According to President and Chief Operating Officer Tom Carmazzi, Tuthill Corporation has a very basic business model. “We make rock-solid stuff,” he says. “It’s not high-tech. It’s fundamental, process-based manufacturing that produces high-value-added, well-engineered products not only in terms of the application but also the services we provide our customers.”
In reality, Tuthill today is a diversified global manufacturing operation, with eight different businesses—Controls Group, Coupling Group, Drive Systems, Plastics Group, Pump Group, Transfer Systems, Transport Technologies, and Vacuum & Blower Systems—supplying product for direct distribution and to OEMs such as Boeing, Freightliner, John Deere, and Caterpillar.
Tuthill traces its roots to 1892, when it helped produce the bricks needed to build the booming city of Chicago and soon was transformed into a manufacturer of industrial pumps. Diversification soon followed, and starting in the 1960s, Tuthill went on a decades-long acquisition spree.
Today, the company has numerous manufacturing operations both across the US—many in the Midwest, near its state-of-the-art headquarters in Burr Ridge, IL—and around the world, with plants in China, Argentina, France, the UK, Germany, and Italy, and distribution centers in Belgium and Australia. Carmazzi says many of the plants were added through acquisition, and Tuthill has worked to align them to meet customer needs.
As a company, Tuthill is enjoying strong growth as it rebounds from “difficult times” caused in part by bad timing of transportation-related acquisitions in the late 1990s that exposed the company to the economic slump that started in late 2001. Now Tuthill is working to mitigate the risk of that happening again by deepening its penetration in overseas economies, though about 70 percent of its sales are still US based.
Tuthill strives to remain competitive through a dual approach that marries a strong corporate culture component with a strong belief in the Toyota Production System flavor of lean manufacturing. “Lean over the years has come to mean a multitude of things,” says Carmazzi. “What we’re trying to do is the purest form of lean, where takt time (representing customer demand) equals cycle time, with the focus on that equal sign and keeping the two sides in balance. It seems simple, but applied rigorously, you can find waste you couldn’t see before, all the way from the customer to the supplier. Also, with takt time in the equation, sales and marketing personnel are actively involved in discussions with operations and engineering personnel.”
Within Tuthill, the system is known as the Tuthill Business System, and every employee understands the principles, he says. A more recent effort, begun about two years ago, is to create a more “conscious company”; it seeks to get employees to see the context of the lean changes being made.
“Any type of lean process can be dogmatic, task-oriented,” Carmazzi says. “Yes, there is an absolute discipline, but we want that to happen in an environment where the employees can say, ‘Hey, this isn’t easy, but it’s great. And it brings me closer to the things I want, like a bright future with a winning company.’”
The Conscious Company push comes directly from the top at Tuthill—literally. Chairman and CEO Jay Tuthill currently spends about 50 percent of his time promoting the concept through three-day leadership training sessions and direct interactions with employees. The sessions began with Jay’s leadership team and are now being pushed down to the supervisory level, with line-of-business presidents learning not only the concepts but how to teach them. “He talks about what it means to be a radical leader, about becoming fully aware and responsible for achieving what you want. And the fact that it’s coming from Jay, is very powerful. It’s a huge statement to have him being the leader of this endeavor. He’s not just saying it; he’s standing up in front of the room and living it.”
The first three-day training session is followed by a second, and now Tuthill is breaking down that full training regimen into smaller four-hour blocks. So far, about 95 percent of Tuthill’s 2,300 employees have been exposed to some part of the training, from hourly workers up to line presidents.
While it’s been almost eight years since its last acquisition, Tuthill is still evaluating potential deals, with an eye toward understanding what has worked and what hasn’t in past acquisitions. “We’ve looked at three or four really good opportunities in the past six months, and we’ve had to have the courage to say they didn’t fit our vision and mission statement,” says the COO. Growth will likely come through additional acquisitions and by continuing to win market share from existing and new customers through continued lean product development—bringing customers what they want in the least wasteful way in the time frame they want it.
“There have been times when we deviated from our process; we developed something we thought the customer wanted and went to them with big smiles on our faces, and those smiles weren’t matched on the other side of the table,” Carmazzi says. “We’ve learned to make sure we know what the customer wants and that it’s willing to pay for, and design it in a way we know the manufacturing guys can make. As long as we stick to that process, we’ll continue to have success.”
