Lean Starts at the Header
Our first lean program died in a binder in 1994. At Cordell it started with a stopwatch at the nail machines and a fifteen-minute meeting at the start of each shift.
Warren Kessling
President and CEO, Cordell Nail & Wire Company
Cordell has made nails in Danville, Illinois, since 1951, and in Jackson, Tennessee, since 1998. I’ve run it since January 2021. My first job in this business was sweeping scale at a wire mill in Kewanee when I was sixteen. I write here a few times a year, mostly about plants and steel.
About
I grew up in Kewanee, where most of the fathers on my street worked in a foundry, a boiler shop or a valve plant. Mine was a foundry man for thirty-one years. I went to the University of Illinois on night-shift savings and came out an industrial engineer in 1993.
I spent six years as an engineer at a wire and fastener company in Rockford, and in 1999 they gave me a plant of my own in Indiana. I ran operations for a lumber and building-supply distributor for five years, which taught me more about selling nails than anything I did in a plant. Then six years buying steel coil for a building-products maker. I came to Cordell in 2014 to run the plants.
Cordell has about 640 people. We drew our own wire long before I got here and still do. In 2025 our recordable injury rate was 1.2. It was 5.6 the year I arrived.
Career
Dates, plants, headcounts and results are on the career page.
- 2014–nowCordell Nail & Wire CompanyVP Operations, then COO, then President and CEO
- 2008–2014Pellston Building ProductsDirector of Supply Chain, then VP Operations and Supply Chain
- 2003–2008Tamsen Lumber & SupplyDirector of Operations, Central Region
- 1993–2003Ashby Wire ProductsProcess engineer, quality manager, plant manager
- 1985–1993Ostrander Wire Works, and the University of IllinoisSummer hand, maintenance helper, engineering student
Recent writing
Everything I’ve written
We Stopped Guessing on Wire Rod
Rod is half to two-thirds of the cost of a box of nails. Since 2018 we buy to plan, price off a published index and keep a spare mill qualified.
Why It Still Matters Where a Nail Is Made
The case I’d make to a lumber dealer starts with a ruler, and with a container of deck nails my old employer bought in 2005.