4 posts tagged “kic”
26/6/08
Source: http://trailer-bodybuilders.com/news/kic_ram_partnership_0626/
KIC Holdings, Inc. (KIC) has signed a long-term manufacturing agreement with Rockford Automated Machine (R.A.M.), a subsidiary of F.A.C. Consolidated Industries, in Rockford, Illinois. The two companies have joined forces to support the manufacturing and supply chain of the KIC brand of wheel-end products that includes wheel hubs, brake drums, rotors and cast spoke wheels.
KIC is moving a large portion of its manufacturing to R.A.M., which will serve as KIC's machining, warehousing and distribution partner. KIC will be utilizing R.A.M.'s machining capacity as KIC transitions a majority of its manufacturing base to North America. R.A.M. has established a 200,000-square-foot facility in Rockford that will serve as KIC's newest machining and distribution center.
KIC is a 37-year-old company that provides truck and trailer parts to OEM and aftermarket users. KIC's network of PDCs supports OEM, OES and aftermarket customers with just-in-time deliveries of wheel-end products.
F.A.C. is an ISO 9001:2000-certified company specializing in contract machining, with over 45 years experience machining cast iron & steel parts. R.A.M. specializes in high-volume production runs of parts for heavy duty trucks, agricultural and construction equipment.
8/11/02
Source: http://portland.bizjournals.com/portland/stories/2002/11/11/story6.html
Anyone expecting to do business in China should be ready for a challenge and be willing to persevere. And the challenges are not necessarily in the details, said one local business owner who founded a manufacturing operation in the Chinese city of Suzhou in 1997.
"Cultural barriers have been much more difficult to overcome, more so than any legal or tariff barriers," said KIC Group co-owner Greg Hatton. Vancouver, Wash.-based KIC, with revenue of approximately $40 million, employs 20 people from its headquarters and 130 people at operations worldwide. The company manufactures axles for heavy duty truck trailers in China, imports axle components for North American distribution and distributes truck and trailer spare parts in Mexico, South America and Southeast Asia. Its products end up on trailers hauling items ranging from consumer goods to timber.
KIC was spun out of the export division of Kimwood Corp., a forest products machinery company based in Cottage Grove, Ore., in 1972. The company is now owned by Hatton, Pat Kuzmer and Miami businessman Rudy Duemichen.
And when costs escalated at its operation in Singapore a decade ago, China's relatively low costs attracted KIC Group. Even though Chinese culture varies drastically from Western ways. Although China's culture is experiencing rapid change, "the concept of a relationship between people is, in almost all cases, more important than price and quality," Hatton said.
And typically, the traditional Chinese style of business communication—whether between organizations or within an organization—is different than Americans expect.
"We tend to be relatively open and blunt. We ask a question and we expect to be answered directly. It doesn't matter whether you're asking about a company policy or pricing structure or the status of customs. In traditional Chinese culture, they don't answer questions directly. And that has been the most frustrating thing for me as a manager," Hatton said. Hatton is preparing for a December communication-promotion trip to KIC's China facility.
To help bridge the cultural gap when it began China operations, KIC hired a Singaporean. "But things are really changing so quickly in China that he even has a hard time."
KIC has a long history of working abroad. Before the company opened KIC Suzhou Automotive Products LTD, KIC served its Asian customers from a facility in Singapore. But by the early 1990s, rapid cost increases forced KIC to look for a way to do business less expensively.
At the time, Portland's ties to China were highlighted with early efforts on a major civic project—the Portland Classical Chinese Garden. A sister city relationship with Suzhou partly facilitated that project.
And those ties, Hatton said, helped KIC with its relocation plans. "We met people representing Suzhou when they came here while Portland was just talking about doing a Chinese garden." Those connections helped lead KIC to an existing 15,000-square-foot building in the city. After company officials considered whether to partner with a China-based firm for a joint-venture, and completed nearly 100 trips to the continent throughout several years, KIC was poised to open its operation.
"Many companies are presented with the opportunity for a joint venture with a Chinese company. But based on our evaluation and on all of the experience we had at the time, we decided to go all on our own. Perhaps our learning curve has been longer but we do feel we have more control over our destiny. A lot of companies have entered into a joint venture, only to leave disillusioned and substantially poorer.
