The ABCs of Exceptional Service

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ISS offers a single source for the complex needs of large-scale industrial companies.

If entire languages can be built from the 26 letters of the alphabet, just imagine what 26 specialty firms can create when they are unified to solve industry’s critical issues. That’s the power of Industrial Services Solutions, a new brand bringing together some of the country’s best contributors to help companies across a wide swath of disciplines meet complex service, repair, and maintenance challenges.

From aerospace to industrial water treatment and power generation, and from food and beverage to mining and metals, you’d be hard-pressed to find an industrial sector where ISS isn’t on the scene. With 45 strategic locations throughout the United States, ISS utilizes a cadre of technicians, engineers, inspectors, and skilled craftspersons as part of a full-service provider of essential utility equipment, process equipment, rotating equipment, and inspection services. Since its founding in the late 2000s, ISS has acquired more than 20 companies, and currently employs about 2,500 people nationwide.

ISS exists to keep big industry players performing at peak through a one-stop shop approach that offers OEM-level services with the speed, agility, and responsiveness of a local shop. As CEO Wade Stockstill explained, “Whether it’s repair, service, and sales of rotating equipment, process equipment, construction services, or non-destructive testing, our goal and focus is to go to a large-scale customer and offer them a coordinated set of solutions. We act as a single source for all a company’s outsourced industrial services.”

Parlaying the strength of each companies’ local market acceptance and brand recognition into a consolidated, unified identity positions ISS as a leader in industrial field services. “Over the course of years we’ve held 20-, 30- and some 100-year-old businesses with a lot of name recognition in their geography or exclusive market, and although the local operating company was well-known and established, no one knew who Industrial Service Solutions was,” Stockstill said. “We were just the parent behind the brand. Over the last 18 to 24 months we’ve made a consolidated push to unify that into one brand to leverage our national footprint and get name recognition across the board.”

Not only does ISS repair electric motors, pumps, gearboxes, and actuation equipment—among a host of other capabilities—they have divisions that manufacture process equipment, as well as those offering construction services. “We can actually perform a full range of construction services from building foundations to building a complete water treatment plant,” he revealed. “If there’s a plant disaster like an explosion, we’ll help fix the plant and then in-source all of the rotating equipment repair, whether pumps, electric motors, or control systems. We’ll bring crews in to fix them on site or bring them in to our shops for repair. Our non-destructive testing group performs traditional or advanced NDE inspection services on equipment and pipelines, so we have a pretty broad reach.”

The coordination of disparate but necessary field services is a welcome relief for large-scale operations. Industrial plants typically have electric motors, valves, pumps, and gearboxes from a range of suppliers that require service or replacement. ISS provides those solutions, as well as installation and removal. In terms of process equipment, from building municipal infrastructure to automotive shredders and recycling equipment or even performing sawmill work, ISS covers a tremendous amount of ground.

That breadth provides a healthy cushion against downturns in specific industries. As Stockstill put it, “This business is designed to be resilient, so where we had so much exposure to the oil and gas market we offset it with some tire and rubber market with the thesis that as oil and gas is in decline, tire and rubber would be up while people are out traveling. We did that in a lot of different spaces, including utilities. It is a very well-organized structure.”

As one can imagine, ISS maintains a highly complex and formidable supply chain organization. “The fact that this business was founded on 26 individual operating companies all with their own internal supply chains tells you we have some serious supply chain complexity,” he agreed.

Stephen Elliott is the company’s VP of supply chain. “He's done a great job coordinating our supply chain, driving leverages in pricing and geographies and trying to really strip out the complexity that we have in the supply chain and get it more manageable and more visible to our business. He's working with our existing supply chain leaders at the local levels to try to leverage all the buying and spending that we do as ISS. He's really done a fabulous job, and although I do oversee it I can't take credit for it; he's really been great at what he has done and continues to improve that process,” Stockstill said. Local leaders are pleased with the effort as well.

ISS clearly knows the ABCs of superior industrial service. “We're a very uniquely positioned business, able to provide a coordinated set of solutions for our customers, which gives them a lot of leverage across their own businesses and in our mind provides a lot of value to our customers. We have taken fairly complex maintenance and new product models and we tried to simplify them into one point of contact, allowing them a single point, tip of the spear solution for their business.”