The Downtime Slayers

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Industrial equipment specialists ProcessBarron keep heavy industry on the move

Heavy industry is a beautiful thing. Muscular, fearsome, fascinating, and to the casual observer, unstoppable. Realistically, stopping is inevitable even for the biggest, most powerful, and dependable pieces of equipment. When that downtime is unplanned, critical industries such as steel, power, cement, paper, and biomass, can lose millions in a matter of hours. When there’s no time to waste, they rely on ProcessBarron.

As one of the world’s leading material handling equipment manufacturers, ProcessBarron leverages 40 years of air handling, gas handling, and air pollution control expertise to keep complex industrial equipment performing safely and at peak.

“We're really proud to be one of the few companies in the country to specialize in everything from design, manufacturing, installation, and maintenance of all of our products,” COO Tim Iori said. “We’re a concept to completion equipment provider with an exceptional emergency field services component.”

That mighty expertise became particularly desirable when the pandemic emerged. “A lot of our customers pushed their service work into the future, and that has turned into a tremendous amount of emergency repair and rebuild work for us,” Iori noted. “It's in our wheelhouse and we're sending teams out very quickly to respond to emergencies. We work 24/7, so that's been an area where we've seen substantial growth.”

As company chief revenue officer Ken Buttery put it, “Forced outages are unfortunate events, and we made a point to be able to react. If a customer has an issue, we can jump all over it very quickly to help.”

Maintaining a flexible workforce has been a key advantage, Iori added. “We’re able to flex between the factory and service side, and as some of our customers hunkered down and held off large capex projects, we're able to take those resources and allocate them elsewhere.”

Carving a successful niche out of thin air

 “Because of the breadth of what we can offer, we think of ourselves as a partner to our customers,” Buttery pointed out. “We are partners who will break down any walls to help customers continue their operations so they can make their revenue and other targets that they need to while doing it safely. Through this year, following all the COVID protocols, we’ve been very successful in meeting that mission for us, which, more importantly, is helping the customers meet their missions.”

 All of ProcessBarron’s design and manufacturing work is performed in house. “We design for heavy abrasive, corrosive, industrial applications. We draw on a great deal of experience to ensure that we have high-quality products, and we put a lot of effort into incorporating lean and quality systems into our processes as well,” he said.

“We're ISO 9001 compliant and we ensure that all of our products are mission critical, so if a client has equipment that isn't running properly they can call us and we have the design and manufacturing team necessary to fix those problems. We don't outsource, and we don't try to push that off on somebody else.”

Air and gas handling and air pollution systems are essential components for industrial firms that handle bulk materials, and system maintenance and repair work is sophisticated and complex. “A poorly designed air handling system can really act like a parasite in that it can drain energy from a site on a pretty large scale, so if we're able to partner with those customers, understand areas where they might be losing efficiency—whether through heat loss, through lost air, however that's happening—we're continually innovating new solutions to identify inefficiencies and then provide the solution to fix those problems for them,” Iori said.

“We've put a lot of investment on being able to deliver the best fan, and a lot of that is technology related to the design, manufacturing, and the balancing of that. We want to make sure that we never interfere with the customer’s continued operations, and want to work in parallel with everything they’re doing on site,” he added.

“I don't know of any other competitors that are doing this level of investment within an organization,” Buttery said. “We are a dependable and financially strong company, and our focus on safety is paramount.” Considering that some of the equipment they build, install, and maintain are the size of semi trucks, that’s as essential as breathing for ProcessBarron. “The safety of our people and safety when we're on site with our customers, is critically important, and it's a real differentiator for us.”

Environmental safety and responsibility is also a key focus. The company’s Southern Field Maintenance & Fabrication-Environmental Elements subsidiary is also present in the field and during plant construction. “The division is dedicated to air handling and air pollution control and the maintenance of those products,” Iori explained. “These industrial companies have to be environmentally responsible; we service all the equipment that handles the exhaust from these mills and in these factories, ensuring that the exhaust is meeting environmental guidelines at the state and federal levels. That's a big piece of our responsibility in helping our customer base but also caring for the lives of those living in the communities we serve.”

While Iori and Buttery are seasoned industry vets, their addition to the ProcessBaron leadership team is relatively recent, both having been hired in the early days of the COVID-19 crisis. “Bringing in a new chief revenue officer and a chief operating officer in the middle of a pandemic means you need to have a lot of trust in your business, your people, and in your customers,” Iori said. “We have the support of our CEO and our investors to make sure that we come out of this stronger than we went in. When you have that ‘sink or swim’ attitude it's all about how you take the hand dealt to you and how you react to it.” ProcessBarron’s on-demand expertise deals the ultimate blow to downtime, ensuring success all around. Like heavy industry, it’s a beautiful thing.