1. Case Study:
An Industry Success Story
Presented by: Charles Buie

2. Situation Overview – Aluminum Industry
Customer scenario
 Summer 2007 - Duff Norton had accepted a sales order from an aluminum
smelter which we were having a hard time delivering. The customer had just
recently come back on-line after having been shut down for 3 years and was
alarmed by our extended lead times and began looking at a competitor. I
received a warning call from the distributor handling the account who also stood
to loose the business.
 The main problem was they were still buying a model which had actually been
discontinued for 30 years and they had never been asked by our company to
modernize. The old model consisted of low usage parts with a high cost
structure and poor availability. Our current models were not a drop in
replacement.
 After an initial design review I came up with an idea to redesign the old model
with a mixture of modern day components and modified old components.
 Traveled to visit the customer with my regional salesman and the local distributor
to assess the customer’s willingness to accept the change and to learn more
about how they were using our product

3. Original Design

4. What was at stake?
Hall-Heroult style aluminum smelting

5. What was at stake?
The entire business consisting of:
 6 active Pot Lines
 344 Jacks per Line
 2064 Jacks total

6. Steps to making it work
Action points
 Reached a quantity per shipment agreement with the customer – would allow for
cost effective manufacturing of special components
 Casting – redesigned the internal dimensions of the old casting to accept
modern day components, and modified some external dimensions as well to
require less machining moving forward.
 Worked with our purchasing group to obtain new and more competitive sources
for some of the special components and raw materials
 Worked with production / manufacturing engineering to ensure the most cost
effective methods were being used for those specialized made in-house
components.

7. The new design

8. The end results
 A significantly lower cost structure which would allow us to retain the
account and still be very profitable
 Better availability for the customer – complete assemblies and spare
parts
 New design was more robust and had a higher capacity rating
providing longer life reducing the company’s long term maintenance
expenses
 Duff Norton retained this customer’s business until 2014 – approximate
volume $250K annually

9. Moving forward?
 Research then commenced learning just
how involved Duff Norton had been with
the Aluminum industry from the 1920’s
through the 1980’s.
 Spent the next 2 years traveling to many
different Aluminum smelting locations –
Alcoa, Alcan, Century, Noranda, Rio-Tinto
domestically and internationally leading
those plants through the same process.
Added approximately $1.5M in repeatable
volume.