Duro Industries

Duro Industries, Inc. History and challenges   Duro Industries, Inc. is a producer of bricks and paver blocks. They has been in business for 75 years and had established a solid regional reputation for quality and reliability in the manufacturing and delivery of its products. They are facing various challenges: 1. changes in the industry; 2. increase of competition from other regional companies; 3. increase competition from foreign firms; 4. changes in the way companies manages their production processes. The primary concern   Although Brick companies (Duro included) had traditionally relied on manual labor to move brick through the manufacturing process. They also employed hundreds of workers to help move bricks and paver blocks through the various manufacturing steps.  Now some foreign competitors, most notably Australian firms, were using vector drives to provide the precision motion control necessary to automatically move different quantities and configuration through the process accurately and repeatedly with less manual labor than before. This produced cost, savings and faster production times.  Duro’s concerns turns around that if domestic firms adopted the same technology, the resulting cost saving could give them a competitive advantage in price and delivery times over them. The offer to Rochelle  The CEO of Duro had notified Rochelle that her plant (Memphis) would be expected to evaluate the feasibility of undertaking this new approach to moving product through the process. If successful, Rochelle would head up the implementation team at the other Duro facilities in the United States. Rochelle at Duro’s  Rochelle had started work at the Duro’s company’s Memphis plant right out of college, and she had worked her way up to assistant plant manager in charge of production during her 22 years with the company. She knew her report could result in significant changes at Duro Industries.  Recently she has an offer from the CEO, but she was concerned that the...