2020 Year in Review

Mask up MKE initiative

Our Wisconsin Metal Parts family quickly responded to the Covid-19 pandemic and helped Mask Up MKE! We are proud to have partnered with Mike Kryshak from Rebel Converting with this initiative of making and donating face masks to those in need. Once we learned what Mike was doing, we wanted to contribute to his efforts by developing fixtures that would make mask making easier, faster and more consistent for all of the volunteers.

We brought it to our engineers and within just a couple of days, had fixtures that volunteers could use very easily and efficiently to make masks. Through our manufacturing processes of laser cutting, bending, CNC machining and assembly, we produced many fixtures and donated them to the cause to help out volunteers. Many of those volunteers were our Wisconsin Metal Parts and our MS-Just Keep Moving family members. This gave many people stuck at home with MS an opportunity to help and contribute to a good cause.

We distributed the masks we made to people in desperate need of protection from the Coronavirus. People from fire departments, churches, health care workers, hospitals, family members, small businesses, apartment buildings, group homes, and more were recipients of these masks. It felt great to help out our community!

We implemented new guidelines to keep our employees safe and allow us to continue with deliveries to our customers during the Covid pandemic. Employees that could work from home did, and we increased safety and cleaning measures all throughout our shop for those who couldn’t. We were able to keep absences to a minimum and kept serving our customers at a great pace! Despite going through a worldwide pandemic together, we remained calm and committed to see it through so we can come out of it stronger than we went into it.

New Website Look & Virtual Department Tours

Over the course of 2020, we made huge improvements to our website from a customer experience, appearance and search engine optimization perspective. Many new graphics, pages and educational content pieces were added. Virtual department tours have also been added to our website since Covid made it difficult to travel and host visitors. We wanted to make sure people could find what they needed from our website and knew how to move forward to work with us!

Wisconsin Metal Parts Inc had been working on a handful of new process-improvement products to share with other manufacturers.! These products are designed to help reduce risk, cycle time and save the user money. The S-Blade was developed first as a way to make the removal of PVC film off of stainless steel easier and faster! We noticed how much time we spent removing protective film off of foodservice equipment we manufacture and found our solution in these blades. Having this purpose-built tool closed a major gap in our processes.

The Mini-Hopper and BIG FunL were designed to work together as a scrap metal collection system, or separately, depending on the user’s need. The mini-hopper was designed to replace garbage bins in smaller spaces, reducing the risk of unloading scrap metal to almost nothing. The BIG FunL is designed to aid in scrap separation and recycling. We use it to sort out scrap metal from various machines, as well as placing it under our stamping presses for simple and clean collection. This system allows us to sort out metals more effectively to get the most money back for their scrap!

Wisconsin Metal Parts was one of 150 companies in the Milwaukee area recognized by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel as a 2019 Top Workplace! This is our 7th year in a row receiving this award and we are so honored. Top Workplaces are determined based solely on employee feedback and gathered by and administrated by an independent survey company. Companies are measured on qualities such as company leadership, career opportunities, workplace flexibility, compensation, benefits and the impact company policies have on innovation and morale. We realize our people are what make us successful, and we appreciate them, treat them with respect, make their job fun and reward them for their performance. Our high employee retention speaks volumes.

Wisconsin Metal Parts added a new CNC machine to our floor to increase our capacity! The Brother S10001X1 unit is up and running, and has a pallet changer unit on its way! The unit has been running tirelessly since we got it and has helped free up a lot of time for our shop.

Candle Wrap Launch

While working on new products, we wanted to develop something that could send a message of love, hope, or faith as a gift to other people. Taking inspiration from some local initiatives, we were able to launch a line of Candle Wraps to share with our community and beyond!

All in all, Wisconsin Metal Parts had a successful 2020 and we hope to continue exploring new products, equipment and wins in 2021!