Akebono a Staple for More Than 25 Years
Article reprinted with permission from The News Enterprise:
http://www.thenewsenterprise.com/content/akebono-staple-more-25-years
By Anna Taylor
Hardin County’s largest manufacturing employer is celebrating more than 25 years of making brakes this month.
Akebono Brake Corp. did not have a brake manufacturing plant in North America in the 1980s and wanted to have a presence as an American company. The corporation made a proposal to General Motors, the largest automotive manufacturer in the United States, and agreed to a 50/50 joint venture to build a new company known as Ambrake in America.
Martha Layne Collins, Kentucky’s governor from 1983 to 1987, explained to representatives of the company that Kentucky had an excellent workforce that convinced them to build the Ambrake plant on Ring Road in Elizabethtown, according to corporate notes from Jennifer Carlson, Akebono’s corporate marketing communications manager.The plant came to Hardin County in 1987 and the first shipment went out May 2, 1988, to Honda America. “There were two lines, nothing but concrete and an empty building,” said Doug Hemmen, a production employee since 1988.
“You could see all the way back to the shipping dock,” added Cis Ellis, an employee since 1988. Akebono now produces about 800,000 brakes a month.
Doug Morgan, who also started working on the production floor when it was Ambrake, said about 10 or 12 employees have been a part of the plant since the beginning. Morgan, now plant manager, said the plant has grown in employment at least twice its size since its beginning. “We’ve been able to offer employment to a whole lot more people,” Morgan said. “A whole lot more than we ever expected. I was told when I was hired back in 1988 that we were going to be about 400 or 500 people.”
After Akebono purchased Dephi’s portion of Ambrake in 2005, the plant became known as Akebono Elizabethtown Plant. The plant employs close to 1,400 people from Hardin and surrounding counties today and manufactures front and rear drum brakes, disk brakes and brake pads for automobiles made by Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Chrysler and many other brands.
There are three other Akebono plants throughout the country, including Glasgow; Clarksville, Tennessee; and Columbia, South Carolina. Akebono’s North American headquarters also are located in Elizabethtown, next to the production plant.
The Elizabethtown plant has been awarded numerous quality performance awards for its consistency and high standards in manufacturing, which consume trophy cases in an entryway for the facility. “We received one award from Honda for having four bad parts out of one million,” said Myron Henderson, human resources manager.
Rick Games, president of the Elizabethtown-Hardin County Industrial Foundation, said Ambrake paved the way for automotive manufacturing in the county and state. “They were some of the first major suppliers for Toyota in Kentucky,” Games said.
As the fourth largest employer in Hardin County, the company has a tight-knit group of workers who Ellis said “work hard and are paid well.”
“We’ve got a lot of history with a lot of folks here and we’ve become friends,” Morgan said. “We’ve seen each other’s children grow up.”
As for the next 25 years, Morgan said he sees the plant staying at a pretty steady rate of production. “I don’t see any future expansion, but I see us continuing with our current customer base and changing with the new designs and being able to produce those as the automotive industry changes its designs,” Morgan said.
Akebono will hold a celebration today on the facility’s lawn for employees. “There’s good people to work with,” Ellis said. “It’s a good group here.”
Anna Taylor can be reached at 270-505-1747 or ataylor@thenewsenterprise.com