Manufacturing in Orange County is in growth mode, with many local companies—those that have weathered the recession and managed to notch consistent business gains—making investments in facility expansions and upgrading their training resources.
At least nine such projects have taken place at local companies in recent months, including:
• Redline Detection LLC, which late last month moved from Placentia to a new facility in Orange, “well more than double our physical size,” according to Executive Vice President Alex Parker.
The company makes automotive diagnostic equipment, such as leak detectors and cooling system diagnostics equipment, which is used primarily by technicians. It has about 50 employees.
Financial details weren’t available, but Parker said overall business so far this year is up about 50% year-over-year.
The company’s manufacturing operations are in OC, and it also works with local suppliers and vendors, said Parker, who with her husband, Zachary, acquired the company seven years ago.
“And call it excellent timing, since the economy fell off its course after that,” she recalled. “When the economy slowed in the U.S., we made a big commitment to investing in our global business. We were expanding and selling and developing relationships overseas. Now we’re shipping to 32 countries around the world. And once the economy began to [improve] here and we began to feel like it was stabilized, we invested in developing new, more agile technologies.”
Redline last year received the Motor Top 20 Tool Award for portable leak detectors, and it’s expanded into other areas, such as the auto racing industry.
Parker said its new Orange facility includes a 3,000-square-foot technical training area.
“I’m excited about this,” she said. “We’ll be able to have the end users and the technicians do training right here.”
• Santa Ana-based Dynamic Fabrications Inc. also recently took its operating capacity up a notch.
It kept its existing building and took over a second building it owns, most of which it had leased out for several years. The move almost doubled its facility to 22,000 square feet.
The company serves various industries with custom fabrication, welding, precision machining and sheet metal work.
“Fifty percent of our work is aircraft, where we’re doing rocket satellite missile components,” said founder and President Mike Kartsonis. “The other 50% is diversified, ranging from medical, environmental, oil and gas, energy, semiconductor [and] entertainment.”
Having diverse service sectors helped the company “weather the storm” in the recession, Kartsonis said.
“We took a good hit in 2009 and 2010,” he said. “Since then, though, we’ve been seeing a 10% to 20% increase each year” in revenue.
DFI had recent annual revenue of about $4 million, said Kartsonis, who added that he’s expecting continued growth in the double digits.
The recent expansion has helped the company commit more resources to in-house training programs, he said.
“We have an ongoing training and mentoring program here for machinists and welders to maintain their certifications.”
Kartsonis is also active in the National Tooling and Machining Association and utilizes the organization’s two training centers in Southern California.
The Cleveland-based national organization has a training center in Santa Fe Springs, which is about 44,000 square foot, and another in Ontario, about 25,000 square feet.
• Anaheim-based Firstline Security Inc. also expanded its facilities. The company, which installs and services security systems for commercial and residential properties, grew its 6,000-square-foot headquarters to about 10,000 square feet and doubled its size in San Diego with a move to a 3,200-square-foot office.
It employs about 50 locally and had about $12 million in revenue in 2013.
Other indicators of an active and growing manufacturing scene in Orange County include national and international companies opening shop or increasing their presences here.
• Bloomington, Minn.-based Capital Safety, for example, recently opened a training center in Tustin as its first location on the West Coast and third in the U.S.
The company makes equipment for people working at extreme heights and in rescue operations. Its products include body harnesses, self-retracting lifelines and tracking systems.
The company’s new center in Tustin has administrative offices and a 3,500-square-foot area for training that includes a 25-foot steel structure and cellphone tower.
• Schaffhausen, Switzerland-based Georg Fischer Ltd. expanded its North American piping division in a move from Tustin to Irvine in July.
It was also a consolidation move, combining its piping unit, GF Piping Systems, with its tool-and-die maker, GF Machining Solutions, which had been in Yorba Linda.
The operations together take up 105,000 square feet, good for more than 100 employees on the campus.
“It will be fair to say by now we are completely settled in,” said James Jackson, head of business unit Americas of GF Piping Systems.
“We find these new facilities really fitting our needs of growing the business.”
Jackson said the increased space at the new facility gives the company room to display real-life applications of GF’s products.
“Among other things, we have a large aquarium, not because of the fish, but to show the pipes and measurements and instruments,” he said.
“We really try to make the link from what a consumer sees and what we really contribute. That’s absolutely a function of having enough space to really display this in a prominent way.”
