When you hear someone talk mention the term “riding mower,” what image comes to mind? You probably picture four wheels, a cutting deck and a bunch of steel painted to fit your brand of choice.
If you’re Kevin Wykoff, director of operations for Commercial Turf Products (CTP) in Streetsboro, Ohio, then your mind conjures up a process, not an image. Wykoff manages the 177,000-square-foot facility that produces products ranging from mowers to spreaders for Cub Cadet Commercial and LESCO. He’s responsible for the staff, which ranges from 125 to 150 depending on the season, the machines, the lasers, the robots and countless other parts work in concert to produce the mower in your mind.
Walking through the plant and watching the assembly lines at work (CTP had three full lines working on this August day, not including the sprayer assembly), you gain an appreciation for what goes into producing commercial-grade machines. And Wykoff’s experience running the plant since it opened in 1996 fills in the blanks.
For example, some manufactured products require minimal assembly once they are delivered either to the dealer or the end user. How does CTP ensure that all of the necessary pieces and parts are in the box? “The reality is that not everything ends up in the right box all the time, so we have a very sensitive scale that weighs each box before it goes out of the plant, and we know how much that box should weigh,” Wykoff explained. “If the weight is too high or too low, we know something didn’t get packed correctly.”
What about the larger machines, such as riding mowers? How is quality ensured with them? “Our products can go through two audits – what we call a 100 percent audit and then a verification audit,” he noted. “The 100 percent audit is a complete review of the machine to make sure that it’s working properly, all of the stickers are on and in the right place and so forth. If something is wrong with a mower, then it goes to a separate area for the necessary work. Once that work is done, then the mower goes through the verification audit to confirm that the necessary work was done properly.”
Along with the assembly lines and manufacturing operations, a critical area for mower development is the testing facility. The CTP test set up may not be glamorous, but it’s clearly functional, with a series of spine-jarring curbs, banked turns, roller-coaster hills and other assorted mower tests. “We tend to err on the side of abusing the products,” explained Dennis O'Toole, director of product development.
In fact, the company typically runs test machines for about 500 hours and uses a number of different units to test new products, according to O'Toole. “We’ll also just run some of them until they fail so we can find out what breaks first,” he added.
This information isn’t valuable unless it gets used by the right people, which is why CTP’s director of testing meets with designers and engineers every Monday at 7:30 a.m.. “In that meeting, they review what parts of different products failed,” O'Toole noted. “How many hours were on the machine when the failure happened? What conditions was the machine operating in?”
Discussion in these meetings also centers on solutions for problems being reported in the field. “One of the most common problems we encounter stems from the addition of aftermarket collection systems to the riding mowers because that added strain and weight can be abusive to the powertrain systems,” O'Toole pointed out. “So we spent a lot of time talking about how to strengthen our mowers for those problems.”
With six manufacturing engineers, six equipment designers and a well-lit test facility that can punish machines 24 hours a day, CTP could hold on to new products forever, continually searching for another improvement. But that’s not practical. “The industry is clearly hungry for real innovation, and we think we’re good at that,” O'Toole affirmed. “But we have to balance the need to get the new product out there in the field vs. getting it out there too quickly. And we do tend to err on the side of over testing machines because you can’t afford to sell a product until you know exactly how it will perform and that it will meet your quality standards.”