22 MAY 2015 ■ IndustrialHeating.com
MTI PROFILE
outhwest Metal Treat ing Corp. (SW MT)
of Fort Wor th, Texas, is celebrating a
milestone birthday this year – 30 years
old, to be exact.
The commercial heat treater was established
in 1985 by the Fussell family, who still owns and
operates the company today. With just a couple of
small Ipsen furnaces, the young business provided
heat-treating services for local machine shops.
To d a y, SWMT – 42 employees strong – serves
the oil & gas, mining, rail and fastener industries.
The MTI member provides a vast array of
services, including age hardening, annealing,
carburizing, cryogenic freezing, f lame hardening,
nitrocarburizing, normalizing, solution annealing,
stress relieving and vacuum heat treating. The
company’s roller-hearth lines are capable of
handling up to 6,000 pounds per hour, and it can
stress relieve parts up to 32 feet long and 12 feet
wide. SWMT also has an induction heat-treating
department that specializes in long bars up 4
inches OD x 24 feet long.
S W M T, which has over 50,000 square feet
of space on 7 acres, also boasts a variety of
metallurgical testing services. These include
Charpy impact testing, chemical analysis,
hardness testing, micro-etching, microhardness
testing and tensile testing. Proving it is much
more than a heat-treat provider, SWMT alsooffers abrasive cleaning services such as sand
blasting, shot blasting and tumble blasting.
The company processes a wide range of
materials for its customers, including but not
limited to: stainless steel, low- and high-carbon
steel, alloy steel, tool steel, aluminum, brass and
copper.
Despites its equipment and scope of services,
however, SWMT says that its ISO 9001:2008
certification is most important to its success as a
business. This certification keeps every employee
accountable for their actions on the job, and its
strict guidelines permits management to oversee
each department and ensure it is operating as
required by company policies and procedures and
customer requirements.
What makes SWMT unique is its status as
a family owned company. This fact gives it the
ability to do business with companies of all sizes,
from home-based shops to large publicly-traded
companies. As such, SWMT has a rather simple
philosophy: “ We have room for everyone, and it
is always our intention to treat others as we would
want to be treated.”
SWMT is continually evolving. The company
recently restructured production employees’ shift
schedules in an effort to operate 24 hours a day,
7 days a week. This gives SWMT a controlled,
f ixed-time work environment while reducing and
minimizing overtime costs. This has also allowed
the business to give its workforce more days off
for rest and relaxation with their families, which
ultimately fosters a happier work environment.
As for the near future, SWMT plans on
turning into a semi-paperless facilit y. It will
utilize barcodes and scanners to upload data
throughout every process. This will allow
SWMT to track everything it needs via
software for real-time information it can share
with customers. The goal is to build processing
information for each part, which will in turn
allow the company to provide parts at a faster
rate. SWMT hopes to eventually have the
ability to supply exact lead-time expectations for
its customers.
Visit http://www.southwestmetaltreating.com for more
information on Southwest Metal Tr eat ing.Southwest Metal Treating Corp.
Exceeding Customer Expectations for 30 Years
MTI
Metal Treating Institute
904-249-0448
http://www.HeatTreat.net