Beckman Coulter Inc., the maker of medical diagnostic equipment and supplies, has been a fixture in Fullerton for more than 50 years.
Come next year, however, that will change.
Beckman said in late January that it is consolidating its operations in Brea. The company is going to move its Orange County operations, including its corporate office, from its 54-year-old complex on North Harbor Boulevard into its Brea facility by the end of 2009.
The plan was announced to company workers before the public, said spokeswoman Mary Luthy. Beckman told workers that there would probably be outsourcing or relocations as part of the effort, but none of that will occur this year, she said.
Beckman is committed to keeping its headquarters in OC, Luthy said. Founder Arnold O. Beckman, who died in 2004 at the age of 104, moved the company from South Pasadena in 1954.
Beckman’s consolidation is part of a continuing restructuring under Chief Executive Scott Garrett who took over for longtime leader John Wareham in 2005. So far, the restructuring effort has included freeing up 100,000 square feet of excess space and closing a metal shop to outsource the work. Beckman also combined six small West Coast warehouses into an 180,000-square-foot distribution center in Chino.
The Fullerton site was actually created to consolidate the then-Beckman Instruments Inc.’s operations at a single site.
“His matured enterprise needed a home base,” wrote Arnold Thackray and Minor Myers Jr., Beckman’s biographers.
With that in mind, Beckman oversaw the start of construction on the company’s Harbor Boulevard operation, which was built on the site of a 40-acre orange grove. In 1954, Beckman moved the company into the facility, which Thackray and Myers described as “220,000 square feet of buildings unified by crisp, right-angle geometries,low, rectangular structures that covered acres.”
The complex’s design, according to Myers and Thackray, was modern and centered on the concept of further expansion because additional space could be easily constructed and integrated, while any interior space could be reconfigured to meet Beckman’s needs.
“Such a flexible design befitted a firm dedicated to new instrumentation in a growing array of technologies,” the biographers wrote.
Today, the Harbor Boulevard complex mainly houses Beckman’s corporate offices and its life science operation, while Brea, which opened in 1979, is largely devoted to the company’s clinical instrument division.
The company has about 950 people working in Fullerton and is that city’s only major public company. Overall, Beckman has 2,100 workers in OC and about 10,000 companywide.
After the move, Beckman will be the largest company headquartered in Brea. Other companies with a headquarters there include Ventura Foods Inc. and American Suzuki Motor Corp., the U.S. arm of Japan’s Suzuki Motor Corp.
UCI Brings Back Annual Forecast
The University of California, Irvine will look at healthcare and politics at its annual Health Care Forecast Conference.
The event runs Feb. 21 and 22 at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center of the National Academies of Science and Engineering at UCI. The university’s Paul Merage School of Business’ Center for Health Care Management and Policy puts on the conference.
Norman Ornstein, political pundit, TV commentator and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank, comes back for his 10th year as the conference’s keynote speaker. Other scheduled speakers include UC Irvine Chancellor Michael Drake, James
Glassman, a managing director at JPMorgan Chase & Co., and Donald Crane,
president of the California Association
of Physician Groups.>
Bits and Pieces:
Insightra Medical Inc., an Irvine medical device maker, said it received European regulatory clearance for ReeTrakt, a device that is used during surgeries to gain better visibility and hold obstructive tissue out of the way. Insightra is run by Brad Sharp, a former official at Orqis Medical Inc. of Lake Forest and Irvine’s Edwards Lifesciences Corp. when it was part of Baxter International Inc. … Ford Properties LLC of Huntington Beach recently paid $1.8 million for an 8,403-square-foot medical office building on Goldenwest Street. David Romero and Dick Silva of Lee & Associates’ Newport Beach office represented Ford. Parkcourt Properties, the seller, represented itself. Janet Cheetham, Irvine-based Allergan Inc.’s vice president, clinical operations and outsourcing, and Tony Page, managing director of Health IQ Inc. of Orange, participated in a conference on helping female bioscience managers advance at the Keck Graduate Institute in Claremont Roger Stoll, chief executive of Cortex Pharmaceuticals Inc., an Irvine drug developer, will make a presentation at the Roth Capital Partners LLC conference in Laguna Beach later this month.