"But because of the cultural barriers, it's very difficult to have a partner in China. You've got to be committed to being in China for the long-term."
KIC invested almost three times China's requirement for a minimum investment of $350,000 when it started up its wholly owned foreign subsidiary. The company's China-based assets have grown to $3.5 million and the 40-person manufacturing operation has experienced 30 percent growth annually. It became profitable in its third year.
With burgeoning demand for transportation systems, the country represents a market too important to ignore, Hatton said. When the transportation industry in the United States boomed during in the late 1990s, roughly 200,000 trucks and 300,000 trailers were sold annually. During the same years in China, probably 20,000 trucks and 30,000 trailers were sold, Hatton said. But with four times the U.S. population, China likely will continue to demand an ever-growing supply of vehicle components.
Source: http://www.ugs.com/CaseStudyWeb/dispatch/viewCaseStudy.html?id=84
Femap with NX Nastran's ease of use permits KIC Holdings to perform more analyses and more complex analyses improving the ability to create competitive and highly durable products.
Challenges
- Continue to flourish in competitive market by offering reduced-weight, lower-cost products
- Design products to last onehalf million miles and meet lifetime warranty
Keys to Success
- Replaced MSC.Nastran for Windows with Femap® and NX™ Nastran software
- Used VAR support to get up to speed quickly
- Full control over analysis models permits more complex analyses
- Confidence that UGS will continue to add functionality to Femap with NX Nastran
Results
- Femap’s ease of use encourages expanded application of FEA
- FEA serves as virtual proving ground at lower cost than physical testing
- “Analyze twice/test once” practice gets product to market faster and a lower cost
Industry:
- Automotive & Transportation
"Femap with NX Nastran has this is a group of motivated software engineers working to constantly add functionality."
Fast-growing, global operation
KIC combines North American technology, design and distribution with Chinese foundry and manufacturing expertise to grow at an impressive rate. It has averaged 50 percent growth per year for the past four years. The company provides a "just in time" supply of wheel end products such as hubs and brake drum assemblies. Its customers are trailer, axle and suspension manufacturers such as Hendrickson, Dana Corp., Hyundai Translead, Cheetah and Lufkin Trailers among many others.
KIC's product development team has long relied on CAE technology to meet design challenges. Because a big part of the company's successful growth strategy has been its aggressive pricing strategy, product developers must balance the demands of making products as light as possible while also delivering exceptional strength and durability. "Commercial over-the-highway tractors and trailers generally have a million mile life target," explains Joe Brotherton, director of product development at KIC. "Our wheel hubs are expected to last the life of the truck. Brake drums, although they are a service item, must meet federal performance standards and the durability expectations of our customers, typically 300,000 to 500,000 miles for over-the-highway trucks."
For years, designers at KIC have been using finite element analysis to help accomplish this. With previous experience using Pro/Mechanica, the company later migrated to MSC.Nastran for Windows. But when a local VAR demonstrated the advantages of Femap with NX Nastran, the company decided to upgrade to this solution. According to Brotherton, this was a good decision for a variety of reasons.
Good support shrinks start-up time
One of the first advantages KIC noticed with Femap with NX Nastran was how easy it was to get started using it. This was due in part to the software itself and in part to the support from the local UGS VAR, Predictive Engineering (Corvallis, OR). In contrast to MSC.Nastran, installing Femap with NX Nastran was a walk in the park. "MSC.Nastran was hard to set up," he explains. "It took a week trading emails with MSC to do.We had to do things like modify initialization files to address setup issues as well as to account for licensing. There was none of that with Femap with NX Nastran. The software was quickly loaded and ready to use."
Predictive Engineering helped with the transition by demonstrating certain modeling in Femap with NX Nastran. "Having a resource like this got us up to speed faster than buying software in a box," Brotherton adds. "The ability to have a local reseller that is so eminently knowledgeable was definitely a selling point for Femap with NX Nastran." Brotherton also appreciates the information available from UGS on the Femap with NX Nastran website. "It has suggestions and you can get feedback so it has been a good resource for us," he adds.
Ease of use invites use
Femap with NX Nastran is used at KIC to provide a virtual proving ground for testing parts. In the real world, physical testing is expensive and slow. "For the cost of two individual brake drum tests, I can buy Femap with NX Nastran and do countless computer studies," Brotherton says. "These studies give insight into the behavior of the parts that we produce. This allows us to meet our customers' expectations for lighter weight products, cost reductions (lighter is cheaper) and improved performance. Our customers are engineers, and they look to finite element analysis as part of the design verification."
