Farrel Pomini opens new headquarters

ANSONIA, Conn.—Farrel Pomini held a grand opening for its new corporate headquarters facility, celebrating consolidating its offices from three different buildings all under one roof for the first time in more than 100 years.

The new building, which is about 60,000 square feet, collects its administration and production facilities together, which were originally in two adjacent buildings in Ansonia, with its research and development and process laboratory facility, originally in Oxford, Conn.

The project represents about a $12 million investment by the company, and currently supports about 90 employees with room for expansion, said Lori Sheehan, sales and marketing coordinator. No new jobs are being added in the short term with the new building.

About 65 customers and other guests attended the grand opening, which included a plant tour of the company's new headquarters.

The facility is an effort to modernize and optimize workflow efficiencies, Sheehan said.

"We went from very old, dated buildings that were really designed mostly for other processes that we made work for our current product line of compact processors and continuous mixers, to a facility that's really been designed strictly for assembling those items and accommodating our administrative offices," she said.

Much of the focus of the design for the new building went to the assembly floor, streamlining production of the company's principal products, such as continuous mixers and compact processors. One advantage to the new design is the use of assembly cells that are designed and optimized to complete construction without moving parts or the machine to other parts of the assembly floor.

"Almost everything can be done in one assembly cell," Sheehan said. "So, opposed to moving it here or there for different testing or different parts of the assembly process, everything is done in one location. It's a huge efficiency."

Another improvement to the assembly area is an inventory shuttle, which runs spare parts on a vertical conveyor.

"It's like what you'd have at the dry cleaners, except it goes vertically," Sheehan said. "We've implemented two of those where we keep our spare parts to assemble the machines. Going from an old-school type of rack system spread out over several thousand square feet to this shuttle system, that itself has cut the picking time for a job by 20 percent, which is about a day."

The new assembly area also has an Aircaster system, which moves a machine from the assembly bay to the paint booth, instead of using a crane system, Sheehan said.

Several departments now also have a dedicated workspace in the new facility, including the automation laboratory, where machine programming is done.

"We can also connect live with machines that are in production, obviously with the customer's permission," Sheehan said. "So we can make programming changes if they need us to, or if they get an error code, as opposed to somebody getting on a plane and going out.

"These are things that we had the capability to do before, but we didn't have a dedicated room to do it. Now we have a very defined space, which is always helpful to get something done."

The facility's new process lab and R&D spaces also have dedicated spaces, designed specifically for those processes. Since the company's lab is connected to the office space, a special vacuum filtration system also was installed as an additional consideration.

"Again, we had these before in Oxford, but this was really built specifically for us, designed by us, involving some of our project engineers," Sheehan said. "These spaces let us do more of a wider scope of things for our customers."