Thyssenkrupp Nears its One-Year Anniversary in Cherokee
German powerhouse in everything metal, Thyssenkrupp Materials NA, Copper and Brass Sales Division nears its one-year anniversary in Cherokee County.
The 170,000-square-foot building located in Cherokee 75 Corporate Park along Highway 92 has 80 employees who focus on adding value to more than 50,000 different metal products including rod, bar, wire and plate.
Thyssenkrupp moved to Cherokee in December 2015 and is broken down into five divisions including components technologies, industrial solutions, steel, elevator technology and the Cherokee facility portion, material services.
Six million pounds of inventory fill the walls of the massive Cherokee facility along with a multitude of state of the art machines to satisfy any customer.
“Where we add our little piece of the pie is adding value and changing the products shape and form so it’s more usable by our customers,” said Stephen Saunders, regional vice president of Thyssenkrupp. “We will cut it, water-jet cut it, saw it, bend it and form it. What we are focused on is adding value and having a distribution of a full line of metals, being aluminum stainless steel, copper and brass”
Thyssenkrupp has been in the metal making business for about 200 years and traveled to the U.S. 175 years ago. TK continues to grow with about 155,000 employees in 80 plus countries with annual sales of about $48 billion worldwide.
In the Cherokee County Thyssenkrupp facility, material services are the main focus.
“If you needed to repair the deck at your house and you needed a two-by-four, you wouldn’t go to the lumber yard and buy a pickup truck full of lumber,” Daniel Taylor, Thyssenkrupp district manager said. “You would head over to Lowe’s and you would buy a two-by-four and sometimes when you are at Lowe’s, you can say you want to just cut it and they have a saw and they cut you a 24-inch piece because maybe you are just fixing a rail. That is at the very basics of what we do.”
Thyssenkrupp then adds value and services on top of that, according to Taylor.
“We bridge the gap between the mill producers and our customers because customers don’t need a 40,000-pound truckload of aluminum to complete the job,” he said. “They need 2,000 pounds and that’s how we service them.”
Thyssenkrupp is unique in their industry because TK owns their own dedicated fleet of trucks that move inventory across the country, Saunders said.
“Our trucks run 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” he said. “We are able to utilize the material that’s available for sale in Los Angeles and move it over to Miami and maintain that in our trucks, our people while keeping the integrity of the product in place. We have the ability based on our trucking system that we could take an order all the way up to 3 o’clock today in Atlanta and deliver it to a customer in Miami by 9 o’clock tomorrow morning.”
For customers within 150 miles of the Cherokee facility, if an order is placed by lunchtime, Thyssenkrupp can have it shipped to that customer within the same day, according to Saunders.
“For people who need smaller quantities of metal, they can order it online and get it the next day,” he said. “We will do everything we can to meet a customers need.”
Thyssenkrupp is also a “Go Green” facility, eliminating 90 percent of their waste materials by recycling unused metal scraps.
The Cherokee Thyssenkrupp facility is like no other, Saunders said
“This is the jewel of the crown,” he said. “We could not ask for a better location as regards to logistics such as being close to the highways, resources, the Cherokee County Economic Development team and our employees. We researched long and hard for five years before we decided to come here.”
The company is excited to be in Cherokee and their intent is to continue to grow, according to Saunders.
“We are here for the long term,” he said. “The customers are happy we are here and we are happy to be here next to our customers.”
For more information on Thyssenkrupp Materials NA, Copper and Brass Sales Division, visit their website at www.tkmna.com.
