Industry news from Anderson Global

Total Casting Solutions

Strategic alliances are in the news every day, and the BNET Business Directory offers a good description of what they mean: An agreement between two or more organizations to cooperate in a specific business activity, so that each benefits from the strengths of the other, and gains competitive advantage. The formation of strategic alliances has been seen as a response to globalization and increasing uncertainty and complexity in the business environment.

The reason these alliances work is because they help companies become more competitive than ever before— but more importantly, they directly benefit customers. At Anderson Global, we’re constantly searching for ways to offer our customers better service and greater value, and that customer focused thinking led us to make a new business decision. Effective as of April 2007, we have formed a strategic alliance with another industry leader, Ashland Casting Solutions.

For customers in the metal casting industry, the benefits of working with our new alliance can be summed up in three words: total casting solutions. Anderson Global’s president, John McIntyre, explains why the alliance was formed: “Our companies know and understand metal casting. It’s the industry we’ve always specialized in and one that we’re passionate about. Since 1931, Anderson Global has been known as a world-class manufacturer of superior custom tooling. After working with Ashland for many years, it became obvious to us that they shared our dedication to quality and service, as well as our core values. But we also noticed something else, and that was a decline in North American foundries, which caused us to start searching for ways we could help them survive and thrive. An alliance between our companies seemed like the perfect solution, as well as a natural fit—joining forces and sharing assets allowed us to do more for customers, to provide them with a much larger selection of products and services than we’ve ever been able to offer in the past.”

Our combined, highly specialized array of services includes everything from experiential-based concepts and implementation for casting efficiency issue solutions, to plant expansion, new facility development, and overall plant automation. We offer knowledge-based engineering for facilities, equipment, tooling, and casting development, and engineering-based manufacturing for facilities equipment and tooling, in addition to Ashland’s full line of consumable items. In short, if our customers need it, we’ll find a way to provide it.

Together, we offer virtually limitless areas of expertise in tooling. We provide prototype development and production tooling, as well as machining of prototypes and development of castings. Our core package designs help customers minimize sand usage to enhance their automation processes. Utilizing some of the most advanced software available, we can design the most efficient new molds, Wolverine Bronze is a successful aluminum foundry whose original focus was on tooling castings for the automotive, aerospace, and aircraft industries. Not long ago, the company decided to expand its offering by targeting the premium aluminum small- to mid-size casting markets such as racing cylinder heads, cylinder blocks, intake manifolds, military premium castings, and engine development programs. After studying state-of-the-art casting processes, Wolverine officials decided to build their new business around the Kurtz low-pressure precision sand process. Then they began searching for companies that had the greatest amount of expertise in designing and building tooling for their new equipment, and they selected Anderson Global. They knew our company had previously worked on turnkey projects with Kurtz, and that we’d had over 80 years of experience designing and building tooling for cylinder heads, engine blocks and other drive train components, and safety casting.

Once Anderson understood Wolverine’s goals, we brought in our alliance partner, Ashland Casting Solutions, to complete the equation. With this team in place, Dick Smith fromWolverine Bronze felt confident about accepting a customer project— even though it was particularly challenging, as he explains: “They needed us to redesign five complex gear box and cover castings in 3D solids, design tooling, design gating, do casting simulations to prove out gating, produce tooling, make castings, and x-ray castings.” Smith goes on to explain the REAL challenge of this project: “All that and it had to be delivered in just five weeks. At the time, all I could think was that this had to be some kind of impossible dream.”

Fortunately for Smith, his impossible dream was neither impossible nor a dream, but rather a real-life story with a happy ending. “When I first approached Anderson Global and Ashland Casting Solutions about this project and asked if it was even doable, they didn’t bat an eye,” he says. “We formed a team and then went to work, and within the fiveweek timeframe we had delivered all five casting projects of x-ray quality, complex development castings.When our customer machined the castings, they all passed every test. By combining our new system and the power of the Anderson Global- Ashland alliance, we proved that we could achieve far more than we had in the past—and in the process, we saved our customer time and money.”

Now that’s the kind of endorsement we like to hear.