OSU applications engineer Rajesh Krishnamurthy lends helping hand to small, local business

Wednesday, December 2, 2015

When disaster struck the Tonkawa Foundry at the start of 2015, it didn’t have to look very far for help.

“I’ve been at the Tonkawa Foundry for over 35 years and after 65 years of being in business, we’ve never had an incident impact us like the one this past January,” Sandy Salisbury Linton, chief financial officer and co-owner of the Tonkawa Foundry, says. “We had an incident where a furnace blew up and that damaged a great portion of our melt capacity – actually all of it - and we couldn’t melt metal.”

Many people were quick to offer help, but Rajesh Krishnamurthy, an applications engineer at Oklahoma State University, was a key player in getting the foundry back on its feet.

“We wanted to make improvements as we rebuilt and Raj was a huge player in helping us redesign the deck to make it safer, more efficient and more modern at a cost that we could afford,” Linton says.

Krishnamurthy came in contact with the Tonkawa Foundry through the Applications Engineering Program (AEP) at OSU, in conjunction with the Oklahoma Manufacturing Alliance, an organization that offers technical assistance and advice to small, local businesses. In addition to his engineering skills and strengths, Krishnamurthy also came from a foundry background, which helped him fit right in from the beginning.

“It’s very rare to find applications engineers or engineers in general with a foundry background, and that was paramount in him helping us,” Linton says. “The more he worked with us, the more value we saw with what he was bringing to the table.”

Krishnamurthy first became involved with the foundry when it started a new layout project.

“Tonkawa had been going through a market change – foundries are shutting down because of offshoring to other countries,” Krishnamurthy explains. “The foundry decided to make its niche a ‘job shop’ and become more flexible with short production runs.”

To align with that strategy, the foundry needed to analyze its current work processes and figure out how to change those over time.

“They were also struggling at the time to meet demands as well as balance cash flow,” Krishnamurthy says. “We made little improvements here and there until they got to the point where they wanted to make a dramatic change - but that was when the incident happened with their furnace.”

Krishnamurthy says the furnace blew up due to a material failure issue. However, it gave the Tonkawa Foundry the opportunity to redo parts of their shop that had been in planning for years, and the furnace was restructured at the tail end of the remodel. With Krishnamurthy’s and OMA’s help, Linton says the foundry was able to become more efficient, productive and profitable, as well as less labor-intensive.

“Without Raj’s help, we’d probably be struggling with the changes in the business climate with foreign competition and economics,” Linton explains. “Foundries are closing daily – in the 1950’s, there were 8,000-9,000 foundries. Now, there are less than 1,800. It’s amazing that we can work with someone who genuinely cares about if we succeed in business and everyday life.”

Krishnamurthy’s partnership with the foundry and with Linton is deeper than a usual business relationship, but that has allowed him to foster that relationship.

“We don’t just design a project, hand over the drawing and portfolio and say, ‘here you go;’ we try our best to work through the implementation of it,” Krishnamurthy says. “When you’re converting an actual design on paper to implementation, there are certain things you have to keep tweaking over time. The continuous involvement over time is what makes the relationship so special.”

Linton says that Krishnamurthy’s aid extends beyond the production line as well to help with clients.

“The great thing about Raj is that he has a finance business background, which I’ve never seen in an engineer,” Linton says. “Usually they’re so creative, they don’t see the real world, but he works with me on the finance side as well to help us stay in business and be competitive.”

At the end of a project, Krishnamurthy says that he will sit down with a client and conduct a final survey to measure the impact of his work. Clients will provide him with tangible metrics such as how many jobs they were able to save or hire, and how their sales are doing. 

“Our payback is not a check in the mail; our payback is: did we ever make an impact?” Krishnamurthy asks. “Were you able to hire more people because of our support for you? That’s what makes a difference.”

His impact on the Tonkawa Foundry over the years has been immeasurable.

“The last time I went to Tonkawa, they were able to bring back their staff numbers to 30 after their furnace incident,” Krishnamurthy says. “We haven’t had a chance to survey this yet, but from past surveys we have gotten close to millions of dollars in sales coming back on, production has improved and Sandy was able to hire three or four new positions. When every foundry is shutting down and moving off shore, she’s still in business and she’s making money.”

While Linton has been able to successfully rebuild and sustain the Tonkawa Foundry, she says she owes her success to Raj and the OMA.

“You can have people like Raj in the position that he’s in that don’t genuinely care about what happens to you,” Linton says. “I think that’s what he, the department that he works for and the people that he works with have really brought to our company that we can never thank them for enough. I’m not sure we would have survived the last six to eight years without the help of the applications engineering program, the OMA and mainly Rajesh.”

Click here to view a feature video of the Tonkawa Foundry transformation by Nathan Chandler from OSU's IFSTA - Fire Protection Publications