R&B specializes in custom machinery

“If a customer wants a machine painted orange and delivered on a Tuesday with a full moon, we can do that. There is a cost, but we can do that,” he said. “I use that as an example of how we try to listen, find out what a customer needs and be flexible enough to build it.” 

“We want to supply machines that are able to solve specific problems or be used for specific applications,” Piercy said.  

Privately owned R&B Machinery, which has been in business since 1980, builds a range of blow molding and extrusion equipment. It ships about 20 processing machines a year, generally split evenly between blow molding and extrusion. 

The company has 41 employees, with about 25 assembling machines. Six are electrical and mechanical design engineers who turn what a customer says it wants into a machine designed to accomplish that goal. 

R&B Machinery builds blow molding machinery with single or multiple parisons and layer structures for injection blow molding (135-ton and 180-ton clamp), accumulator head, shuttle blow molding (hydraulic, hybrid and all-electric) and mechanical wheel blow molding. It also manufactures the Max Parison Control system, which provides measurable, high-performance wall-thickness control of the blow mold parison. 

Extruders include single-screw (1 inch to 10 inches diameter), smooth-bore and impact reciprocating-screw models. R&B Machinery is especially well-known for its trademarked Max Impact screws, designed to provide the maximum output at the maximum value. 

It also builds a finishing trimmer and deflashing system and a controlled scrap release system. 

R&B serves dual markets 

From its earliest days, R&B Machinery built rotary wheel machines for one large processor. Other types of blow molding machines were added about 11 years ago when Piercy joined the company. That includes accumulator and all-electric shuttle machines.  

“We are restyling ourselves into this space,” he said. 

Very few of R&B Machinery’s customers buy both blow molding and extrusion equipment, so the company serves two different market segments. 

Nearly all its machines are sold in North America. 

There are four legs to R&B Machinery’s business. In addition to blow molding and extrusion equipment, it rebuilds and refurbishes older R&B Machinery equipment and has an extensive parts and service segment that focuses on the machinery it builds or rebuilds. 

Piercy said about 30 percent of R&B Machinery’s business is in blow molding equipment, 30 percent extrusion equipment, and the rest is split between rebuilds and parts and service. Some years, blow molding might be 40 percent and extrusion 20 percent, he said. 

Annual sales are in the $15 million to $20 million range. 

The business diversification has been important for the company. “Last year was very, very, very slow,” Piercy said. “There was not much blow molding business, but we had a couple of decent extrusion projects that offset the year before, which was predominately blow molding machinery.” 

Those extrusion systems were part of a new application that exemplifies the type of projects R&B Machinery is perfectly suited to tackle. The extrusion systems went along with compression molding systems R&B Machinery built for a proprietary application that uses recycled resin and an organic material. 

“We built all of it, ran it all off here and then shipped it to the customer. Pretty cool stuff,” Piercy said. “Unfortunately, I cannot give you details, but it was something new and not just your run-of-the-mill application. A lot of our extrusion equipment goes into these specialty areas.”  

Piercy admits the R&B Machinery business model does not provide every type of machine the market might want.  

“We try to work with customers that are looking for value-added,” he said. “If they are looking for just a plain, 4-inch extruder and all they want is for it to be down and dirty and cheap, we may not be their best solution provider — not that we couldn’t do it — but sometimes we are not as competitive in that.” 

On the other hand, “we do a lot of repeat business with a certain number of customers,” he added. 

One aspect of R&B Machinery’s design philosophy is to focus on operators’ needs. If a customer requests, control screens can be configured to look like what the operator has been using on the machine that is being replaced. 

“There are other little things we can do,” Piercy said. “One is to make the machine as easy as possible to get inside the machine and troubleshoot it. We are keeping very focused on ease of operation. If a customer wants more bells and whistles, we can do that. But we don’t try to over-complicate the machine because it adds cost.”  

Building a skilled workforce 

The central Michigan plant competes for employees in a crowded manufacturing market, and Piercy credits the company’s core values for success in recruiting and retaining talented people. 

“Safety, integrity, social responsibility, teamwork, innovation and customer first,” Piercy said. “It is up on the wall, but it is not just wallpaper. We believe and run our business this way.  

“We build a good solid product. We try to keep it very cost competitive. When someone calls, we are going to pick up the phone. We try to treat every customer, whether big or small, the same. I think that is one of the reasons people choose R&B when we get into competitive situations.” 

He said there are third-generation employees at R&B Machinery. “That’s pretty helpful,” Piercy said. The company also gets employees from the Saline area through word-of-mouth. 

There is no formal training or apprenticeship program, but Piercy said there are plenty of toolbox talks or half-day training sessions conducted by outside experts.  

“We are a human capital company,” Piercy said. “What we do is very much about our people, so we are very focused with our people on their skill sets.” 

Working on the 60,000-square-foot main assembly plant floor requires a variety of skills. R&B Machinery orders machine bases and cabinetry from an outside fabricator, then assembles a machine based on what the customer needs.  

R&B Machinery can use a variety of control systems and downstream equipment as needed. It purchases standard automation equipment but builds specialized items. “If it is commercially available, I try to determine if we can add any value. If the answer is no, then we are going to buy it.” 

Master screw designer Tim Womer designs the screws, and another supplier builds them for R&B Machinery. 

Extrusion machines take an average of 22 weeks to build and deliver; blow molding machines take 35 weeks to 38 weeks, depending on size.  

Most of the plant floor employees also serve as service technicians and are sent to customer locations for installations, tests, reconfigurations, troubleshooting and repairs. Being able to travel is a prerequisite to being hired, Piercy said. 

Employees work on both blow molding and extrusion equipment. “I think that is a bit of an advantage for us,” Piercy said. 

Outlook: Ready for growth 

The sweet spot for R&B Machinery customers are medium-size to larger companies, Piercy said. “We deal with global companies, and we can deal with the smaller guys too, but sometimes the smaller companies might not want to spend the money to do what we recommend. I don’t want to minimize that in any way, but our sweet spot is medium and larger companies,” he said.  

“There are a lot of challenges in the market right now, and our customers are not insulated from them,” he said. “But we are seeing more activity from reshoring and companies stabilizing their base and even expansion here in the United States,” he said. 

Industrial markets seem to offer the best opportunity for growth, he said. 

“There are going to be opportunities to work with customers that are either reshoring or growing their businesses,” he said. Either way, there is increased investment in manufacturing in the U.S. base. 

“I see more industrial product investment, so that means single-screw extruders or larger blow molding machines,” Piercy said.  

“I don’t see a lot of growth in standard container shuttle machines because the market is quite saturated with that capacity. We are going to have to work and fight for every inch of that business,” he said. 

Piercy said he currently has customers making products out of 100 percent recycled plastic that previously were made from wood.  

“We do a lot of really cool stuff,” he said. “These are places where we try to put our time. If we are looking to sell just a blow molding machine to another standard plastic container manufacturer, we will do that for sure, but there is not a lot of growth in that space right now.” 

And speaking of cool, R&B Machinery can paint that new machine Green Bay Packer green or Ferrari red. Whatever the customer needs — a custom focus is R&B Machinery’s mission 

Contact: 

R&B Machinery, Saline, Mich., 734-429-9421, www.rbplasticsmachinery.com