Building a Better Brass Foundry
For AFS Corporate Member Mueller Water Products, which produces valves and water infrastructure products, along with hydrants and natural gas infrastructure products, the timing for building a new brass foundry in Decatur, Illinois, couldn’t have been better.
Construction on their new state-of-the-art brass foundry—set on a 30-acre site— began in 2019 but was delayed more than a year due to COVID. It proved to be a stroke of luck: Before the plant first came online in 2023, Congress passed The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), which provided $55 billion in funding for water and wastewater infrastructure—the largest federal investment in water ever made. This investment, along with the accompanying Build America, Buy America Act that requires all iron, steel, manufactured products, and construction materials used in federally financed projects to be produced in the U.S., meant growing demand for the Atlanta-based company. A boost in production capacity was needed.
Decision to Build a New Foundry
The decision to build instead of refurbishing their existing 100-plus-year-old facility in Decatur, came down to practicality. The legacy plant, located just a mile down the road from the new facility, had served as several different types of foundries over the years, and the material flow was inefficient.
“Even if you could have refurbished the equipment, it was still poorly laid out and didn’t optimize single-piece flow like our modern foundry,” said Paul McAndrew, president, COO, and CEO-elect of Mueller Water Products.
“We had to pick things up and put them down numerous times throughout the production cycle,” said Graham Hines, vice president of Advanced Engineering and Manufacturing, who served as plant manager at the Decatur plant from 2020 to 2024 and worked with the construction team. “The new plant allows us to save on material handling and process material far more efficiently than we could at the legacy foundry.”
In addition, spare parts for some of the older equipment were becoming difficult to obtain, and capacity needed to expand to meet growing demand in the water-infrastructure sector.
“The new facility is capable of doubling our pouring capacity,” Hines said.
“Additional capacity also means we can flex a lot more when we need to do preventative maintenance on our equipment,” McAndrew noted. Currently, the foundry runs first and third shifts in Decatur, while a second shift is staffed by a 25-person maintenance team. In total, the new plant employs approximately 250 people, 200 of whom are production workers. The entire Decatur campus, which includes the new foundry, a machine shop, and offices, is home to more than 700-employees.
The Power of Clean and Modern
When Riley Kerestes interviewed for the plant manager position in Decatur in February of 2024, he knew it was the right opportunity once he saw the new foundry.
“It sold me on the opportunity,” Kerestes said. “It’s clean, it’s modern, it’s bright. You could see that there was a lot of intentional effort put into the organization, including automation and lighting, and there was an opportunity to build the culture from the ground up in the new manufacturing facility.”
“When building the foundry, we put a lot of thought into the employee spaces,” Hines affirmed. Amenities such as a convenience-store-style breakroom and new locker and shower areas were far nicer than those at the legacy foundry.
But that was just the beginning: The new foundry delivers improvements in safety and efficiency by employing a new lead-free brass alloy, four automated green-sand molding lines, a high-efficiency induction melt furnace, automated pouring, automated saws, advanced dust collection, and the latest IoT software and systems.
Since the plant first came online, production has steadily increased. Meanwhile, the legacy facility was closed in January 2025. Roughly half the employees of that facility now work at the new plant while the remainder moved to other Mueller Decatur-area facilities.
By all accounts, the new foundry is meeting expectations. “We’ve been running at our target production levels for about six to nine months now,” said Kerestes. More importantly, the foundry still has much more capacity.
“I feel like Mueller was ahead of the curve in ensuring we had additional capacity in the market to serve municipalities and the infrastructure work that needs to take place in the U.S., particularly around lead service line replacement,” McAndrew said. Anticipating those needs, their investment to construct the plant was one of the largest in the company’s 168-year history.
They’re not alone in both sizing up and seizing the opportunity. Two of their competitors in the water infrastructure market—AFS Corporate Members A.Y. McDonald and Ford Meter Box Company—have also begun construction on greenfield brass foundries. Mueller is also updating its two iron foundries in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Albertville, Alabama. For fiscal year 2025, the company expects to spend $45 million to $50 million on foundries, capacity expansion, manufacturing efficiency, and maintenance.
McAndrew said vertical integration helps the company control key aspects of its supply chain (such as the cost and quality of manufacturing key components). It also allows for shorter lead times and greater operational flexibility. According to Hines, the added capacity from the new plant has already had a positive impact.
“We’ve been able to bolster stocking positions within our distribution centers and reduce our lead time to customers, which we anticipate will lead to more growth in the future,” he said.
Moving to a Lead-Free Alloy
One of the most significant changes in the new foundry was a shift to a completely lead-free operation.
