An Interview with SNI's Ed Camp published in the Worcester Sunday Telegram 1/30/05

January 30. 2005 6:57AM

From the ground up SNI creates new machines, brings old ones back to life

By Noam Reuveni SPECIAL TO THE TELEGRAM & GAZETTE

For much of the 20th century, machine tools were king in Worcester — and Heald Machine wore the crown.

But by 1992, the company that once employed 1,300 and occupied nearly 500,000 square feet in a complex of buildings on 35 acres in Worcester's Greendale section had closed.

Yet its grinding machines — thousands of them — have lived on in no small part because of Edward C. Camp, a former Heald employee, and his 20-year-old company, Service Network Inc. of Worcester.

Mr. Camp is president and co-owner with his wife, Beverley A. Camp, of SNI, which rebuilds old Heald Machine and other Cincinnati Milacron grinding machines and also builds brand-new grinding machines of SNI's design.

The company, which got its start in Mr. Camp's Princeton kitchen after he retired from a 33-year career at Heald, has steadily grown, save for a setback during the manufacturing recession, and is now a world player — one of only a handful of U.S. makers of new grinding machines.

Grinding machines are a small portion of total U.S. machine tool sales, accounting for about 8 percent of sales of metal-cutting machines, according to the American Machine Tool Distributors Association, but they are vital to the automotive and aerospace markets. They are used to machine parts such as wheel bearings, fuel injectors and landing gear struts.

Mr. Camp attributes SNI's survival in a shrinking industry to the company's ability to adapt new technology to its products, staying ahead of foreign competitors in Japan, France, Australia, India and China. “We thrive on technology,” he said.

For much of SNI's history, the company didn't sell new grinders; rather it rebuilt old Heald machines, retrofitting them with electronic control systems and other new parts that enabled customers to streamline their production processes.

The story of SNI began in 1984, when Mr. Camp retired as manager of commercial development at Heald. Seeking to supplement his pension, he started a company to service Heald grinders in the field and found a ready pool of talent in the numerous employees Heald was letting go. “I wanted to do something more than just tend a vegetable garden,” said Mr. Camp, who is 79 and still works 60 to 80 hours a week.

With a $2,000 initial investment, Mr. Camp began servicing Heald machines nationwide; he recalls his first job was in the Carolinas. SNI's first year in business saw revenues of $65,000, growing to $450,000 in the second year and $750,000 in the third year.

For its first 15 years, the company experienced stellar growth, with annual revenue climbing steadily throughout the 1980s and peaking at $11 million in the early 1990s, when SNI employed 75.

For much of this period the company spent nothing on advertising, relying on word of mouth. “The machine tool industry is small and there's a lot of talk,” Mr. Camp said.

According to Mr. Camp, the positive buzz in industry circles was because of SNI's ability to meet customers' specific needs. “We do whatever the customer wants on their terms,” he said.

After several years of service calls, Mr. Camp realized that SNI could not just service but rebuild old Heald grinding machines, modernizing them and providing customers with a competitive advantage.

In rented factory space at 180 Southbridge St. in Auburn, SNI began receiving grimy old machines, and over the course of a methodical six-month process, retrofitted them with state-of-the-art components. Rebuilding Heald grinders is still a mainstay of the company, accounting for half its revenues. SNI even offers substitute units so customers do not have to shut down production lines.

New grinding machines designed and manufactured by SNI account for the balance of revenues.

SNI sells its new machines worldwide and has installations in England, India, Mexico, Canada and Poland, among other countries.

SNI relies upon about 400 vendors, many of them local, to machine parts and provide components such as hydraulic valves, tubing and piping. The bulk of the rebuilding and assembly work is done at SNI's plant, which was relocated in December 2002 to 30,000 square feet at 243 Stafford St. in Worcester.

Rebuilding work helped support the company in the 1980s and most of the 1990s, but as manufacturing entered a recession in the late 1990s, SNI had to begin delivering new grinding systems to stay afloat.

“The last five years were really hard for us,” said Mr. Camp. While SNI's competitor, Bryant Grinder of Springfield, Vt., closed its doors in 2002 (its assets were later acquired by Vermont Machine Tool), SNI was lucky enough to only see its revenues fall to a low of $4.5 million — barely break-even — and $5 million in the year ended in September 2004.

To stay solvent during the recession, the company shrank from 75 employees to 35. Things were so bad that management even took turns cleaning the bathrooms.

Relying on its ability to deliver technologically more advanced products than the competition, SNI was able to continue marketing its products to customers. “To stay competitive we had to be run better,” said Brad R. Klar, general manager of SNI.

But since September, SNI has seen its orders for rebuilt and new machines explode, according to Mr. Camp. Currently, 30 machines sit in various states of assembly in SNI's plant, and 10 more employees have been hired.

Business is so good right now that SNI is projecting revenues for 2005 of about $20 million.

While excellent service has always been a factor that has attracted customers to SNI, the company is seeing sales grow recently thanks to a series of technical innovations that have enabled SNI to market its machinery as more efficient than its Chinese and European competition.

Mr. Camp said the company has developed about 122 product innovations since its founding; some of them have been patented.

As manufacturing has transitioned to a just-in-time supply structure, manufacturers have developed a need for equipment that can be rapidly switched over to another assembly line.

“We market ourselves on the basis of quicker changeover and less down time for equipment,” said Mr. Klar.

While SNI's new machines, which sell for about $400,000 each, are nearly double the price of the Chinese competition, SNI is able to use return-on-investment analysis to show customers the benefit SNI grinders will provide.

“Grinding is 30 percent of manufacturing time,” Mr. Camp said. “If we can trim that to 15 percent, it provides our customers a serious competitive advantage.”

A reduction in manufacturing time is what drew Worcester's Sancliff Inc., a maker of carbide and wire drawing dies, to purchase three new SNI grinders.

“We had this project that was tying up three Heald grinders,” said Bill Drumm, owner of Sancliff. “We approached SNI and they provided us with a state-of-the-art computer-controlled machine that was able to do in a day and a half, what those three machine did in a week.”

When Sancliff decided to expand, it considered three European companies, as well as SNI, but decided on SNI based on higher efficiency. “I'm not going to fool around with some other company's grinders when SNI can supply me with better machines,” Mr. Drumm said.

It is the gains in productivity and rapid assembly line changeover that have brought some of the largest automotive suppliers in the world to SNI's grinding equipment. SNI numbers among its customers Saint-Gobain, General Motors, Ford, DaimlerChrysler and bearing makers Timken Co. and Sweden's SKF Group.

Being in Worcester is seen by Mr. Camp as an advantage in competing against rivals in China and Europe. “Few houses have our level of expertise in grinding,” he said, noting that SNI's employees have from 10 to 40 years in the machine-tool industry, with an emphasis on grinding.

- Return to What's New Index Page -