One of the main differences between MSC.Nastran and Femap with NX Nastran, in KIC's experience, has been the level of user-friendliness. "While MSC.Nastran ran on the Windows platform, it did not really take advantage of Windows functionality," Brotherton says. "For example, you could only have one window open at a time, and it was difficult to navigate through the program. Femap with NX Nastran conforms to all the Windows conventions, so right from the start it's more accessible. Because information is so readily available, and I was able to navigate through the program so intuitively, I learned it much faster than I learned MSC.Nastran." What Brotherton has found is that the user-friendliness of the new software invites its further use. "It's the small things that make Femap with NX Nastran more user-friendly, and the ease of working with it makes you want to do more analysis," he notes.
More and better analyses
Since the upgrade to Femap with NX Nastran KIC has done some analyses that it never attempted with the previous software. For example, Brotherton recently performed a non-linear contact analysis involving bearing cones in a wheel drum. "When I tried to do a similar analysis with MSC.Nastran, I had to simplify it considerably," Brotherton explains. "With Femap, I was able to create a more complex model that ran quickly and got good results." The end result of the ability to create more complex models is a better ability to predict product performance and optimize weight.
Although Femap with NX Nastran is easier than other preprocessors to use, its functionality is capable of handling even the most demanding analysis problems. One important capability that Femap with NX Nastran provides is the ability to combine element types within a finite-element model. Some of KIC's analysis models may contain imported solid models (usually in .sat format and then automatically meshed) as well as beam elements and plate elements (to represent a wheel, for example). "Now that we can combine all these elements, we can more accurately simulate mechanical systems," Brotherton adds. Another distinct advantage of Femap with NX Nastran is "full control of the analysis models," such the ability to remove layers or volumes to vary the analysis. Brotherton compares what Femap with NX Nastran delivers to the old MSC.Nastran by saying, "MSC.Nastran is like a photo viewer and Femap with NX Nastran is like Photoshop. There's a lot more you can do with your models."
"For the cost of two individual brake drum tests, I can buy Femap with NX Nastran and do countless computer studies."
Joe Brotherton
Director, Product Development
KIC
The FEA payoff
In the carpentry world, there is an adage, "Measure twice, cut once." "In the mechanical engineering world, we use Femap with NX Nastran to calculate twice so we only test once," Brotherton says. "This pays off in time to market, lower costs and safer products on the roads. In today's global market, we're as likely to see our wheel components in the Outback of Australia as we are on an 'out n' back' to the neighborhood grocery store.We must design our products with care and Femap with NX Nastran plays a big role in helping us do that."
By upgrading to Femap with NX Nastran, KIC got an FEA solution that is both easier to use and more powerful than its previous system. That, combined with excellent support from a local VAR and UGS, is proving to be a winning combination. And a solution that positions the company well for the future. "One of the reasons we considered replacing MSC.Nastran was that it had become stagnant," Brotherton says. "UGS has a group of motivated software engineers working constantly to add more functionality to Femap with NX Nastran. With software that is this important to your company's mission, it is better to be moving forward than standing still."
01/12/03
Source: http://www.kic-group.com/kicsuz.asp
KIC Suzhou Automotive Products Ltd. is a wholly foreign owned enterprise in China of the KIC Group of Companies. It manufactures and sells trailer axles and other trailer parts.
KIC Suzhou Automotive Products' new headquarters, opened December 1, 2003
With world wide exposure and twenty five years of experience, our components satisfy ISO, DIN and JIS standards. KIC axles have been tested and proven in demanding work environments from Europe to America, Asia to Africa. As the standards for trailer axles move toward increasing international uniformity, KIC provides the leadership, innovation and the standardized top quality products the world demands. KIC's stringent component standards and manufacturing procedures, as well as our relationships with the world's best suppliers, have earned KIC an important position in the international axle market.
KIC China is small and agile enough to provide fast and flexible service, but large enough to offer economies of scale and the international network of support that today's business demands. Providing high level of service and product quality at extremely competitive costs is our principle pursuit, and the promise we give to our customers.
