SOUTH SIOUX CITY - A small army of giant grinders, blenders, spurge pumps and other heavy industrial machinery stands at regular intervals throughout the huge assembly room at BPI Inc.'s new high-tech machine facility next door to its plant here.
A year ago there were just a few machines, as the 65,000-square-foot support facility for the maker of a lean beef product was coming on line. Now 15 workers in the machine assembly room make sure the company's plants stay up and running with the best equipment available.
In the next room, large parts for those machines sit on the floor and on industrial-strength shelving, ready to be sent to any one of BPI's four processing plants, including the one right next door, or to a customer who leases the company's innovative food processing equipment.
"It's all custom fabricated equipment," Rich Jochum, corporate administrator, said. "Virtually nothing in here comes off the shelf and gets used in another type of operation."
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Nearby, 5,000 baskets of smaller parts, each marked with a bar code and stacked 18 feet high and 50 feet long, go around on a computer-run system that delivers the needed part to a person. He in turn makes sure it gets to where it's needed, whether in the adjacent assembly room, in the beef product plant next door or one several states away.
And, finally, there's the machine tooling shop. It's the pride of BPI CEO Eldon Roth, who not only invented the process for producing his company's lean beef product from trimmings, but also designed the equipment to do it commercially. Now other engineers work together refining designs and creating new equipment through Beef Products Technology Inc.
The shop contains 17 work centers with various functions, including nine CNC, or computer numerically controlled, machine-tooling stations, each with a different capability.
"This is probably the largest machine shop in the Midwest right now, with the latest technology," Dave Rose, engineering and purchasing manager, said as he gave a recent guided tour of the facility.
The CNC machines use a computer-aided design, or auto-CAD drawing, which has been converted to the "G-codes" read by the CNC machines. The codes designate the specific tools the machine will need to make the part and directs the process. The machine operators load the tools, enter the numerical directions and monitor the process.
The shop is capable of manufacturing all but the very largest parts that might be needed at any BPI facility, as well as the smallest. One lathe can shape a solid roll of stainless steel 26 inches in diameter and 164 inches long. One vertical turret lathe has the capacity to machine tool a piece 60 inches in diameter and 60 inches high. A similar horizontal milling machine can shape a piece 72 inches high and 110 inches long.
The smallest piece needed is 1/2-inch in diameter; surface grinding must be done in some cases to a tolerance of .0005 of an inch.
Rose points to a dimple-walled stainless steel drum made there. It is large enough to hold several adults standing, with only their head and shoulders poking above the rim. It's a chiller drum which is used with a nearly equally large drum inside, freezing and scraping the liquid product into a giant beef smoothie.
"It is critical our product stays at a certain temperature," Rose said. "We have tubes inside of tubes to keep it the temperature we want it. The dimples help heat or cool it."
Now hiring
Currently just nine people run the CNC machines, but BPI would like to hire another 14 or so operators. "If we go to three shifts, it could be more," Rose said.
"It's not only needing people. It's needing people who work within the BPI mold and the way we do things," he said. He said the company is looking for young people to train as well as experienced CNC machinists to hire.
Roth expressed frustration with BPI's nationwide search for machinists. He said BPI is looking for people with a little machine experience, or an aptitude for it, and a good work ethic. The company does drug test. "It's a good opportunity," Roth said.
It's about time
BPI built the machine shop to have more control over its beef product operations.
"It's a time issue," Rose explained. And that makes it a money issue. "If we've got a $200 hole to drill and spend $500 to ship (the part) and wait two days." Plus, the equipment itself is very expensive: what if the machinist on the other end does a poor job or ruins the machine altogether? In its own shop, BPI can control costs and improve quality.
In addition to making equipment for its own plants, BPI is also leasing its equipment to some of its customers.
"We're working with them not only in terms of the beef we're selling," Jochum said, "but we're helping them with their own equipment so we can give them more opportunity to work with our product."
For instance, one piece of equipment a maker of commercial food products might use is the company's custom grinder, designed to grind its 60-pound blocks of frozen beef product.
Jochum said none of BPI's equipment is sold to customers, rather it is leased, or licensed for their use. The exception is the equipment used in the company's patented process of separating the fats from the lean beef; nobody is allowed to use that except BPI.
Jochum said all of the company's customers currently are within the United States, although some of them have facilities outside the country. He said there might be opportunity in the future for some BPI equipment to be used in foreign operations. "But, we have to fill up the United States first," he said.
