Sales at Fastco

At Fastco, the Sales team doesn’t just sell parts; we perform a wide variety of tasks, from marketing & advertising, to quoting new business, to managing the sample process, to handling price increases and general customer relationship management for established customers. Managing customer relationships is a broad and ongoing job. It requires us to work closely with numerous other departments.

As a customer-centered department, Sales has a high-level of visibility at Fastco and a big impact on the company’s success. Every person in Sales has to understand how their job affects the company as a whole, looking up and downstream to see how tasks fit into the big picture. We are constantly working to improve our processes and are all very self-critical and self-sufficient workers.

Hard Work, Team Work

In 2022, our team set an aggressive goal for new business awards and we blew it out of the water. Of course, it wasn’t just the Sales team that made this happen. Engineering, Customer Service, Manufacturing, Finance, and Purchasing all work to help Fastco win new work to varying degrees. And certainly, winning work and keeping customers happy depends  on the work of every single team member at Fastco.

That being said, Sales should be given a lot of credit for the ongoing success in new business awards. It speaks to a highly motivated team who doggedly pursues new work and does our best to keep our customer’s coming back for more parts.

Interested in learning more about what Fastco does and how our sales team can help you? Request a quote from us or give us call at 616-453-5428.

Production Control at Fastco

The Production Control department’s primary role is to move product. Whether it is keeping the cold heading department supplied with raw material, moving bins of product to the next step, or taking product to and from the outside processors, our team makes it happen. Every team member in the Production Control (PC) department contributes to the company’s goals and helps get every dollar of sales out the door every month.

Not everything is controllable

While our job is to control product, many key factors that impact production are outside of the control of PC team members. The material handler cannot bring material to the header if we do not have it here. The truck drivers cannot bring product back in if it is not completed at the outside processor. Raw material, especially, has been a challenge for the last couple years. The PC department, like Fastco and many other companies, is at the mercy of the industry.

Controlling what we can

Despite this, the PC department works hard to improve the things they can control. I am proud that each member of the PC department knows their job and how to do it. The team members are always willing to help each other out. They do a lot behind the scenes of manufacturing that may not get the recognition it deserves.

Fastco is grateful for all the work put in by team members in the PC department, from the material handlers and parts washer to the truck drivers and the logistics support staff.

by Phil Kowalczyk, Logistics Manager

The Quality at Fastco

The primary function of the Quality Department is ensure standards are met. This includes all required specifications, checks, processes, and procedures. Quality is critical to reducing costs and failures. We work to ensure that our customers are getting what they pay for by having parts within specification.

Everyone is on the Quality Team!

The Quality Department is here to help improve, correct, and ensure things are done properly. It is important to recognize that EVERYONE at Fastco is responsible for the quality of the parts we produce, even if they are not technically a member of the Quality Department. Everyone that touches a part, from cold heading to washing to sorting to entering orders, are part of the Quality Team, in a broader (and important) sense. At Fastco, we all contribute to the quality of our products. Following procedures and processes ensures there are no extra costs or dramatic losses due to a failure.

Thank you, Quality Team!

Thank you to the Quality Department for their efforts to keep our company IATF compliant and to deliver on our promises to customers. When there are quality concerns, members of the Quality Department are always the first to answer the call to assist. They will help with extra sorting & audits and generally help on the production floor. The team regularly goes above and beyond without complaint.

by Brian Kropp, Quality Team Leader

The Inspection Department’s primary function is to get quality parts to our customers on-time. Delivering quality parts on-time is critical to Fastco’s success. We need to meet our customers’ expectations and demands in order to be a successful company.

Inspection Department to the Rescue!

Inspection is often treated as a “hail Mary” operation – it is the last step to getting parts out the door. If other operations run behind, the Inspection team feels it the most. Often, they get tubs in the day before parts are due and are expected to sort them and get them out the door on-time. It’s an unrealistic expectation born of the reality of manufacturing. The Inspection Department handles unrealistic expectations well.

Trust the Process

In this department, team members are not just boxing up quality parts (although that may be the goal). They are also inspecting for quality concerns. For electronically sorted parts, they run each tub through multiple times due to false fallout and to reduce scrap. Quality and timing issues in cold heading and thread rolling all run downstream and affect inspection’s workload. Therefore, the more issues we catch on the machine, the better off the company is as a whole. Cold heading and thread rolling both work hard to stop quality defects on the machine before they reach the inspection department. But no one is perfect, which is why we work to have a process that is.

Through it all, the Inspection Department will do whatever they can do with the timing they are given.  They continue to work hard and get parts out quickly. The department has a very high productivity rate and its members work well together as a team. It’s good to have a team that is so focused on meeting quality and timing demands, even when these two demands seem to conflict. The team trusts the process and serves our customers well.

PLUS – they have a robot on their team named Ellie. How cool is that?

Keeping heavy machinery such as cold heading equipment up and operational is no small task. At Fastco, we have an entire department of machine repair & preventive maintenance technicians, along with an onsite electrician that help keep our cold headers, thread rolling machines, inspection equipment, and general facilities running smoothly and efficiently.

Fastco’s maintenance department works diligently to keep production equipment running. The team performs repairs as needed and schedules planned maintenance to make sure that all key equipment is kept running without negatively impacting production because of machine down time.

Due to the ongoing nature of maintenance, this department has team members working onsite through all three shifts. They are here to help keep the facility running smoothly, days, nights, and sometimes weekends. The amount of time spent behind the scenes doing preventive maintenance on the equipment and the upkeep of facility itself is huge. It may often be invisible to other team members, but it matters.

Our maintenance crew team understands how much it matters as well. They know that they impact the company’s bottom line. Profitability depends on productivity, and productivity depends on having machines up and running efficiently. By doing their jobs thoroughly, our maintenance team works to prevent down time first, and then reduce any necessary down time.

These eleven team members are essential members of team Fastco and we want to say thank you to them for all the work they do. Maintenance at Fastco is critical and we appreciate everything you do.