Few Hands, Many Hours, Schantz's Pipe Organs Defy Assembly-Line Logic

By TIMOTHY AEPPEL
October 27, 2006; Page B1

ORRVILLE, Ohio -- Factories where employees do most of the work by hand aren't supposed to survive in the U.S.

But at Schantz Organ Co., the largest maker of pipe organs in the U.S., there really isn't any other way. It takes a worker an average of 30 to 40 painstaking hours of hand labor to bend specially made sheets of soft metal into the 61 pipes in just one of the shorter "ranks," or rows, of pipes; the seam on each pipe is hand-dabbed with solder. Depending on the size of the instrument, the number of ranks can range from three to 150 or more.

And yet Schantz, founded here in 1873, remains solidly profitable, according to its managers. And business is steady: The backlog is such that an order placed today wouldn't start production until April 2008. From design through construction, it takes Schantz on average four to six months to build an organ; the company completes one roughly every month.

Johnny Adkins, one of the 'voicers' who tunes the pipes in Schantz organs, says it can take hours to get one right. 'There's no book' on how to do it, he says.

The organ maker's secret rests in its highly skilled work force. Nearly half the company's 92 employees were raised on farms, including two former Amish. That background gives them exposure to woodworking and other mechanical skills needed in organ building, not to mention deep community roots, which tend to reduce turnover.

But even then, workers spend years becoming proficient at their jobs, many of which are unique to this tiny industry. It takes four to five years to become a good pipe maker, for instance, while the company's seven "voicers" each spend up to seven years as an apprentice learning how to tune each pipe by hand.

Inside the factory's small "voicing rooms," each voicer works with a machine that is essentially a stripped-down organ, complete with a sliding keyboard that moves along a track, allowing the voicer to slide down a row of newly made pipes, tuning each one in turn. Adjustments are made in various ways: by lifting or lowering a metal sleeve at the top of each pipe to change its length, or by using a hand tool to carve open a bigger hole in the side of a pipe.

Johnny Adkins, a 51-year-old former engineer and professional saxophonist, has been a voicer for 19 years, and he says it is by far the toughest thing he has ever had to learn. "There's no book," says Mr. Adkins, "and there are times I spend hours trying to get just one note right."
In another part of the plant, workers pour molten lead and tin onto a long table to form the distinctive alloy used for pipes shorter than four feet. These smaller pipes have to be highly pliable. Longer pipes need to be stronger and so are cut from tougher sheets of zinc bought from a manufacturer in Germany.

Throughout the factory, workers take responsibility for an entire chunk of production, rather than breaking tasks up into tiny bits, as is done in most modern plants. A single pipe maker, for example, does an entire rank of pipes. One upshot is that Schantz has no need for a quality-control department, or even a quality inspector. Flubs are easily traced.

The company has adopted some new technology. There is a computer-controlled router, for instance, which has freed workers from such repetitive tasks as cutting out the elaborate wooden grillwork that often covers ranks of organ pipes. "This is one place where we've outsourced to a cheaper labor supply," says Timothy Mann, the company's vice president of marketing, pointing toward the machine.

Daniel Meckstroth, an economist at the Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI, an Arlington, Va., policy research group, says it is difficult to replicate overseas a series of complex processes performed by a deeply trained work force, such as those involved in building an organ. "That's one reason why people who say we're going to lose our manufacturing sector are wrong," Mr. Meckstroth says. "We'll lose part of it, but there will always be niches where foreign competition doesn't have an advantage."

Pipe organs are an $80 million a year industry in the U.S., the world's largest market for the instruments. Proximity alone provides an edge when selling something as bulky as a pipe organ, which essentially has to be built twice: once in the factory and then again on site, when it is reassembled by a team sent from the company. Indeed, the biggest room at Schantz's red-brick factory is the cavernous, three-story "assembly room," where each organ is put together and tested before being boxed up and shipped out.

Schantz does face global competition. Pipe organs are made in Britain and elsewhere in Europe. Schantz's biggest competitor is Casavant Frères, of St. Hyacinthe, Quebec.

Schantz calculates its labor costs represent just under 57% of its sales of about $8 million -- a high percentage that reflects the hands-on nature of the work. By contrast, the average for all U.S. manufacturing, according to an annual survey by the U.S. Census Bureau which looks at labor costs relative to total shipments, is 17%. In some highly automated sectors, such as soybean processing, it is as little as 2%.

Hefty labor bills help explain Schantz's high prices. The company's most elaborate instruments sell for up to $2 million. Schantz also does a brisk business in refurbishing old pipe organs. In its shop currently, for example, is a disassembled 1950s organ from the First Methodist Church in Salem, Va., which is being restored and expanded to double its size.

Victor Schantz, great-grandson of the company's founder and the current chief executive, says his customers -- which besides churches also include universities and municipal concert halls -- often come to Orrville to see their instruments being built and are amazed at the company's old-fashioned techniques. Yet it also reassures them, he says, because it shows the art involved.

When customers talk with the workers, they are assured further still by their intimate knowledge, not only of how the instruments are made but also of how they are used. Designing a pipe organ is a delicate task that boils down to figuring out exactly what sound the customer wants from it.

That's one reason three of the top four managers at Schantz are themselves organists (and who all also happen to have Sunday jobs playing at local churches). Oddly enough, the only one who doesn't play is Mr. Schantz himself. He plays guitar.

Mr. Mann, the marketing vice president, says he couldn't imagine doing his job if he didn't understand what a customer meant by saying they want an organ "that could interpret Baroque literature while at the same time interpreting Romantic literature effectively." Mr. Mann, who grew up on a pig farm in Indiana and says he dreamed his whole life of being an organ builder, plays every other Sunday at a Lutheran church.

The company does face serious challenges. New computer technology helps electronic organs create sounds that more closely mimic the rich tones of an actual pipe organ, and the technology keeps improving. For now, managers at Schantz say tradition usually prevails when a big church decides to replace or improve its pipe organ.

Meanwhile, the industry has been grappling with the rise of new-style churches, which often eschew organ music in favor of guitars and other types of music, and the gradual decline of mainline religious denominations, which have long been the industry's bread and butter. This has brought a steady decline in the number of organs sold each year.

One bright spot, says Mr. Mann, is that more of these new churches are "rediscovering" pipe organs. Indeed, a growing number of them are instituting traditional or "classic" services, using hymns and organ music.