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BOC Water Hydraulics Celebrates Expansion
SALEM, Ohio -- BOC Water Hydraulics Inc. had considerable demand for the high-pressure water equipment it manufactures and services, says its president, Todd Olson. What it lacked is capacity to meet that demand.
That restraint is now gone as reflected by the Salem company spending $3 million to expand its manufacturing and office space plus another $600,000 on machinery, “to allow us to do our job a little bit better for our customers,” Olson remarked. “This will allow us to crank out more.”
Plant employees and their families, customers and other guests – including founder Don Olson, Todd’s father and a former Hunt Valve Corp. executive and chief engineer – celebrated the expansion Sept. 28 with a ribbon -cutting at the plant.
The additions include 16,000 more square feet of production space, bringing production capacity to 50,000 square feet, said mechanical designer John Burr. The expansion also included a 15,000-square-foot office space addition.
“American manufacturing is not dead. It is alive and well,” he said. “The American manufacturing landscape has a new face and it’s small businesses like this one.” The company has a repair and distribution center in Chicago.
BOC is growing at 15% to 20% annually and has grown consistently over the years, Olson said. Last year it enjoyed $10 million in revenues.
“High-pressure water is used a lot more places than I even realized 10 years ago,” he added.
BOC supplies customers in several industries, including steel and oil and gas. On its list of clients are familiar names such as V&M Star, ArcelorMittal, BP and Exxon Mobil Corp. In fact, the oil-refining segment is one of the company’s growth sectors. “We’re seeing good growth there,” he reported.
Contributing to BOC’s growth in that segment is a water control value used in refining. “Basically three valves rolled into one,” Olson explained, making the unit “a growth engine for us.”
He pointed to a new product developed with the Army Corps of Engineers, a water hydraulic system for a dredge, that has “tremendous growth potential.”
Among the satisfied customers at the celebration was Bill Ferguson, repair buyer at V&M Star. The steel mill in Youngstown has been a customer since 2008, he said.
“We had a lot of Hunt Valve products, Hunt valves, cartridges and so forth, and they do all that repair work for us now,” Ferguson said. “The big thing is the service,” he continued. “They’re always there when we need them.”
Jessica Borza, executive director of the Mahoning Valley Manufacturers Coalition, pointed to the celebration as a sign of the good news that the Mahoning Valley is experiencing in manufacturing – “a manufacturing renaissance,” as she put it.
“We’re really seeing a resurgence in manufacturing growth that’s been unprecedented,” said Borza, emcee of the program. “While the rest of the country was in decline, for example, in 2009 to 2011, we were growing and our members in the manufacturing coalition continue to project strong growth, 33% in fact over the next two to three years,” said Borza.
That growth means increased demand for workers trained in the skilled trades, already experiencing a shortage of such workers.
“We’ve been blessed. We’ve got great people. We don’t need to hire hundreds and hundreds of people so we’ve been able to be selective and find the right people,” Olson said. “But we fear the day may come when everybody’s hiring at the same time and we may not be able to get people, and at the end of the day people are critical to our growth and success.”
Copyright 2012 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.