3M's Hutchinson plant provides tape to the worldDEE DePASSStar Tribune of MinneapolisHUTCHINSON, Minn. - Every 12 seconds, one of 3M's behemoth molding machines hisses, opens its steel jaws and spits out 12 Scotch tape dispensers at the company's tape plant in Hutchinson, the largest 3M plant on the planet and the birthplace of 5,600 varieties of 500 sticky products.

The plant, which houses 1,500 workers in 1.2 million square feet, has been manufacturing its made-in-Minnesota "jumbos" - sofa-sized rolls of Scotch tape - for 60 years, and it's not about to stop.

In an era in which more and more manufacturing is being outsourced to nations such as China and India, the Hutchinson plant is a notable exception. It makes 1 percent of the 55,000 products 3M makes around the globe.
Plant manager Dan Carlson beams as he strides next to the humming sprawl of automated machines.

"All the Scotch tape for the world is made right here. That's exciting," Carlson said.

The plant once produced only miles of clear "cellophane tape" in red plaid tins for consumers. Now it also makes black electrical tape, purple and green Post-it "flags," adhesive computer-chip trays, medical tape, duct tape and the increasingly popular blue painter's tape. From small, historic Hutchinson, the products go out to more than 200 countries.

3M has a "strong commitment to the Hutchinson plant. It has obviously demonstrated that it's viable," company spokeswoman Jackie Berry said.

The factory contributes mightily to 3M's consumer and office division, where sales grew by $125 million to $3 billion last year. 3M doesn't release product sales figures anymore. But 25 years ago, 3M estimated that its Scotch tape sales alone were $700 million a year - more than $1.6 billion in today's dollars.
The plant also contributes to each of 3M's six other business segments, including industrial and health care. 3M executives say the plant has stayed competitive through regular investments and changes that have reduced its environmental emissions.

Twenty-five workers at the plant were laid off in 2001, the year then-CEO W. James McNerney Jr. cut 5,000 jobs companywide. But the plant has lost only 100 positions altogether since 2000, and Carlson said he wants to hold steady at 1,500 jobs in the Hutchinson facility.

Maplewood-based 3M has invested $50 million to make sure the plant stays competitive and lean.

"Lean is about increasing the speed to customers, taking out unnecessary steps and improving our processes," Carlson said. "We did that with the blue painter's tape that we began making here about eight years ago."

The easy-to-peel tape that leaves a smooth paint edge has became a blockbuster hit, thanks in part to America's home improvement craze. Demand has swelled so much that the company spent $50 million last year converting a parking lot and packaging supply warehouse into the "Scotch Blue Tape Center of Excellence." The addition, which connected the Hutchinson plant's North and South buildings, created 70 jobs, Berry said.

On a recent Friday morning a forklift operator zoomed a "jumbo" of blue tape into the cavernous new center, where machines pulled, sliced and re-rolled the massive blue beast into 2,000 smaller rolls. Soon vacuum suckers stacked the reels, plopped them onto scuttling conveyor belts and sent them on to shrink-wrapping and packaging stations, as Annette Plowman looked on.

Plowman, the production team leader, has been with 3M for 24 years. Last year she, Carlson and other managers got smart and took glue coaters and tape slitters from different ends of the Hutchinson plant and moved them into the new factory addition. They then moved those production machines closer to packing equipment and robotic transporters, which reduced product movement within the plant and cut the production cycle time by three days.

"We used to have lots of big rolls of stuff waiting to be finished, and now we realized we can do all this under one roof," spokeswoman Berry said. "Because of that, we reduced the semifinished inventory by 50 percent."
That wasn't all.

"By pulling it all together they could see all the packaging supplies they had sitting around, and realized they had more than they needed. They did a Six Sigma analysis and then reduced the packaging supplies by 50 percent," Berry said. "That saved money and floor space for production" - and hiring.

The hiring came just in time.

This month some blue-tape workers who were sent to help peers on the Scotch tape line during the crazy Christmas season were returned to Plowman. Now they are ready to attack the painting tape's "big spring rush," Plowman explained.
Blue tape sales "go up in February and stay up all the way through August," she said.
Honking forklifts, zooming worker bikes and beeping robots zip along the concrete floors that link the addition to the rest of the plant, where other signs of innovation are evident.

In the rear of the plant, tape spools sail overhead through clear vacuum tubes toward the transparent tape conversion station, where a 3-foot-wide "jumbo" unrolls at warp speed - routed through a slitter into ribbons and onto small spools that are then lined up quickly by 25-year veteran Sherri Arneson. She snatches the spools and scoots them into boxes in neat rows of 30.

"These will go into contour dispensers," said Arneson, working quickly.
The contour dispensers are the result of what was supposed to be a temporary marketing campaign that took on a life of its own. Curved and colorful, the hot pink, chartreuse, mango and lilac-colored contoured tape dispensers were introduced last year just to celebrate Scotch tape's 75th anniversary. But they've become a permanent offering.
The reason?

"Teens just love them!" Carlson said. The product, now made by a supplier, soon will become the 5,601st product to be made at Hutchinson.

"If customer demand continues to take off, maybe we'll have to build a new Center for Contour Excellence," Carlson said with a chuckle. "It's pretty wild."