JIT Stops Here.

Nineteen years ago, when Michael Day quit his job selling other people's engineering thermoplastic compounds, it was to broker generic compounds on his own. He had a limited range of prime nylon grades toll compounded, stored them in rental space, and worked the phones from his home in Akron, Ohio, with his then infant daughter in his lap. From the start, Day stored a lot of resin--enough to fill most orders the same day.

"Michael didn't intend to become a compounder himself," says John Targett, a partner who joined the business 13 years ago as v.p. of technical marketing. "He just intended to sell compounds from a warehouse." Today, Michael Day Enterprises in Wadsworth, Ohio, is a $40 million business that still espouses the same unorthodox warehousing strategy. It is an ISO 9001-certified compounder with capacity for 40 million lb/year of engineering resin compounds in several hundred catalogued grades. The menu includes an array of nylons, polycarbonate, ABS, PC/ABS, polyesters, and acetals. And it still stores a lot--two-digit millions of pounds of feedstock and finished compounds at any given time. "We spoil our customers. If they call before 2 p.m., we can get an order out the same day," Targett says.

"We've got a couple of machines standing by to do any product gyrations, plus the inventory," says president Michael Day, but he admits that as the company has grown, this gets harder. "How much longer we can ship the same day I don't know. Our challenge is to continue the same level of service with 300 to 400 customers and bigger orders," he says. Large compounders, by contrast, typically take 1-3 weeks for an order they have to make up, he says.

Michael Day Enterprises now has 160 employees, eight extrusion compounding lines (four twin-screw, four single-screw) and a flexible production layout that includes four double-cone vacuum dryers (from Devine, originally of Pittsburgh, and Abbe Co., Little Falls, N.J.). The three larger dryers hold 11,000 lb of plastic each and tumble over and over like two-story-high cement mixers.

Twenty percent of Michael Day Enterprises' business is newer specialty grades, in addition to recycledcontent compounds based on fiber or film, which are pelletized on a new single-screw extrusion processing line from PTi-Processing Technologies, inc., St. Charles, Ill., then compounded to customer specs.

"Companies have to have something different to survive," Targett says about the firm's uncommon strategy. "In a JIT world, somebody can't be. The bank thinks [Michael] is crazy for carrying such a large inventory, but our customers are used to getting what they want."