THE BLACK CAT TEAM
Office Staff
The wide-reaching office staff supports the production, marketing, and overall operations of Black Cat Wear Parts. On an operational side is the accounting, human resources, continuous improvement, and information technology team, which ensures the office is running smoothly. We have marketing, pricing, and sales teams. Finally, with a specific focus on the product is our design, drafting, quality, and metallurgy lab, who are responsible for researching, designing, and testing everything that leaves our warehouses.
Production Staff
The skilled production team handles everything in the process of creating and maintaining our hardest working wear parts. From the first steps of processing the raw steel sheets and bars into the necessary dimensions, to the important heat treatment, and eventual storage and distribution, this team is responsible for ensuring the equipment that leaves our warehouses is of the finest quality.
Located in the Edmonton head office, the Accounting and Finance department look after financial reporting and management, and recording related transactions.
The Continuous Improvement department identifies and develops strategies that drive operational excellence, increase capacity, and reduce cost. The team develops lean implementation strategies, provides leadership, training, resources, and implementation assistance to focus on achieving world class manufacturing. They conduct assessments of manufacturing operations to provide focused improvement opportunities, increase production efficiencies, eliminate waste, reduce inventory, reduce lead times, increase quality, and overall due date performance.
The Design and Drafting department produces drawings of fabricated edges and proprietary cast parts. Using a variety of CAD tools such as SolidWorks 3D drawing program, laser scanning capabilities, and rapid prototyping, the CAD department also reverse engineers parts, develops graphical illustrations for marketing material, and supports various manufacturing projects and quality initiatives.
Our Health and Safety program strives to provide a safe work place for all employees. We are committed to this by providing safe work procedures and practices.
Human Resources and payroll functions are decentralized as each production facility has a local department for both. Most of the recruiting and daily resource management are handled at the local plant level while corporate human resource administration is located in Edmonton.
Located in the Edmonton head office, the IT department is responsible for the infrastructure and day-to-day operations of the corporate information systems.
The Inside Sales team is the primary contact for our customers, providing quotes and product support, inputting orders, relaying quality concerns, and delivering information. Communication and collaboration with all areas of the organization is essential in order to meet or exceed our customers’ expectations.
Located in the Edmonton head office, the Marketing department organizes and executes the company’s trade show participation as well as the creation and production of marketing materials, including company brochures, promotional items and marketing communications.
We have a comprehensive in house metallurgy facility that analyzes and test materials. The laboratory is fully equipped with advanced tools for testing steels, conducting failure analysis and research and development to support the continuous improvement, production, quality, product, sales, and marketing teams.
Territory Managers are responsible for understanding the ground engaging tool (GET), market size, and establishing distribution networks within their respective regions. They look after: product support, promotion, training, customer service, and accounts receivable while communicating opportunities and challenges to the company from the field. It is important and valuable to have our outside sales staff in the field building relationships with our customers.
The Pricing Department: responds to customer quote requests, updates and maintains internal and external price lists, establishes and implements internal price formulas, measures cost and profitability of products and market segments, and keeps up-to-date on market trends and recommends opportunities.
The Quality department maintains our ISO 9001:2015 certified Quality Management Systems which encompass both the Edmonton, and Selkirk facilities. It systematically promotes continuous improvement of our processes with the goal to reduce non-conforming products, and improve company-wide efficiency.
The second step in the manufacturing process heavily relies on Computer Numerical Controlled milling and drilling machines for countersink, round hole, and bevel cutting. Varying amounts of this equipment are located in all of the manufacturing facilities including Edmonton, Selkirk, and Suzhou.
Generally the first step in production is to process the raw steel sheets or bars into the shapes and dimensions required for the finished product. This includes oxy fuel and plasma cutting tables as well as CNC saw cutting for many functions.
Heat Treatment is a significant operation in all the Black Cat manufacturing plants. Most of the products made by the company are heat treated to increase the hardness of the steel to create tougher parts and increase the products’ wear life.
The final process is shipping, where parts are sorted, arranged, and sent to the customer. We ship daily to allow for quicker lead times.
Our warehouse handles the storage and distribution of all our cast products. We can react very quickly to customer demands since we have products commonly used in the industry in our warehouse.