It’s not very often that you get the chance to see some of the largest construction vehicles in the world get made, but a recent tour of Milwaukee’s P&H Mining (www.phmining.com), a subsidiary of Joy Global (www.joyglobal.com), gave me and my partner, Jeff Dean, just that chance.
Mining is the first step in bringing every person around the world many of their day-to-day needs and conveniences; cans, cars, fuel and diamonds for example. It’s essential to our progress and our way of life.
The P&H complex, located at Miller parkway and National Avenue in Milwaukee, dates back to the early 1900s. P&H stands for [Alonzo] Pawling and [Henry] Harnischfeger, the founders of the company. But what you might expect to see in buildings that old, where rolled and cast steel parts are stretched, machined, welded and painted -- that is, a dirty, oil-mist-filled cavern -- is not at all what you experience. In fact, if you didn’t know the building’s age, you’d think you were walking into a brand new facility. The buildings are clean, bright and fresh, the collaborative result of the desire of both management and the work force to create first-class products in a first-class environment.
P&H Mining makes huge earth mining equipment, like electric shovels, drag lines and drills used to mine precious metals, minerals, coal and oil sands all over the world. Their largest machine, the 4100 XPC is the size of an office building and designed to run 24/7/365.
Our tour was hosted by my friend, Vice President of Human Resources Andre’ Williams and Pat Bartling, the Vice President of Global Operations. They guided us through the 1 million plus square feet of complex of buildings that house the various operations, like fabrication, machining, heat treat and painting. You won’t see a fully assembled machine at this plant because they’re so huge they’d be impossible to ship. Instead, individual components, like booms, gears, counter weights and spools weighing upwards of hundreds of tons, are shipped by rail, truck and ship to their customer’s locations. There a team of 20 or more workers spend three to six months putting together their giant, earth-gobbling machines.
While P&H Mining has a lot of cool things going for it (like history, people and size), what most impressed Jeff and me was their focus on innovation. Laser this and laser that, cutting tools that reduced gear machining from a 300-hour to a 30-hour process and so much more. They are uniquely old-school, but with a future-focused cutting edge.
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