Ritz-Craft's North Carolina Plant Recognized in Automated Builder Magazine

09/01/2005

MIFFLINBURG, PA—This year Ritz-Craft celebrates its 51st year in business, that celebration in part marked by the opening of a plant in Rockingham, NC, which they believe to be one of the largest, most technologically advanced facili-ties in the modular housing industry.

The Rockingham expansion not only represents an effort at improving ef.ciencies in production but also an exten-sion of the company's business philosophy as formulated by President and CEO Paul D. John and Vice President Eric John.

In 1997 when Ritz-Craft wanted to expand to the west and the south, they built a design center in Michigan and one in North Carolina. The design center in Michigan attracted a lot of sales so they built their .rst expansion plant there. Now they’re following up in North Carolina.

Rockingham is 200,000 sq. ft. and this adds to the 500,000 sq. ft. they operate in four modular plants and a kitchen cabinet plant, so the total Ritz-Craft manufacturing capability is 700,000 sq. ft.

Eventually the North Carolina plant will employ 250 people. The start-up crew now numbers around 70 and is producing two modulars a day at present.

The plant is dedicated to modular home production and will be capable of producing single-story, two and three story homes.

The general manager is Ron-ald Olson, the plant manager is Dale Dixon and Mike Heckart is operations manager.

President Paul D. John is impressed with the North Caro-lina workforce because of the experience they have. There were a lot of families in the manufactured housing industry in the area so the idea of factory fabrication was not a foreign concept to them.

Ritz-Craft is a second generation family-operated, and privately-owned organization and Paul and Eric pride themselves on the fact that they answer only to their custom-ers and not to stockholders. They believe this means that they can give a customer a lot more for their money. They also feel that too many factories have changed from being customer-based to stockholder-based. Both of.cers continue to concentrate on their ‘business partners,’ builder/dealers and co-workers, and indicate to them that they’re in it for the long haul.

Ritz-Craft has always had a business plan which concen-trated on trying to give people the greatest possible opportu-nity for advancement.

The philosophy in place for the plant is to have three principal qualities: 1. safety, 2. morale of the workers, and 3. quality of the product. The goal is to create good jobs in whatever area they work in, and they think it was especially important in North Carolina where there was a 14% unem-ployment rate.

Ritz-Craft intends to use the talent they’ve built up over the years to bring homes into that area needed by the population. The of.cers have always operated Ritz-Craft on core values. They don’t consider the Caro-lina plant as start-up but see it as a natural outgrowth and improvement of what they’ve done for so many years in the housing industry.

Ritz-Craft soon found that the buyers in that region wanted more upscale homes than those sold in other areas of the country. As a result, they modi.ed their model line, put in more amenities and added two new product lines which they call The Elite and The Legacy.

There were a number of innovations Eric made part of the new plant, designed to increase production ef.ciency. They built a mezzanine running 45,000 sq. ft., which is used to build ceilings. The mezzanine space is large enough to stockpile ceilings so that the boxes on the production line will never have to wait, unlike many plants where the ceiling system is a bottleneck.

They also have developed overhead hoists and cranes to move the materials quickly into positions as needed on the line. If they get into a highly complex ceiling and roof sys-tem, they will build that in advance and have it ready when the unit comes down the line. They also have eight different controls on the materials cranes to assist them in reaching, loading, unloading, and moving.

They also have a large system of catwalks that go from one end of the plant to the other. There are 80' long cat walks and they have 11 of them as well as two overhead rail systems used to move the roof materials and load shingles onto roofs.

The walls and .oors are done on a special glue-nail system. All electrical and air lines are buried in the plant .ooring so the workers can plug in anywhere they wish and they don’t have the tangle of wires and air hoses seen in some factories.

Eric also put in a special moving system that consists of V-groove rails with boxes that ride on special hardware. As they move they sweep the debris out of the way so there are no jams. One man can literally move an entire house section down the production line with a special pusher. Since they have no outside storage for either houses or materials they also have ten specialized detail bays where they put the house sections for .nal quality control inspec-tion and high-end amenities.

As they move into their new market area, Ritz-Craft is currently seeking builder/dealers. Although they’ve already signed on 35 they still have openings on exclusive territories in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and the Florida Panhandle region.

http://www.ritz-craft.com/images/Automated Builder.pdf

© Copyright 2005. Reprinted from the September 2005 Edition of Automated Builder Magazine with the permission by the publisher.