Holliston firms seek to revolutionize temperature sensors
Contributed
Herb Dwyer, chief operating officer, Nanmac Corp.
Holliston sensors manufacturer Nanmac Corp. was purchased in 2014 by the Patriot Worldwide, also based in Holliston. Since the acquisition, the company has been selling its products to the likes of Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Saint-Gobain, trying to grow its market share for temperature-sensing devices.
Herb Dwyer, chief operating officer for Nanmac, spoke with WBJ about the new owners and how the company can innovate to get a bigger slice of the market.
Will Patriot Worldwide buy any more companies?
Suffice to say they’re looking at the possibility.
What are thermocouple and RTD solutions?
Thermocouple and RTD, temperature sensing systems that have been around for 100 years, more or less. The temperature sensors we build are used in industrial commercial and aerospace applications and are highly engineered, rather complex sensing systems.
We supply temperature sensing system to Saint-Gobain in Worcester for their ceramic sintering furnaces.
We also supply to companies like Chicago aerospace manufacturer Boeing, Maryland defense manufacturer Lockheed Martin, or Massachusetts defense manufacturer Raytheon. In those cases, they are primarily used for aerospace applications.
What would they use them for?
The sensors could go into a missile, where they want to measure the gas that's used to propel a missile; or it could go into a battery used to electrically provide power. They want to measure the temperature of those types of things
For example, Boeing is using our thermocouples in the new crew capsule they're building for NASA. The next replacement for the crew capsule going up into space thermocouples into the heat shield, and inside crew capsules as well.
On reentry, they'd want to measure the temp of the outer skin, to measure that temperature, so they can adjust the angle to increase or lower temperature.
When was the company founded?
Nanmac was actually founded 56 years ago. It was originally founded by two former NASA engineers; they actually were building thermocouples for testing rocket engines, and they wanted to see what the temperature was.
It evolved from there into more commercial uses like heat treating. There are certainly lot of companies that take metals and shape, weld and machine them, and they put them through a heat-trading process to remove stressed from metals to improve life and performance.
Take, for example, the turbine blades, made by a couple of companies in New England. These would be for the use in the turbine engines, for jet aircraft. They have to go through a very precise heat-treating process, thermocouples would be used in application.
Is Holliston your only manufacturing plant?
Holliston is our only manufacturing location. Originally, the company had been for a number of years in Framingham. Shortly before we bought the company two and a half years ago, we moved from Framingham to Holliston.
Why?
They moved for two reasons: old facility was becoming antiquated for manufacturing, and there was an opportunity to sell the facility to Framingham State University to gain some value as a result. Holliston has a lower-cost operating environment, and better access to labor.
What do you mean a better access to labor?
Interestingly enough, our company does a lot of manual labor, not highly automated. You need a lot of intricate hand work, and you have a lot of direct labor people involved in manufacturing these various sensing systems. A lot of layoffs had occurred in Milford, or even Holliston areas close by, from plants shutting down and going to China. So there were a lot of unemployed people who were highly skilled. It was a good opportunity to come in, hire these highly skilled people, pay them a good living wage, but at the same time have a good labor force.
More than 60-70 percent of original employee base came to Holliston.
There were some people that could not make the move, because they had to travel too far. We hired a fair number of replacements and actually increased the number of skilled people as well after the purchase.
How many employees do you have now?
Right now, 32
Are you hiring?
Off and on, we just had a new person join us this Monday. Not always. It’s one of those as needed, as business increases in some areas.
Why did Patriot buy Nanmac?
It was a real successful company at the time of purchase. It fit the manufacturing objectives of Patriot. They wanted to go into manufacturing arena, but didn’t want to become a service industry supporter.
Massachusetts is suffering a great deal of losses in its manufacturing base, so this gave us an opportunity to help that base.
Why stay in Massachusetts?
People have homes, they have families, they have skilled labor, and it would be a shame to lose.
Capital equipment in this particular setups is pretty small, compared to capital intensive companies. You could move it anyplace you want to move it, but there is such a thing as maintaining tribal knowledge. and keeping good hardworking honest people employed.
To try to save a few bucks by moving doesn’t make a great deal of sense. Our product is easy to ship.
Where do you ship?
Twenty-five percent of our production is actually shipped to China. There’s an example of a unique manufacturing product that we sell to China at a price we can make money on.
You pick a location, you pick an industry, and we’re there. We’re in oil and gas area. Oil and gas primarily is in Texas, Oklahoma, North Dakota and places like that, but also offshore. In Pennsylvania too.
The medical industry, we sell to an innovative medical device application based in Minnesota. Here we were in Massachusetts selling all the way to Minnesota.
We sell to aerospace. You can be Boeing in California or Boeing in St. Louis or in Texas. Basically, you go sell where the actual application exists. A lot of heat-treating sales would be sold to Midwest because there’s such a large market there.
Internationally, 25-30 percent of total shipments go abroad, primarily to China, South Korea, Japan, Malaysia and Taiwan. We do relatively little business with Europe. A lot with Asian countries.
How do you stay on top of the competition?
In the industry we’re in, it’s been around so long that the concept of innovation, invention and so forth is relatively unknown. We’re actually updating some patents, filing for new patents, new discoveries and new innovations. If you look at steelmaking, that’s been around a long period of time, but if you look 50 years ago and now, you’ll see significant innovations and improvements. It’s the same thing right now with temperature-sensing devices.
The market for these types of temperature sensors has been stagnant for years. With some innovation we’re intro, instead of cutting up the same-sized pie into smaller slices, we’re going to grow the size of the pie to give us new opportunities for new markets as well.
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