Bouckaert: Products everywhere you look

ENGAGED WORKFORCE, HEALTHY COMPANY: Bouckaert Industrial Textiles President Max Brickle involves employees in the company's decision-making, looking for ideas and feedback from its staff. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY
ENGAGED WORKFORCE, HEALTHY COMPANY: Bouckaert Industrial Textiles President Max Brickle involves employees in the company's decision-making, looking for ideas and feedback from its staff. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY

The first thing you should know about needle-punch felt manufacturer Bouckaert Industrial Textiles: the employer of 58 came through the worldwide economic downturn unscathed.

The second thing is that its products are virtually everywhere, underfoot, overhead and in between. Bouckaert’s felt is in the padding under aircraft carpeting; in automobile cabin filters and thermal insulation; in stamp pads (the ones used by both bureaucrats and children); in braces, casts and other orthopedic products; in rooftop gardens; and in footwear.

The company, overseen by its president, Max Brickle, and the management team at The Brickle Group, which purchased Bouckaert in 2000, sources its wool from all over the world, including in the United States.

The best American wool comes from Texas, according to Brickle. “The drier the climate, the drier the wool,” he said.

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Cutting-edge, needle-punch milling techniques of its wool and wool-synthetic blend felts were one reason Bouckaert did better than tread water during the recession. Another was diversification.

“It was interesting, because we actually grew during the recession,” Brickle said. “Our core businesses softened quite a bit, because we’re B2B, but we picked up two new businesses and entered a few new segments that allowed us to grow our employment base by 10 percent. Sales grew by about 4 percent or 5 percent.”

Brickle said the company has a history – and a policy – of remaining nimble.

“We’ve been around since 1937, and we don’t stay the same,” he said. “We have our core, but we continue to grow and diversify into markets where we can provide a value proposition that other people can’t provide.”

Bouckaert’s latest new venture is felt used in packaging. With increasing numbers of people ordering perishable food over the Internet, the early leader in insulating packaging was styrene. But in an old-made-new twist, wool felts are grabbing market share, and Bouckaert is at the forefront of the change, according to Brickle.

“There are so many bad things about styrene, the product that comprises Styrofoam,” he said. “That product is horrible for landfills. Wool is not only environmentally green, but also it performs much better than styrene. Wool … will perform two to three times better than styrene as an insulator.”

Market pioneering and expansion are key competitive advantages for Bouckaert. Another is in the realm of manufacturing-floor processes, where the extensive recycling of raw material is standard operating procedure and the development of new ideas proceeds at a significant pace. Bouckaert has taken the principles of Kaizen, the continuous-improvement paradigm made famous by Toyota, and made them its own.

Take the generation of new ideas. Last year, the company goal was to come up with 525 viable ideas for improvements. The actual number generated was 690.

“Each employee is responsible for seven of them,” Brickle said. “It’s all about everybody having an opportunity to make a difference. The idea doesn’t necessarily have to improve the bottom line, it can also be the environment. You’d be amazed by some of the ideas that some of these folks came up with. They’re the ones operating the machines, and their ideas save steps, sometimes many steps per day, and those are the things that we continue to look for.”

Bouckaert opens the door to creative innovation with its customers and suppliers as well, according to Brickle.

“We allow customers and suppliers to tour our facility, and we’re looking for ideas to spring forth from them, too,” he said. “It’s really about partnerships and educating one another.”

As for the effect on morale at Bouckaert, encouraging new ideas has been a huge positive. Perhaps the process of idea development is best exemplified at the felt manufacturer’s “demo walks,” in which employees do presentations to management about what parts of the fabrication process stand to be improved.

“We know that sustaining a good employee base is really about engaging them,” Brickle said. “Money is something that people talk about, but what keeps employees coming back is listening to them. They’re not the problem, they’re the solution. When a mistake is made, it’s typically not the employee that made the mistake – it’s the process that had some faults in it.”

Bouckaert anticipates revenue growth of 15-20 percent in 2015, according to Brickle, with expected workforce growth of 5 percent. •

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