It was apparent almost from the beginning that the task before us would be daunting. As mentioned earlier, we discovered that the “List of Customers” we had received as part of the buyout contained many dead-ends; mostly disgruntled customers who had already found other sources for their machinery. We did try to make contact with some of these folks, but our sales force consisted of only one person. Craig did make many trips (usually accompanied by our Operations Manager) to try to build up some sort of listing of possible customers. In the meantime we were busy rebuilding old machinery and also creating a “Bryant” product line. We picked the smaller machines to quote, and seemed to sell a few. But the incoming orders were not encouraging. A lot of the Bryant parts were proving to be difficult to get quotes on (we made very few parts in-house). This was especially true of parts for high speed wheelheads. We initiated a redesign program to allow our vendors to build the parts necessary to be successful. But, being novices in this field, it seemed that every design change brought heartache; some of the completed spindles would only run a few hours before failure. Even worse, some failed in the customers plant. It was beginning to look like this would be a long, expensive road.

On the bright side, we did have a very lucrative Bryant spare parts business. Especially if we sold parts we already had as part of the buyout. But we did have the Bryant drawings and microfilms, so if we didn’t have the actual part, we could (hopefully) have it made locally.

The Bryant mechanics we hired for assembly floor work got a culture shock when they came on board; being only involved with building Bryant product, it took some of them a while to readjust to our methods (especially in the rebuilding of old machines). Building a new machine is NOT the same as rebuilding old machinery (although our Operations Manager insisted it was). There were certain guildlines that had to be followed during teardown and cleaning, to prevent problems from cropping up when it came time to reassemble (we had a detailed, written procedure for this). Some never really got the hang of it, which tended to shift more work on the Project Engineer. I remember one instance, where I had a Bryant mechanic working with me on a teardown, who failed to tag worn parts for repair (a mechanics responsibility). When we started to reassemble the machine, we had a panic situation to get these parts fixed.

It was only a few years after our Bryant purchase that Craig got us all together to announce that the company was discontinuing the 401(k) plan; for most of us this amounted to a 5% pay cut, not to mention our future retirement income. It was said that this was “temporary”, and would be reinstated as soon as possible. But most of us knew better.

Something had to be done to accommodate all the necessary computer equipment needed after our Bryant purchase. At this time engineering was still upstairs looking out over the Black River and the dam / falls. Management decided that we should move downstairs to be closer to the assembly area. But to do that required some removing and replacing of walls and doors. The downstairs office area consisted of Craig’s office, a quoting office, the senior engineers office (Ed Becker), and the girls who greeted visitors and did the necessary paperwork any business is involved in. The first order of business was to build a reception room closer to the main entrance and move the ladies out there; then serious wall removal and replacement would be possible. The company purchased several used work cubicles with flat work surfaces and five foot high walls. These were placed to create eight individual work areas for the engineering staff down stairs. After we were moved down, the upstairs area was revamped to create an office for Craig, looking out over the river; a sales office manned by our roving (sometimes) salesman; a separate purchasing department office; and an Operations Managers office at the top of the stairs.

There was a large room upstairs that had been used as a “catchall”, where various items from past projects had been stored. Most of this stuff was not really very valuable, but because we had the room, it accumulated. But we needed some space to set up a shop office where the MRP computer system would be used to track all necessary items to build any machine. Our acquisition of the Bryant product line required this, and it would lead us into ever more complex procedures down the road. MRP stands for Material Readiness Plan, a computer program, and it is suppose to allow us to plan future parts purchases so we can build machines more efficiently. The MRP manager would be seated in this newly refurbished area (the old “catchall” room); but also in there would be some purchasing and spare parts salespeople. Walls were painted, drop ceilings were installed, air conditioners were placed in the windows for the summer season (as it could be quite a hot area).

Up to this point all engineering BOM’s (Bills of Material) were hand written, and were distributed by engineering by hand. The new MRP system required computer generated BOM’s, with each item having it’s own specific part number (including fasteners and hardware). The BOM’s would still be generated from engineering, but each part needed a dedicated number, which had to be inserted into the MRP database for future use. It didn’t take long to see just what kind of errors could (and did) occur; most anyone could generate a part number, engineering, purchasing, management, and place it in the database. The MRP system that we bought did NOT allow changes or erasures once these numbers were entered, so an inserted wrong number Was Forever. There was no standard procedural guide written for part numbers to be reviewed before being entered into the database. Everyone had their own ideas as to how it should be done………

The Bryant “intellectual property” referred to earlier also included all the electronic drawing files. But the computer drafting system that Bryant used to generate these was different than what we used. This would become quite a nuisance in the future; nobody on board had the training to be able to access these drawings as changes became necessary. And converting these drawings to our version of AutoCad was unworkable. Our only hope was to hire a Bryant engineer who knew how to work with these files. In the end, this is what we did, and that proved to be a workable solution, although not ideal.

We didn’t realize it at the time, but quite a lot of the physical inventory was worthless; spare parts for obsolete machines. Parts that were not marketable at all. But useful for accounting purposes (I.E. if you claim $2 million in spare parts inventory, that can be used as collateral for a loan). The bank really wouldn’t know just how worthless these parts were. The same goes for the wooden patterns we inherited. Mostly worthless, and even worse: they were considered “hazardous material”, and could not be easily disposed of. But the partially built grinders we got turned out to be quite profitable for us. Most of these were already sold, and all we had to do was finish the build, runoff, and ship. With the help of our new Bryant employees, we all received a nice profit sharing check from this. It would be the last one, though.

When we took control of the Bryant brand, little did we know that it had already been tarnished from poor service and support from its previous owners; because of that, many of the “faithful” Bryant customers had already found other sources for their grinding machines. Also, in retrospect, we did not fully advertise that Bryant was still a viable brand. We heard comments many times in the coming months that folks did not realize that Bryant was still alive. But to be perfectly honest, we couldn’t hope to be able to bring this famous line of machines back; we didn’t have the machinery necessary to fabricate many of the “fussy” parts of the grinder. We had a very difficult time getting outside vendors to quote on some of the drawings. The specialty machines that Bryant had used to make these parts had been scrapped. As a result, we spent many engineering hours redesigning these same parts so they could be made by the local machine shops.

At one point, after reviewing some of the Bryant drawings, it was suggested that we do a “cost analysis” of each of the major items. On the surface, it appeared that there were many cases of excessively tolerance parts (I.E. the tighter the tolerance, the costlier the part is to make). But we didn’t have the manpower to do this. In the end, it was agreed that the Bryant machine had a good reputation in the field, and these close tolerances must have had something to do with that reputation.