By Al Makynen

It is not often you travel across the state line to attend your local Rotary Club meeting.  But that is what approximately 65 Rotarians and guests did to visit the Amsoil Center in Superior, Wisconsin.  Upon arrival at the gate, we were waved to our assigned parking area by Scott Davis, Vice President of Operations.  Once inside the 411,000 square foot building, we were escorted (for safety and to herd wandering Rotarians) along the yellow painted pedestrian route to the conference room for a box lunch.  The welcome by President-elect Dean Casperson (also Chair of the Day) briefly interrupted our lunch festivities.  He then introduced Scott Davis who screened a short video of the history of Al Amatuzio and the 1972 founding of Amsoil – the first in synthetics and the least-known company in town.  Amsoil currently has 345 employees and thirteen distribution centers in the U.S. and the world.  And then we were off to tour the facility.

 

It was as if we were in an episode of “How it is Made” as seen on the Science Channel.  We proceeded through a high-tech laboratory, then into an enormous enclosed rail car bay where raw materials are unloaded. Next came rows of huge tanks with miles of piping for all the ingredients for the next batch.  We were then ushered into a site designed to serve one of their newest markets – wind turbines.  With 85 to 130 gallons of oil in each gearbox, Amsoil trains and certifies its technicians on how to climb, inspect and service the installed oil.  No small task at that height!  From there, the product moves to the fully-automated blended, production, filling and packaging line. 

 

One of Al Amatuzio’s early goals was to produce 1,000 boxes of oil a month.  The line we watched accomplished that in less than 42 minutes.  Next was the warehouse and shipping area.  The amount of product sent out from the facility is so massive that it represents 18% of all regional shipments by UPS.  Current production is at one million gallons per day.  All of this is accomplished by a single shift working from 7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.   Amsoil’s success is based upon its people who are retained through attention to their commitment to work/life balance.  As we walked past pallets of product stacked to the ceiling, in what seemed a few minutes but was almost an hour, we were provided with amazing insights into a product, process, and company not well known!  And then literally, we were out the shipping dock door!