Burke E. Porter remains a leader in the fast-paced automotive test systems manufacturing industry.

Premier Business Partners:

Allied Machine Inc. Kendall Electric VanHaren Electric Inc. Electric Apparatus Co.

Although the North American automobile industry is struggling, Grand Rapids, Mich.-based automotive test systems manufacturer Burke E. Porter Machinery Company stays competitive in the global marketplace.

“For a small, Midwestern, Michigan company to survive, we have to keep our mind open right now,” President David DeBoer explains. “For every cloud, there is a silver lining, and now it comes in the form of global opportunity.”

This company, which counts almost every major automotive manufacturer as its customer, has manufactured internationally since 1998. It operates a 107,000-square-foot facility in Grand Rapids, an 86,000-square-foot facility in Belgium and a 65,000-square-foot plant in China, with service and sales locations in India, Korea, Japan, Germany, Belgium, Brazil and China.

“Our industry is in a very dynamic time right now,” DeBoer asserts. “There have been more changes in the last 18 months than in the past 50 years. The minute you have it figured out, that’s when the recipe will change.

“We have to [stay] on the treadmill and keep running,” he adds. “We must never stop varying our approach.”   

Staying on that treadmill means not just maintaining, but improving Burke E. Porter on a daily basis, DeBoer stresses. The company has two formal global teleconferences each month and an annual global senior management meeting to stay on top of the industry’s rapid changes and diversification, and to pinpoint new technological and business goals.

For example, Burke E. Porter has learned to minimize shipping costs by building machines in the region of the customer. “While this may seem contrary to the traditional thought of manufacturing scale in one location, the machine size and complexity, combined with increasing transportation costs, has made the economic tradeoff more advantageous,” the company says. 

Burke E. Porter has also devised strategies to meet the specific needs of each customer – which can vary widely – without having to eat the cost of an all-encompassing design.

“Sometimes you can overbuild a machine if you don’t communicate properly,” DeBoer says. “Certain foreign companies don’t have the same kind of needs as local North American businesses.

“If you listen to your customers, you can avoid [overbuilding] and unnecessary spending. In reality, the material savings associated with only building what a customer wants is more economical than the benefits of a mass-produced product.

“I like to consider ourselves a value proposition,” DeBoer adds. “[We make] a good machine that is reliable and gives confidence to our customers that it will run.”

24/7 Service
Reliable or not, machines can break down, and Burke E. Porter makes responding to customers as big of a priority as selling to them.    

If there is an equipment problem, the company guarantees it will have a technician in the customer’s facility, anywhere in the world, within 24 hours.

The company also has a 24/7 customer service hotline, so customers who need help can reach a speaking person, not a machine, at any time. “We offer various levels of service from complete preventative maintenance contracts, installation, and start-up supervision, to field service on an as-needed basis,” the company says. Its services include:

• Ongoing training courses
• Roll/brake maintenance
• Alignment maintenance
• Preventive Maintenance
• Dyno maintenance

Taking Risk
“On the manufacturing side, the issue is sometimes being able to take a little bit of risk,” DeBoer says. You have to be in-tune to the market and you may have to sometimes guess before your customer gives you an order. In our industry, that can mean guessing on a half-a-million-dollar machine.   

“It’s a big gamble, but nonetheless, we have to modify our thinking. In this custom machine manufacturing industry you have to move your manufacturing thought processes from waiting until the customer order comes in to the probability of a customer order coming in,” DeBoer says.