Wizards of Work Tools
Go Behind the Curtain to Meet the Team at Caterpillar Wamego
“There’s no place like home!”
That’s Dorothy Gale’s famous line from the end of The Wizard of Oz, when she wakes up back home in her own bed, far from the Emerald City. Home just happens to be Wamego, Kansas — a mere 15 miles down the yellow brick road from Foley Equipment’s Manhattan branch.
But ruby slippers, little dogs and powerful tornadoes aren’t the only things to come out of Wamego. The bucket on your Cat® wheel loader? The blade on your dozer? The snow plow on your motor grader? Chances are, they’re all products of Dorothy’s hometown, too.
Forming an Attachment
Caterpillar has called Wamego home since the early 1990s, when the company acquired a work tool manufacturing plant that had been owned and operated by the Balderson family for generations.
Today, a team of 300-plus Caterpillar employees work on the 10-building, 258,000-square-foot campus, making nearly 50,000 different attachments for use on almost every piece of Cat equipment.
Though the tools and techniques used at the facility have evolved over the years — robotic welding and CNC machining now take center stage — the quality of the people doing the work has remained consistently high.“This facility has always been able to attract really good talent — people who work safely and make quality products,” says Adam Mize, facility manager. “I think what separates our workforce is that Midwestern work ethic. Our employees come in every day wanting to do a good job and make a difference for our customers.”
Mize should know. While finishing his degree at Kansas State, he started working part time at Caterpillar Wamego as an intern. He eventually hired on full time and spent most of a decade at the facility before moving around the United States in other positions. He returned to Wamego as facility manager in 2022.
“I grew up in Kansas. I went to school at K-State. This is the place I want to be and the place my family wants to be,” Mize says. “I’m glad to be back. There really is no place like home.”
The Life of a Bucket
Some of what’s made at Caterpillar Wamego stays close to home — Kansas-made for Kansas customers. But the facility’s geographic location makes it ideal for shipping product across the continent. More than 90% of the attachments made in Wamego go to work somewhere in North America, with the rest distributed worldwide.
And some end up right back where they started — literally.
Consider a bucket: Like all attachments made at Caterpillar Wamego, it begins its life as a piece of steel, which is made from mined iron ore. After it’s cut, fabricated and machined, welded into its final form, painted and inspected, that bucket is shipped out to a Cat dealer like Foley Equipment to be sold or rented to a customer. It could go to work on a construction site, in a landfill or — you guessed it — on a mine site.
“Many of our attachments are used to mine the ore that will go to the steel mill that starts the manufacturing process in the first place,” Mize says. “It’s a full circle.”
Manufacturing Pride
Wherever they’re used, attachments customize Cat machines to the task at hand — enabling Caterpillar customers to do the actual work of building a better world. The team manufacturing them takes a lot of gratification from that fact.
“In our neighborhood, there’s some construction going on right now, and there are Cat buckets on the machines working there,” says Renee Plute, a section manager at Caterpillar Wamego. “There’s a pretty good chance we built them. I get a sense of pride knowing I had a part to play in what’s happening right here at home.”
If you know someone who’s looking for a job that delivers that kind of satisfaction, Caterpillar Wamego is hiring for manufacturing technicians, welders and other positions. Both Mize and Plute say there’s no need to come with any technical experience.
“As long as you’re willing to show up to work, we’ll do the rest,” Plute says. “We’ll train you. People who have tenacity and the drive to do more definitely have the opportunity to build a career here.”
Success Takes Root
Plute is a perfect example. She started out as a material handler on the shop floor, trained to be a welder, took on some team leadership roles and now serves as a section manager over logistics and shipping.“A lot of the people I manage are people I used to work with every day — we’d sweat together and get dirty on the shop floor,” Plute says. “They know I’m going to do a good job for them, and I know they’re going to do a good job for me. There’s a huge sense of fulfillment in that.”
Though she’s a native Kansan like Mize, Plute didn’t intend on a long-term stay in Wamego. But now she’s building both a career at Caterpillar and a family in the community.
“I moved here because it’s a wonderful place, and at work there’s a real sense of family,” she says. “I’m creating my roots here.”
No place like home, indeed.