Turbocharger maker transitions to new facility in Palmetto Commerce Park

Charleston Post and Courier
Katy Stech
October 22, 2010

For Cummins Turbo Technologies, two Charleston area manufacturing plants were better than one before the automotive industry downturn.

Nearly all of the automotive supplier’s 458 local employees now will report to their existing 207,000-square-foot facility in Palmetto Commerce Park, where the Indiana-based company assembles turbochargers for diesel- powered trucks. By the end of the year, company officials will have finished moving out of their longtime Leeds Avenue facility in North Charleston.

Top company executives, local business leaders and hundreds of Cummins employees celebrated the move Thursday at an event held outside the four-year-old facility. Collectively, they watched plant manager Zipul Tandon hand a pair of overstated gold scissors to Anant Talaulicar, chairman of Cummins India Ltd., who cut a red ribbon that drooped between two pillars at the plant’s entrance.

Though the event marked a consolidation, company executives remained upbeat. Business has livened to where workers are producing a healthy 10,000 turbochargers a week — more than four times the number needed during the slowest economic times.

Cummins Turbo Technologies president Jim Lyons pointed to the more efficient manufacturing processes inside the recently expanded building, calling it a conversion of lemons to lemonade.

“You get to examine every one of your processes … and you’re given an opportunity to improve them,” he said of the moving process.

Inside the facility, workers assemble turbochargers, a circular piece that uses power from the hot, high-energy exhaust air to compress fresh air and push it into a truck’s engine.

The manufacturing process requires more than 70 parts from suppliers in places like Brazil, Canada, China and India. Local workers also make two components themselves: both circle-shaped air spinners that look like pinwheels.

Assembled turbochargers are shipped off to other automotive manufacturers in upstate New York, North Carolina, Indiana, Maryland, Mississippi and, of course, Detroit.

Four years ago, Cummins workers began assembling the parts at a new 110,000-square-foot facility in Palmetto Commerce Park, which officials opened to comply with ever-tightening diesel-fuel engine emissions standards.

Then the recession hit.

Orders plummeted to the point that Charleston plants needed to turn out only 2,200 turbochargers a week.

Managers cut the workweek down to three days, then struggled to find enough work for the remaining shifts, Lyons said.

Under pressure to cut overhead, company executives agreed to close the longtime Leeds Avenue plant and move the entire operation to the newer Palmetto Commerce Park site, also in North Charleston. It expanded the manufacturing space by 85,000 feet.

Clapping alongside employees at the event was retired Cummins plant manager Bernard Murphy.

In 1989, Cummins executives told Murphy to find a spot somewhere in the United States to build another turbocharger plant.

He eventually picked Charleston, counting on available space at an existing company facility and the state’s generous offer to train future workers for free.

What he didn’t count on was a massive hurricane.

Hurricane Hugo hit after Murphy moved to the Lowcountry to help set up the local operation. The storm caused more than $1 million worth of damage to the site.

“It frightened me to death, being an Englishman,” Murphy said with a thick Yorkshire accent that hasn’t faded. “We wondered what he had gotten ourselves into.”

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