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04/01/05
SUTTON - Consider the humble box.
Made of corrugated cardboard or wood, padded with foam or not, the box inevitably dims in comparison to its contents.
But not at Atlas Box & Crating Co., where foam shapes are melded together according to blueprints and wooden crates are constructed with more precision than some furniture.
Atlas employees will today celebrate the company's receipt of a state Workforce Training Grant worth $120,950, money that the privately held company will use to teach its workers to build boxes better and more efficiently.
"Obviously, it will make us much more efficient at what we do," said Arthur M. Mahassel, Atlas president. "I think it gives us a competitive edge."
Founded in 1988, Atlas Box makes customized cardboard boxes and wooden crates for customers who want to protect products during shipment. Some Atlas crates as big as a refrigerator go to EMC Corp. of Hopkinton for the shipment of computer equipment. Other boxes go to customers such as Waters Corp. of Milford and Bose Corp. of Framingham.
Atlas workers produce the boxes in a cavernous, 120,000-square-foot facility that includes a 50,000-square-foot addition built last year. Atlas takes in stacks of brown corrugated cardboard and cuts it to size, tamping down fold lines and gluing and stapling the cardboard to create boxes.
Blocks of foam - both polyurethane for cushioning and polyethylene for shock absorption - arrive in towering blocks about 10 feet high. Workers slice them into slabs, then cut them to desired shapes.
Some of the foam goes to workers who, following engineering drawings, use glue or heat guns to meld pieces together. The resulting forms can be secured in boxes or crates to cradle finished products.
Those crates come together through a combination of computers and elbow grease. Some workers send sheets of plywood through computerized saws and routers, while others with nail guns assemble the cut parts into tightly construct ed crates.
The quietest part of the business is the warehouse, where Atlas has nearly 4,000 storage spaces. Outside, loading docks allow trucks to cart away finished boxes and a small lumber yard holds wood. Some of Atlas' leftover wood gets ground into sawdust for area farms, and local scavengers retrieve other leftover pieces from outside the building.
The addition that Atlas built last year cost about $2.5 million, including construction costs and equipment. That investment, plus the work-force training that will be partly covered by the state grant, represent an effort to improve manufacturing, company officials said.
Under the rules of the grant, Atlas must match at least 50 percent of the state grant, or about $60,500. The company was one of 75 to be awarded grants totaling $7.5 million in March. The purpose of the grants is to promote Massachusetts workers, companies and jobs.
For Atlas, the grant "is going to help them to become more competitive as a company," said Linnea Walsh, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Workforce Development.
Leonard S. McAleer, Atlas vice president of sales and marketing, said the company wants to implement "lean manufacturing," an effort to eliminate waste in the manufacturing process but still meet high production goals. Few in the packaging industry are running lean, he said.
"We're in a low-tech industry, but we're servicing high-tech companies, and it's something they're practicing," Mr. McAleer said.
Atlas has a history of aggressively pursuing valuable employees, customers, markets and investments, even when the economy has not been robust, said Charles R. Valade, president and chief executive of Worcester-based Commonwealth National Bank, which has helped Atlas finance expansion.
"When you hear all the bad things about the economy, these guys are running contrary," Mr. Valade said. "They're running contrary because they invested money when things were soft."
"What we do is build our facilities to be self-sufficient so we can ask our own questions and answer our own questions," Mr. McAleer said.
In recent years, Atlas has opened a facility in North Carolina that employs about eight people, a manufacturing and distribution center in Cork, Ireland, that employs about 30 people, and a 15,000-square-foot manufacturing plant in Suzhou, China, with about eight workers.
The company has already started running training classes for workers in Sutton under the work-force training grant. Initial classes focused on auditing, and lean manufacturing sessions start next month. New employees at Atlas already go through 90 days of training when they start, but Mr. Mahassel said he wants the additional training to boost productivity even more.
"The grant will key in on those areas so we can fine tune," he said.
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Atlas Box’s packaging can be as sophisticated as some of the products that are shipped in it. Custom-designed packages of corrugated cardboard, wood, foam padding and barrier wrap to keep the contents free from humidity are all part of the mix. . . View Article
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