines power the dies, achieving a force and speed much greater than a blacksmith’s arm could. In a conventional forge, the dies move in a single direction and generally the workpiece remains in one place. In a rotary forge, dies positioned at an angle to each other move synchronously as the workpiece is rotated, pauses for the hammer strike, and rotates again. Each die is in contact with the workpiece for less time, the dies generate less friction between each other, and less downward force is required.
With less force in play, the dies and the machine last longer since they’re not subject to as much wear and tear. Rotary forging also requires fewer raw materials and generates less “flash” (metal waste), because of the multiple, more maneuverable ways to deliver force. You can do more things more efficiently when you have hammers that can strike at an angle, as compared to the straight up-and-down force of the single blacksmith’s ham- mer. Rotary forging is thus more efficient than the conventional method— which justified the initial high cost of acquiring the forge at Watervliet.
put it, to use more multitalented job cat- egories. Now all employees are classified as metal processors and are cross-trained in all the critical skills to operate the forge, creating a flexible, diversified pool of workers less vulnerable to individual departures.
Being open to the changes and compro- mises that a full partnership demands has yielded other benefits for Water- vliet. Te arsenal’s equipment has been upgraded and is maintained by a partner with equal incentive to keep it in shape, and can move faster to keep it up to date. “Electralloy can make investments much
Army AL&T Magazine July-September 2016
more readily than we can,” Turcotte noted. And since becoming an on-site presence at one part of the arsenal, Elec- tralloy has identified other equipment that wasn’t being used. “Now we’re looking at expanding work downstream on machining,” Turcotte said, which means even more skills retained and work gained. “Tat’s a totally unexpected benefit that wasn’t in our analysis [of the initial proposal].”
CONCLUSION In 2015, the arsenal renewed the partner- ship with Electralloy for 20 years. DOD recognized the Watervliet-Electralloy
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