A workplace is safe only when EVERYONE is safe.

In a heavy equipment manufacturing plant, safety takes a total team effort from the front desk to the corner office, all the way to the last loading dock and out the driveway.

At GMF, we work with large, heavy metal parts and fabrications which don’t yield easily to pressure. We never take safety measures lightly. In reality, employee safety is a very heavy topic. We make sure that everyone goes home healthy and happy when their shift ends.

Building a Safety Culture

We look for potential risks. That means proactively seeking out and  retiring those risks before they occur. For example, we report any and all “near misses” and process them as nonconformances to our quality management system. We seek out the root causes, identify any potential for hazard and implement procedural changes, often bringing in outside experts when needed.

It’s better to proactively retire a looming hazard than reactively rehabilitate an injured team member. Therefore, safety training must be systematic and ongoing. It is required to work with the materials and equipment in our plant. This is on top of learning all the various machine and materials handling operations.

A Rewarding Initiative

Fabricating large metal parts used in construction, transportation, maritime operations and manufacturing is often fun and exciting, especially when workers feel safe and confident in their roles. Building a safety culture that promotes “having everyone’s back” goes a long way in fostering trust in the team and the established safety systems.

Setting Goals and Measuring Progress

The goal is simple: an injury-free workplace. GMF has established a safety team designed to get management and employees together in a cooperative effort to promote safety and health at work. The team is composed of equal numbers of senior management and staff representatives. This assures accountability across the company in all matters of safety standards, training and track records.

The goals of the GMF Safety Team are:

• To create a hazard-free work site
• To create an injury-free work site
• To attain zero lost-time accidents

These are the procedures we follow to achieve these goals:

• Engage all employees in safety awareness and training.
• Report all “near misses” as nonconformance, investigate trends and causes, and implement appropriate improvements.
• Review all first reports of injuries.
• Conduct injury investigations and take corrective action.
• Conduct regular safety inspections.
• Oversee ongoing training.
• Develop safety incentive programs.
• Encourage and reward adherence to safety rules.

Our ongoing commitment to maintaining a safe and healthy work environment is one of the most important things we do. It’s a key factor in attracting some of the best and brightest talent in our industry to come work for us.

Culturally and societally, high school students are pressured to attend a four-year college and pursue a bachelor’s degree, and maybe a master’s degree and beyond to get the best start in life. Almost every teacher and guidance counselor in America follow this conventional wisdom while advising their students. This is understandable because it’s what they know. Academia is their world. 

Unfortunately, following this advice has been financially debilitating for some kids and their parents, putting  them in long-term debt with little to no return on the long-term and extremely expensive educational investment.

Vocational tech schools, trade schools, the military and community colleges offer better options for many of today’s youth in spite of the pressure to conform to academic expectations. Without having family wealth or earning full-boat scholarships, students and their parents must seek financial aid, borrow huge sums, and pay for college even while they are still unsure of a career path. This approach to higher education is unnecessary, and many parents need to wake up about other options for their growing children.

The construction and manufacturing trades pay well from the start and provide practical business experience that college cannot offer. Consider the benefits of a starting job at GMFCo:

• Hands-on technical experience in a high demand industry 
• Get paid while learning valuable skills 
• Vocational Tech classes paid by the company 
• Great benefits such as healthcare, dental, flexible hours and paid vacations 
• Unlimited advancement opportunities 

We are not down on education. Just the opposite as we strongly encourage everyone in our company to continually learn, whether taking outside classes or attending our in-house training on the job. Our point is that education comes in all shapes and sizes and everyone should be able to learn and grow according to what’s best for them. For some, that’s 4, 5 or 6 additional years in college and for many others, great careers begin right out of high school. We’ve had the pleasure of watching people in our company flourish who had previously no means to go to college.

Every child is different so it’s important to work with them closely to discover their talents, interests and best career opportunities. Trade schools and colleges both have advantages. The important thing is understanding their differences concerning time, money and value return. A comprehensive article from Indeed.com discusses the key differences and benefits of each option so whether you’re a student or parent, you can make a more informed decision. 

Lastly, please consider the great earning and growth opportunities at our company or pass it on to someone looking for a job. We’re always looking for people who love to build the things that make the world work!

Before any high-tech products like your phone or laptop can be manufactured to meet the market’s demand, machines need to be manufactured and those machines are a collection of parts. Some of those parts must be large, rigid and unyielding to handle all the friction and pressure of mechanized kinetics, namely the foundations and large frameworks of these machines. Generally speaking, larger parts mean fewer parts and better overall stability.

Consider the precision quality of your phone, tablet, laptop, television or other high-tech device. Pretty impressive, isn’t it? Notice how precise everything fits together geometrically in a sleek, trim, durable unit that can do amazing things.

Foundations for Precision Quality

Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, Google, HP, Dell, Motorola and other high-tech manufacturers owe much of the precision quality of their products to the machines and robots that produce them. Foundational to those machines are the frames containing and supporting the working parts.

There can be no precision quality manufacturing without the square, level and rigid properties of the frames. That’s where large part fabricating & machining are crucial and highly valued.

The less movement and vibration machine frames are subject to, the better the machines perform and the longer they last. Larger and fewer parts in a frame assembly reduce friction and movement thereby improving rigidity and durability. Fewer parts also means having fewer things to maintain or fix!

A major portion of our work at GMFCo supports the manufacturing and logistics industries by building frameworks and housings for their machines to perform properly.

Helping Manufacturers & Distributors Meet Demand

GMFCo has specialized in large part fabricating and machining (in part) to supply high-tech equipment manufacturers and others with the structural components needed for their assembly lines and materials handling equipment. We supply machine bases and large frameworks used in many different industries including technology, hardware, construction, food processing, materials handling, warehouse automation, paper processing, printing presses, semiconductor manufacturing and defense contracting to name a few.

Experience Counts

If you can design the machines, then we can manufacture the frames for you. Our large CNC equipment such as 5-axis milling machines and our Quickmill Gantry Machining Centers provide the capabilities to produce the larger, heavier parts, such as large frameworks, needed for most industrial machine building.

We work with all kinds of metals and various grades of each. Whether it’s steel, stainless, copper, aluminum, bronze or even tantalum, we can machine it and form it into the precise shape you need, and in sizes large enough for frame building.

Are your finished products of a consistently high quality that your customers deserve? Remember, where others see problems, we see opportunities!

If you need durable frames or any other large metal parts to support and house the workings of your manufacturing equipment, feel free to call us at 603-889-2600.