Mark Mohr, president of Mori Seiki Mid-American Sales, presents Crown President Jim Dicke III with a customer appreciation plaque. The plaque contains an etched copy of the Modern Machine Shop story about Crown's use of Mori Seiki equipment.

Once again, Crown Equipment Corporation's vertical integration strategy has received national recognition. This time it comes from the editors of Modern Machine Shop.

Crown was recently featured in the publication's Better Production section with a story entitled, "Vertical Integration Reduces Cycle Times". The story includes comments from Bill Solarek, Crown's manager of advanced manufacturing engineering and Greg Bruns, manager of manufacturing services at Crown.

The story points out how Crown's strategy has provided shorter turnaround times and how we have become more adaptive to our customers' needs. By using vertical integration, the company can modify schedules to enable machining a single part if necessary.

"If a customer is in dire need of a product, it's a matter of rearranging our schedule to meet that requirement," says Bruns in the story. "We're able to offer flexibility in our products that would be impossible if we were relying on outside suppliers. It would also prove difficult to achieve this level of service when receiving standard parts from a supplier."

To insure the high quality of parts, the article says, Crown invests in what it considers to be "top of the line" machinery. As such Crown has implemented a number of mills, lathes and machining centers from Mori Seiki (Irving, Texas) in its facilities. The article further details how the two companies have worked together in trying to achieve the best manufacturing processes possible.

"As a vertically integrated company, we don't have to demand shorter turnaround times from suppliers. We can invest in technology and then work on our processes," says Solarek.