Original Date: 10/07/2002
Revision Date: 01/18/2007

In 1947 shortly after World War II, General Tool Company (GTC) was developed in Cincinnati, Ohio with a few dozen small machines and only five employees. Businesses were growing and changing from war effort companies to commercial concerns and William Kramer, Sr. and Harold Poe found a real market for producing machinery and parts. Shortly after their business began, GTC started working with Procter and Gamble producing thousands of metal shear pins that were used to protect Procter and Gamble’s large product manufacturing machines. GTC then began working with stainless steel, which developed its business with General Electric (GE) in 1948. By 1949, GTC added a second work shift to help with the growing projects. In 1957 at the age of 17, William Kramer, Jr. began working part time for GTC, and in 1965 became president. Since the beginning, GTC has served over 60 valued customers including Lockheed Martin, NASA, GE Aircraft Engines and Medical, Rolls Royce, and Pratt & Whitney; increased its number of job shops to two; and developed a well educated, informed and productive staff. GTC gained ISO-9001 certification in 1996, which stands the company in the front for precision machining, fabrication, tooling, die, and mold, and assembly capabilities for worldwide applications. In March 2001, several of GTC’s employees received Outstanding Achievement Awards from program partner, Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company, for the precision machining and on-time delivery of “mission critical” parts for NASA’s Space Shuttle Program.

GTC has been in business for almost 60 years and is now a medium-sized job shop with 240 employees, achieving $35 Million in annual revenue for 2005, and projecting $40 Million annual revenue for 2006. GTC is certified by the National Aerospace and Defense Contractors Accreditation Program and is AS-9000 and ISO-9001 certified. GTC’s facilities include a 200,000 square foot job shop in Cincinnati and a 40,000 square foot job shop in Woodlawn for tooling and assembly business units. The facilities include 40-ton lifting capacity, gas turbine test cell, Class 10,000 clean room, and a full nondestructive testing facility. GTC is one of the few job shops in the United States that can perform a full range of metal-working to the exact standards of aerospace and defense customers. GTC continues to remain competitive within commercial markets with its policy to manufacture, fabricate, assemble, and deliver products and services that meet the customers’ specifications, drawings, and contractual requirements. GTC’s top priority is customer success and satisfaction, which has allowed the company to grow internally and nationally. Through this, GTC has become one of the largest and best equipped manufacturers of engineered systems in the country.

GTC has continued excellence in performance through their partnerships, programs, machines and enhanced facilities. Among the best practices documented by the Best Manufacturing Practices survey team were the implementation of centralized tooling and Cribware software for controlling inventory and documenting the tooling requirements associated with specific jobs; friction stir welding for aluminum as an alternative to conventional weld processing; clean room facility that provides the job shop with additional capabilities for cleaning, assembling, and packaging processes; non-conventional methods that use a Laser Tracker, an articulated computerized inspection arm, and out-of-cycle dimensional measurements; roof mist cooling to provide additional cooling for the machine shop; and certification to program standards that introduced tighter process control for nondestructive testing.

GTC has many plans for the future. The company is striving to strengthen its competitiveness in the commercial market by searching for new ways to meet the market’s needs and is willing to restructure to meet them. GTC strives to maximize service to specific clients within selective industrial markets. The company’s production and development hardware has allowed them to support clients’ development and production activities through tailored approaches to multiple lines of business. Also, GTC’s program management reduces client administrative involvement. GTC’s focus is on the implementation of programs such as composite machining, customer feedback, intranet, and performance management and review system as well as others. Through all this, GTC has advanced its high standard of performance and customer success. The BMP survey team considers the practices in this report to be among the best in industry and government.

TABLE OF ACRONYMS:
The following acronyms were used in this report:

For more information see the Point of Contact for this survey.