“By eliminating processing of leaded brass material, we eliminated all the hazardous materials we were previously generating,” Hines said. This removed lead-exposure risks for employees, as well as the need for precautions such as blood testing and mandatory showers to prevent contamination. Additionally, by moving to a silicon-based brass material, Mueller eliminated its reliance on bismuth, which is a by-product of lead mining and almost completely controlled by overseas sources.
However, learning how the new material melts, pours, and affects tooling takes time. Process improvements related to the new alloy and new equipment took more than a year to mature, which was in line with expectations.
Because the new alloy pours differently, the company now uses automated CNC cutoff saws rather than band saws, which simplified casting cleaning. After pouring, the casting tree (a way to group many small castings onto one gating/feeding system to maximize output from a single mold) moves to a CNC-controlled cutoff saw that de-gates the parts.
Automated Equipment Improves Safety
The cutoff saw, like many other aspects of the foundry’s operations, is automated to reduce risk of operator injury. Once the operator loads the casting tree, the machine rotates it and performs the cutting inside an enclosed chamber. The finished parts are then deposited onto a conveyor for sorting.
“It is much more efficient than what we were using at the legacy foundry with cut-off saws,” Hines said.
Similarly, automated pouring of molten metal removes risks associated with splashes or melt-related hazards. The operator remains safely away from heat and fumes while the robot pours.
“We’re very proud of the fact that we’ve had zero recordable injuries from the molding and pouring processes due to the intentional investment in automation,” Kerestes said.
New Equipment Improves Capacity and Efficiency
A high-efficiency induction furnace has reduced Mueller’s energy consumption and improved melting efficiency. Because product specifications for water-contact components are extremely exacting, the metal’s chemistry and temperature are continually monitored.
“The second most critical input of a foundry is making sure you’re controlling your sand parameters,” Hines said. “Having a brand-new sand system with all of those controls built in has made us much more efficient and our processes much more repeatable.
“New DISA molding machines have much tighter tolerances, so we don’t get as much shift or misalignment between the two mold halves,” Hines continued. “All of those things helped us increase our capacity compared to the legacy foundry.”
Data-Driven Maintenance and Performance
To monitor production, Mueller uses two software systems. Xalt measures key performance indicators—such as scrap rates, overall equipment effectiveness (aka OEE), and downtime—in real time. Another program, Tractian, is condition-monitoring software that predicts equipment failures using sensors that measure vibration, temperature, runtime, and RPM. Tractian’s AI maps signal patterns to specific failure modes (e.g., bearing wear, misalignment, unbalance) and sends alerts to managers.
According to Kerestes, maintaining foundry equipment is challenging due to dust, shot, and sand. Predictive maintenance is a game changer because it allows work to be performed on second shift or weekends rather than during production time.
“Tractian has absolutely been worth the investment,” Kerestes said. “Being able to identify potential issues and schedule them to be fixed before a critical failure has saved us a tremendous amount of downtime.”
The Decatur plant is the first Mueller location using Tractian. Expansion will be considered once the trial concludes.
AI-based monitoring also reduces the need to hire highly skilled specialists. “Finding skilled people to come in and monitor and measure that kind of process is tough in the current market,” Kerestes said.
Web-Based Standard Work System
Another point of difference at the Mueller Decatur foundry is the web-based standard work system used at every workstation. Dozuki, an AI-powered platform, digitizes knowledge, delivers contextual guidance, and scales workforce training. Employees log in and can watch embedded videos for the job they are performing. They are also encouraged to provide feedback through the tablet.
“If an employee sees something wrong with the standard work or has an idea to make something better, all they need to do is click on a text box within that step in the standard work, and it provides live feedback to engineering and operations so that we can take action on employees’ suggestions,” Kerestes said.
For employees new to the industry, Kerestes believes it is an important tool for improving safety and quality. “Over the course of a year, we had a 50% reduction in our recordable injuries on the Decatur campus and a 50% reduction in our scrap rate from Year 1 to Year 2.”
The Foundry as a Recruitment and Retention Tool
Kerestes believes the new foundry is an effective recruiting tool, especially for people with prior foundry experience. “It has helped us go out and recruit some of the best foundry talent that we can find,” he said. Tools such as Dozuki have also helped with retention in an industry where retaining employees is very difficult.
“People sometimes almost look down on foundries or think of them as a necessary evil, but that’s not the mindset at Mueller,” Kerestes said. “Mueller sees foundries as foundational to its core business. And with this investment—and future investments in Albertville and Chattanooga—they stay committed to that.”
As a leading manufacturer of products used in water infrastructure, Mueller’s commitment ensures they have the capacity to meet what municipalities require over the years to come.