Updated: October 12, 2020
manufacturing excellence awards
Manufacturing Awards: Process Cooling Systems has tripled in size and gone worldwide
Photo | Courtesy of PROCESS COOLING SYSTEMS
Process Cooling Systems opened a new Leominser facility in 2019 more than doubling its manufacturing space.
By Grant Welker
Someone drinking, say, Coke or Pepsi, would never know if their beverage was made during a manufacturing process relying on equipment from Leominster’s Process Cooling.
But the companies themselves certainly know – and that’s why the small cooling equipment maker and manager has been called on to install its equipment from Fiji to Uruguay and from Mexico to Poland.
Process Cooling isn’t a household name, but it has lasted 57 years by adapting to change, and in more recent years it has gone green. Its equipment is used to cool machinery that heats up during manufacturing processes, often for consumer products, making the company’s equipment itself a potentially huge user of both water and electricity. The idea is to use as little of both as possible – and to not end up using too much of one while trying to save on the other.
In the past three years, it estimates it has saved its customers nearly 5,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions and more than 10 million kilowatt hours of electricity. That’s all thanks to equipment improvements and systems technology advances.
“When I came to Process Cooling 25 years ago, there was no focus on energy conservation at all,” said Ted Rudy, the company’s president. “Not just at Process Cooling, but in the industry at all.”
One manufacturer in New Hampshire that Process Cooling has worked with saved 13 million gallons of water a year and $100,000 in electricity use. The Northeast has some of the highest electricity rates in the country, so Process Cooling designs systems and provides equipment aimed at greater efficiency than its competitors.
“That’s where the green side comes into the company,” said Rudy, one of three owners with Dave Doucet and Dave Dufresne. “That’s why we have such a strong customer base.”
The trio worked together at Process Cooling before buying the company together in 2004. At that point, the company had about 20 employees. Today it’s 67, and the company combined two locations into a new space opened in 2019, more than doubling its manufacturing space. A smaller secondary location in Greenville, S.C., helps the company deploy workers to install or check in on equipment across the country more easily.
It’s a long way from a company that for years relied heavily on a local plastics industry that’s largely dried up. Today, largely through word-of-mouth, Process Cooling has built a customer base that’s taken it nationwide and beyond.
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