My Peddinghaus Story - Rodgers Metal Craft, Inc. - Fortson, GA

Search Video Gallery

Channel: Customers

Fortson, Georgia may be difficult to locate on a map of the United States but the rural, southern town is where Rodgers Metal Craft, Inc. has managed to become a major player within the structural steel industry. Discover how Rodgers can lay out 88 parts in only 20 minutes utilizing one machine and a newly trained operator.

Our company was founded in 1969.

And it was founded by my father, Curtis Rodgers, and his brother, James Rodgers.

Current tonnage, we would say an average of 125, 150 tons a day.

Our company focuses mainly in general construction. We do a lot of warehouse type buildings, tilt-up buildings. We do schools. We do churches, pretty much a whole gamut.

But our main focus is in larger commercial warehouse type buildings.

I first heard about Peddinghaus through going to trade shows and reading trade magazines and seeing the advertisements, seeing testimony of Peddinghaus and how their quality and their precision were really first class in the industry.

That's why we looked into Peddinghaus to see if we could find equipment that was more durable, that was more efficient, and that was precise.

And our first piece of equipment was a drill line that we purchased. And it has really done a good job for us.

So much so that we continued to buy another high-speed drill line, high-speed plate machine, and a PeddiWriter, and also an Anglemaster.

So we've brought a lot of equipment in from Peddinghaus

And one thing that has been good for us is the new Raptor program that we have. It has let us tie all that equipment together, under one software.

The PeddiWriter has played a critical role in every project that we've done since we put it in. There's not been one project that we've ran that does not go through the PeddiWriter.

Our operator on the machine is 18 years old, no experience in machine operating except the last two months of working this machine. This 18-year-old can produce through that machine what three skilled fabricators can layout in a day.

So what it has done for us is it's made us take the skilled help and be able to produce more with the skilled help by using a person that's not as skilled, that would take five years to get him to the point of being skilled to produce this kind of work.

The PeddiWriter took 20 minutes to layout 88 parts on the machine, near side, far side, top and bottom flange.

We're at a point now that there's no way that we can--there's no way we can do without the machine.

As Raptor grows-- nd that's one thing that's good about Raptor, is it's always expanding, it's always getting better.

The ability to bring parts in from a model into Raptor, you have the cleanest file that you can get. That gives us a product we put to the machine and it runs without any problems.

And I've seen that since we've been using Raptor, is it really has given us a lot better precise part and we produce it.

One thing that we have worked hard at is to try to stay on the cutting edge of technology.

And that's where Peddinghaus has come in for us, is we've been able to take and grow without necessarily growing a lot of employees, but growing smarter by using machinery to help us to fabricate more precisely, quickly.

We are very production-minded company.

And so over the years we've always worked toward that goal of being a better producer given our economic cost of load. And hopefully have some profit there at the end.

But we've been very successful that way.