MMI Engineered Solutions wins Excellence Award for employee relations

Saline, Mich. — As a molder focused on the automotive market, 2020 was a real roller-coaster ride for MMI Engineered Solutions Inc.

The Saline-based company started the year with high expectations and plans to open a new $10 million, 82,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Warren, Mich.

Then came COVID-19 and the abrupt shutdown of most global automotive assembly plants. MMI had to react quickly.

"We pulled everybody together and said, 'OK, well, we've got to treat this like we're going to war. The business has to live, and we have to put our priorities in line," Doug Callahan, MMI's president, CEO and owner, said.

"First and foremost, we said safety is the No. 1 concern. We want all of our people to be safe. And we also knew that we wanted to survive for the long term. So we had to make a long-term plan, while taking into account what our short-term strategy was going to be, because essentially, our cash flow was going to go down significantly, sales were going to go down. And we needed to prepare for that," Callahan said.

MMI was able to stay open throughout the year because some of its customers designated the company as an essential supplier. So MMI chose to maintain the highest level of employment possible, and to use the automotive slowdown to make improvements to its processes, procedures and facilities, to be prepared for future business growth.

MMI continued to move forward with its operational plans, so that it was ready to move when the automakers reopened. That strategy has paid off, and MMI was able to move quickly and capitalize on new business opportunities.

And as a result, even in a pandemic year when many auto suppliers suffered big losses, MMI managed to repeat as a finalist for the Plastics News Processor of the Year award in 2020.

On top of that, MMI is the winner of the PN Excellence Award for employee relations. The company was selected for prioritizing its workforce and workers' safety during the pandemic year, and taking steps to ensure sustained growth and a strong future for the company.

MMI is a custom injection molder with strong roots in toolbuilding. In addition to Saline and Warren, the company also has a plant in Monterrey, Mexico.

MMI is our only 2020 finalist with a big automotive molding business, and that created some special challenges .

Back in March and April 2020, Callahan said the first step when was to go through the spending plan and prioritize … everything.

"We went through line item by line item and we made a list of the gotta haves vs. the nice to haves. And anything that wasn't a gotta have immediately went. We got rid of cost immediately, things like some specialized uniforms, some outside consultants, which were nice-to-haves," he said.

"While we were doing that, we also made a plan and said, 'What is important to the sustainability of the business?' And we said: 'We are an engineering company. We need to preserve our engineers and our engineering staff, our technical staff, that needs to be a priority," he said.

Remembering the Great Recession of 2007-2008, the team decided that MMI needed to follow an aggressive strategy, rather than a preservation strategy, to prepare for when the automotive market recovered.

"We decided to beef up our engineering staff, to beef up our sales staff, and to be more aggressive than ever, to provide better service than we ever have to our customers. And we're going to aggressively pursue new business when a lot of our customers are trying to figure out how to keep the doors open. We're going to be in their face, so to speak," Callahan said.

He figured that some automotive molders that were in poor financial health at the outset of the pandemic would have trouble reopening and producing product when the OEMs reopened.

In the meantime, MMI kept busy. The tool shop had a nice backlog of work, plus it got involved in the Ford Motor Co. project to make ventilators. MMI put signs on the molding floor in Saline that had the Ford and MMI logos and the message "Saving lives 1 shot at a time."

"That really built some positive morale. Our employees were taking pictures next to the sign and posting them on social media," Callahan said.

Molding components for ventilators and face shields kept the molding machines running. The result was that even though MMI's overall sales went down in 2020 — the company had a record year in 2019 — it was ready for a big influx of new work that hit in the fourth quarter, helping the company to a finish the year profitably.

"As a result of our strategy to really aggressively go after new business, we've kicked off many dozens of new products. And since we make all our own tooling, it's really the tooling that has propelled us forward," Callahan said.

At the end of the year, even with molding business booming, Callahan said the MMI team wanted to give factory workers some extra time off around the holidays.

"This goes to show how much we appreciate our people: With all the stress, we wanted to give our operations folks a four day weekend, around Thanksgiving. And we did it again at the end of the year, we wanted to shut our molding operations down the week between Christmas and New Year's, and give people a little bit of a break," he said.

"But our orders were going up, and we couldn't get enough labor. So we went to our salaried staff and said, 'This is what we want to do for operations folks. The only way we're going to do this to be able to shut down that Thanksgiving and the Christmas is we get volunteers from the salaried staff.'

"And it was amazing the response we got. We had dozens and dozens of people volunteer, not just once or twice, they volunteered their free time in the nights and on the weekends. And we successfully hit our numbers," he said.

Callahan himself worked each weekend in November and December, making parts.

"It had to start with me to be successful. I was out on a press, I was making parts," he said. "I will tell you, it was one of the greatest learning experiences that we've ever had in our company."

Not only did it build morale, but the engineering, design and quality staff got an opportunity to learn the business better.

"We learned how we could make the business more efficient, how we can design tools better, how we can improve processes, unlike any time in our company's history, because we are physically out there doing it every day," Callahan said.

As a result, MMI is going to mandate that its people in design and engineering spend time out on the floor making parts, because they learned so much during the post-pandemic rush.