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Wabash National to consolidate platform manufacturing facilities
By CCJ Staff
Wabash National Corp. announced Tuesday, Nov. 3, that its Transcraft Corp. subsidiary -- a manufacturer of flatbed, drop deck, dump trailers and truck bodies -- has agreed on the terms of a sale of its production facility in Anna, Ill., and will consolidate its operations into its facility in Cadiz, Ky. Platform production at the Anna facility will cease sometime in the first half of 2010, at which time the new production lines at the Cadiz production facility will be fully operational.
"These types of decisions are always difficult to make, especially when it affects associates, but due to the current economic climate, we are faced with the need to further right-size our operating footprint and reduce our cost structure," says Terry Campbell, general manager of Transcraft Corp. "We expect this to be a seamless transition in production due to utilization of excess manufacturing equipment, which should have no impact to our customers."
Transcraft plans to sell the facility to local business owner Rusty Flamm, owner of Rusty’s Home Center, a lumberyard and home center business with locations in Anna and Vienna, Ill. Flamm originally approached Transcraft to purchase an unused portion of property in Anna. After this initial inquiry, Transcraft offered to sell the entire facility to Flamm in conjunction with Transcraft’s plan to consolidate its production facilities. Transcraft will consolidate production of all product lines from two production facilities to one in Cadiz, which also will serve as its corporate headquarters.
"This will complete the consolidation process of the company’s platform business, which began in October 2007 with the closure of the Mt. Sterling, Kentucky plant," says Dick Giromini, president and chief executive officer of Lafayette, Ind.-based Wabash National. "Similar to our Lafayette transformation project completed earlier this year, this consolidation initiative continues the optimization of our production facilities and overhead cost structure that we have been focused on throughout the current economic climate." |
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