Moving Metal

and Space Administration. The systems approach tackled problems from a holistic and interdisciplinary perspective in which multiple components were not just analyzed individu- ally, but also viewed in terms of how they worked together as complex, interconnected systems. The more he studied systems engineering, the more Gimbel was convinced that it could be applied to Reliance’s operations. The key to pro- ductivity, he concluded, lay in building the company into an efficient, integrated system rather than maintaining a collection of single warehouses containing individual, inde- pendently operated machines. Incorporating the systems approach into his management philosophy, Gimbel pushed Reliance to the technological forefront of the industry. It was another insight that triggered the effort, however. One day while making his rounds, Gimbel looked down the length of the warehouse. “I could see stock piled often no more than one foot above the deck,” he remembered, “and twenty feet above it, up to the craneway, a big, unused cube of space that produced nothing.” He then recalled a recent excursion in which he had driven into an automated parking garage and watched as his car was robotically whisked away and deposited in a rack of “pigeonhole” storage spaces. Gimbel realized that a similar type of storage and retrieval system might get the stock up off the floor, into the twenty feet of unused cube space, and solve most of the warehous- ing problems. The only catch was that no one was building that kind of technology for the metals service center industry. Unde- terred, Gimbel began experimenting with different ways in which the unused cube might be transformed into usable warehouse space. One idea involved storing metal sheet and bar stock on trays in roller racks and using muscle power to

A good example of “unused cube space” during the early 1960s. Stacks of aluminum sheet cover the floor at the Vernon flagship plant while an overhead crane swings in the empty air space above.

pull them out and onto supports in the aisles, then using a crane to lift the stock to work areas. He was on the right track, but the concept needed further refinement. While grapplingwith the unused cube problem, Gimbel— an inveterate trade magazine reader—saw an advertisement promoting a small, semi-automatic rack storage system built by Triax Company of Cleveland, Ohio. He was intrigued. Triax had never built a rack system of the size Reliance would require, but Gimbel believed that it could be done. “We were sure that their design was basically sound and that the system could be built to any size,” Gimbel said. He flew to Cleveland and met with Triax President Ray Armington. Armington was at first reluctant to scale up the system for Reliance, but Gimbel persuaded him to try it on a “must-work-or-no-pay” basis. It was going to be expensive. The price tag was $250,000, and Gimbel knew that would be a tough sell to Reliance’s Board of Directors.

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