Continued Growth
Welcome to the latest issue of Extrusion Solutions.
Last year was a great year for ENTEK in many ways – we broke our previous sales record, and we also saw a big jump in demand for our turnkey services. We define ‘Turnkey Services’ as providing our customers with our engineering and plant design capabilities, to help them expand their existing operations or even design and build all-new plants from the ground up.
The turnkey business has continued to grow and we expect it to continue in 2017. Because of this, ENTEK is staffing up to keep up with the increased business and we expect our employee count to be up 11% over 2016.
In-House Plant Expansion
Besides helping customers expand their plants, ENTEK is busy working to expand our own headquarters facility here in Lebanon, Oregon. We are planning to increase our assembly shop facility by building a new 27,000 square foot addition that will house our fabrication shop, assembly shop, and grinding area. This much-needed expansion will also benefit our entire machine shop by creating more room for more efficient operations.
What We Mean by ‘QC3’
When we came out with our new QC3 line of twin-screw extruders in 2015, we worked hard to tell the industry what ‘QC3’ meant (Quick-Clean, Quick-Change, and Quality Control) and why it was important to our customers.
One of the best examples of the advantages of the QC3 machine design is shown in this issue’s cover story on page 1. Dr. Jeff Cernohous, President of Interfacial Consultants (IFC), has been an ENTEK customer for some time and knew the features and benefits of our machinery. But when he started IFC spin-off company Rev Materials LLC, the real advantages of the QC3 concept came into focus.
Rev Materials churns out small lots of custom compounds for its customers, and they do this fast, meaning they need to frequently purge their extruders and change screw sets. This is exactly what ENTEK’s QC3 machinery was designed for. When you can execute a complete screw set change in 5 minutes, as opposed to an hour or more with other twin-screw extruders, you’ll realize less downtime, more profit and a competitive advantage.
The 33MM machine we are providing to IFC is the latest addition to our QC3TM line of co-rotating twin-screw extruders, which includes the 27MM, 33MM, 43MM, and 53MM models. All of these machines feature Quick-Change, Quick-Clean, and Quality Control features designed to help compounders improve their processing with faster, easier operations, and produce better quality end products.
Thank you to all of our customers for their continued support.
As always, I encourage you to contact me anytime at khanawalt@entek.com.