Ramcel Partners with Customers to Deliver Solutions
There’s a lot on the menu at Ramcel Precision Stamping and Manufacturing. But President and CEO Jason Palmi can easily summarize his company’s catalogue of products and services.
“We solve problems,” Jason said. “Our philosophy from the beginning has always been to make Ramcel an extension of our customers’ teams, whether it be quality, engineering, procurement, or whatever is needed. We strive to find the best ways to understand our customer’s issues and deliver an innovative and cost-effective solution.”
Located just north of Chicago in Northbrook, IL, Ramcel has been delivering solutions for more than 70 years. In addition to stamping, Ramcel offers its customers many value-added services including assembly, robotic welding and part finishing, in addition to engineering and machining services.
“Because stamping is somewhat of a commodity, it can be difficult to differentiate yourself,” said Ramcel Executive Vice President and COO Casey Kreiger. “But what makes us different at Ramcel is our level of partnering on all fronts. From the design phase to end result, we get involved and make sure we’re making the best product for our customers.”
Rocco Palmi, Jason Palmi and Casey Kreiger head up a group that purchased Ramcel from its founders in 2016. With much of the long term management still involved in the operations, the new owners still consider it a family business.
“There was a familial connection when we purchased the business, and we wanted to make sure that the people who made Ramcel a success over the years stayed,” said Rocco Palmi, Chairman of Ramcel. “Our goal was to keep in place the great practices that Ramcel had established along with our strong culture and customer-focused philosophy.”
Today, Ramcel sports a very diverse customer base, featuring a wide range of stamping products and a wide range of applications. And while the company specializes in tight tolerance, high volume parts, General Manager Scott Bedow said there is no application the engineers at Ramcel won’t consider.
“There’s no project that we’re turning away and not looking at,” Bedow said. “We’ll take an honest look and see if it’s something we can add value to and try to come up with the best solution for.”
The capabilities at Ramcel expanded even greater with the recent installation of a Nidec Minster GS2-630 servo press with a fully integrated Nidec CHS coil line.
Featuring precision kinematics, a Desch Planetary Gearbox, and a Siemens full energy management system, the Minster GS2 is one of the most technologically advanced servo presses on the market.
“We try to give customers a full turnkey solution, which is our business model as well,” Palmi said. “If you think about the variety of presses we have, the variety of metals we stamp, and the variety of customers we have, we intentionally put ourselves in that jack-of-all-trades category so we can deliver a complete solution.
“We knew that if we wanted to continue to grow with our customers, that investing in a big bed, high tonnage servo process was the way to open more doors,” he continued. “So it’s an investment in the future and expanding our breadth of capabilities across stamping and post stamping operations.”
“Most people go with a servo press to get better throughput, which we’ve certainly seen,” Bedow said. “But we’re playing with new methodologies, and building dies that are able to form and cut metals in ways that you couldn’t do with conventional presses. So we’re opening up those capabilities and offering more solutions to customers.”
With Minster and CHS both part of the Nidec Press & Automation (NP&A) group of companies, Ramcel was able to work with a single source in acquiring and installing the new press line.
“That’s a huge selling point,” Kreiger said. “It gives you that sleep-at-night factor. When you have a team that’s working together and clicking on all fronts from a press, feed line, and a management perspective with a single point of contact, it allows you to meet time-lines and deliverables.”
“What we did to get the press line up and running as fast as we did was a Herculean effort and only accomplished because it was a one-stop shop, and not because there was finger pointing across different operating entities,” Palmi added. “It was all seamless, and it was all fluid.”
The feed line and the press are integrated though NP&A’s proprietary Global Production Control (GPC), which allows Ramcel to operate the entire system from a single control pedestal.
“Overall, the team really sees an improvement and they like the line,” Bedow said. “It’s a much cleaner, friendlier system and easier to use.”
The Minster GS2 servo press joins more than 20 other Minster presses at Ramcel.
“There are very few press manufacturers that I’ll personally sign my name on to say they’re going to be the best presses and Minster is one of those,” said Bedow, who has worked in the stamping industry since he was a teenager. “That was one of the big selling points when I interviewed here and walked through, was that I saw nothing but Minsters. That tells me that the company is thinking about its longevity. They’re not buying cheap throwaway presses. They bought the best presses they could over the years. And it continues now with the new servo.”
“I was told by Rocco right when I stepped in the door, ‘If you take care of a Minster press, it will last forever,'” Kreiger added.
Looking toward the future, Jason said Ramcel is considering the addition of a mid-sized servo press to further expand capabilities.
“That would allow us to leverage some of those capabilities in a different sized press,” he said. “We can continue growing with our customers and solving problems.”
