Thursday, March 08, 2012HERMITAGE, Pa. -- “I can’t have enough people.” That’s the lament of Jerry Taafe, general manager of Extreme Engineered Solutions Inc., Hermitage, Pa.
What began 16 years ago with one lathe in a garage has grown into a multimillion-dollar company that has enjoyed 15% growth since 2010 and posts annual revenues of $14 million, Taafe says.
As manufacturing rebounds, so do orders at the 108,000-square-foot plant where it builds equipment from scratch for steel mills, aluminum extrusion plants, railroads and mining companies.
With new markets opening because of the Utica and Marcellus shale, there are many opportunities for jobs, “just not enough people to do the work,” Taafe says.
“I think that everybody wants everybody to go to college now instead of going into a shop and getting dirty,” Taafe says. “I could comfortably hire between seven and 10 people.”
Extreme Engineered Solutions employs 100 full-time employees, a number that includes those working in its two other departments, Extreme Machine & Fabricating and Extreme Caster Services. Taafe says he has openings for “a whole variety of fields that are well-paid and satisfying careers,” including fabricators, welders, skilled machinists, assemblers and maintenance people. “Five years of experience would be acceptable as a skilled machinist here,” he says. The company runs two shifts and would like to man a third.
“Business is very good right now,” Taafe reports. “We’re rebounding from 2007, 2008 and 2009, so we’re pretty happy with the outlook.”
Extreme Engineered Solutions has taken on more work and completed projects faster since May 2009 when it moved its operations from its 42,000-square-foot plant on Logan Avenue in Youngstown. The plant in Hermitage is its fourth.
The company, still moving equipment from its third address and buying new equipment, looks to be fully moved in by the end of this year. Some 120 horizontal and vertical machining centers and lathes fill the shop floor, 90% of which are Computer Numerically Controlled, or CNC, with computers aiding the machining process. The company can make just about anything for the industries it serves, taking an order from concept to assembly, Taafe says. Business is cyclical, he notes, so meeting the needs of a variety of industries helps keep the business moving.
“When aluminum extrusion is down, steel is up,” Taafe says. “So we always have a nice flow going through the shop.”
Each project is painstakingly designed and engineered to customer’s specifications, Taafe says. To ensure the highest quality, some pieces are machined in a CNC process, then finished manually.
As they work on an edger chock, machinists Anthony Olesh and Bob Bakos have the blueprints laid out on their workbench and refer to them for each detail. The circular piece of steel is lined inside with grooves, some of them as small as 0.001 inch, Bakos says. Each chock takes about one month to complete.
“We break it down in steps, so we start at one side and refer each side off of a spot, and if we keep our spots in line. It all comes together,” Bakos says. “It’s like plotting a really detailed map. If you scrap something this big, it’s a lot of money.”
Having more workers would mean taking on more large-equipment jobs, says manufacturing engineer Joe Steh.
Workers are putting the finishing touches on a hands-free front-end loader for a tin line being prepared for its final equipment analysis. The large rolling machine was built from scratch for a customer in the steel industry who will come in to watch it tested. This machine alone needed 700 drawings, with multiple parts on each sketch, Steh says.
“Every drawing has at least two parts,” Steh says. “So, you have at least 10,000 parts on it.”
The machine will be broken into parts to be re-assembled at its last stop before it’s shipped, Steh says, and, depending on the piece of equipment, Extreme Engineered Solutions can ship products nearly anywhere in the world.
With the advent of drilling in the Marcellus and Utica shale plays, the company has developed its own niche, making pump bodies for the hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, process. The company turns out about eight pump bodies per week, Taafe says.
“We have two machines that run 20 hours a day with two operators,” Taafe says. “The horizon right now is all energy. So we’re going to try to expand into some energy industries a little further.”
EDITOR'S NOTE: This story first appeared in the March print edition of The Business Journal. Watch for a video version later today on the Daily BUZZ webcast at our home page.
Copyright 2012 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.