Starr Manufacturing Meets Demands of New Markets
VIENNA -- Inside the walls of Starr Manufacturing Inc., employees ply the tools of the manufacturing trade as they weld, machine, fit, cut and bend pieces of steel and aluminum that, when assembled, provide the very foundation for the region’s industry.
“Currently we’re manufacturing what we call skids – bases for industrial machines to be mounted on,” says Andreas Foerster, president and CEO of Starr. “A lot of them are going into the compression industry.”
Starr Manufacturing, hit hard by the decline in the coal industry, is carving out new markets as the demand for compressor stations increases, a reflection of exploration for oil and gas in the Marcellus and Utica shale plays in Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio.
“When the recession hit, we had some of the best years in the history of the company here,” Foerster reports. “A lot of that was driven by the coal industry, which was going like gangbusters until 2011.”
As that business declined, Foerster says, his company took the initiative to retool and prepare the shop for other business opportunities.
Since then, the company has transformed its expertise to fit a growing segment of the regional economy – the oil and gas industry. On a freezing afternoon in late February, workers at Starr are busy crafting components and assembling mostly large steel bases designed to support heavy compressors and other industrial machinery.
Much of the work is done for the steel industry, Foerster reports. “Their needs have been pretty constant,” he says, while the power generation business is also a steady customer of Starr.
But the emerging oil and gas industry has helped offset some of the aftermath of the decline of the coal industry, he says. “It’s causing an influx of work from all different areas” associated with oil and gas.
The company, for example, supplies skids to Dearing Compressor & Pump Inc., Boardman, which manufactures large-scale compressors for the oil and gas industry. “Dearing Compressor is growing by leaps and bounds because compressors are needed everywhere,” Foerster says, “and they have a very good product. They need skids – so we make some of them.”
On average Starr Manufacturing is working on anywhere from eight and 12 projects simultaneously for different customers, reports Dennis Yommer, Starr manufacturing manager. The company employs 30, he reports.
Various suppliers ship steel to the plant where it is cut to specifications, Yommer says. On one project, employees are finishing what looks like heavy-metal troughs roughly five feet long formed out of thick plate steel. These components are chained together and used in the coal industry as a type of dredging tool.
Workers operate an automatic plasma-cutting machine that burns through metal to form the needed shape to be fabricated. Then the piece is shaped to its general form through a bending press. “We burn them, bend them, fit them, and straighten them after welding,” Yommer explains. Holes on each side of these components are milled to precision to accommodate chain links that are assembled later in the process. “The links have to be perfect,” he says.
But this day much of the work at the shop is devoted to building the large platform skids for companies such as Dearing, Yommer says. Many of the same processes are used to manufacture these bases, he notes, only on a much larger scale.
Large bases are manufactured in several stages of fitting, welding and cleaning, Yommer says. Thick steel beams that will form the structural skeleton of the base are finished first before they are fitted and welded into place per the customer’s designs and specifications. These bases can reach 20 feet in length and longer.
Others, much smaller, are designed to support small motor mounts, Yommer notes.
“They keep us pretty busy with these bases that come through,” he reports.
Once the frame is fitted, welded and cleaned, workers perform the same tasks as they install the metal-plate flooring, Yommer notes. After the platforms are inspected, a heavy overhead crane is used to load the product onto a flatbed where it is then transported to the company’s paint department in another building. Once the product is painted, a final inspection is performed and the skid is shipped to the customer.
While the customer provides its own schematics for the skids, Starr does manufacture and ship products it designs and fabricates for a general market, Yommer relates. “We have done some meter skids for the gas and oil industry,” he says. The company has finished three systems in the year and a half since it secured this business. “We’ve done all the pipe work, the code work, so we have guys who can fit, weld and clean on code work,” he says.
The code work to which Yommer refers is business primarily with the oil and gas industry, which maintains stringent safety standards, certifications and requirements manufacturers must meet before they can do business with producers or midstream providers, Yommer says.
“It’s a whole new venture for us,” he notes. “These are completely different standards. It’s a whole different animal than just fit/weld projects.”
First, Yommer says, his company must prove that it can perform the work, and in this case, Starr produced a small tank as a sample of its welding and fabricating abilities. “You’ve to do your documentation, prove you can do the work,” Yommer says, “and then they come out and look at you and see if you can be code certified.”
Since Foerster took the helm of Starr in 2007, the company has invested in new machinery and made the necessary upgrades to make it ever more competitive, Yommer reports. “If we don’t move forward in this economy, you’re like a dead duck in the water,” he remarks.
Among the most daunting challenges is finding people qualified to do manufacturing work, he says. “It’s tough. We’re using three hiring services now,” he elaborates, while also consulting with the trade schools, career centers and workforce development agencies in the area.
To help achieve this, organizations such as the Mahoning Valley Manufacturers Coalition are trying to create jobs descriptions that include these credentials as well as getting the word out about the changing nature of manufacturing and industry, says Dale Foerster, director of human resources at Starr and a member of the coalition.
“We’re looking at a number of applications out of trade school right now [to fill positions at Starr],” Foerster says. “We’ve always worked with the trade centers, and private and public trade schools.”
Today, manufacturers are no longer interested in hiring a worker with a single discipline or skill, “We’re now looking for thinkers, people who can understand, who can learn,” Foerster says. “People who can take information and translate it into something they’re supposed to do.”
EDITOR'S NOTE: This story first appeared in MidMarch edition of The Business Journal as part of our year-long focus on Trending: Manufacturing.
Copyright 2014 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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