Flexaust adds to Indiana facilities

WARSAW, Ind.—Flexaust Co. Inc. is adding a 25,000-sq.-ft. expansion that will connect two buildings at its complex in Warsaw, freeing up space for new manufacturing and providing a single spot for finished goods inventory.

The industrial hose and ducting producer is spending about $2.5 million on the project, including another expansion at an adjacent plant, according to Mike Harvey, the firm's vice president general manager.

Flexaust previously had two separate facilities on adjacent property that the expansion will join. The firm has occupied one since the 1970s, and Harvey said one was purchased in the 1990s after Schauenburg Group purchased the firm. An additional 15,000 square feet was added to one of the buildings in 2006, but now the firm is out of space.

"The logical thing was to add on between the buildings," he said. "We had enough room to put 25,000 square feet between the buildings and join the structures."

Flexaust broke ground on the project in May and is in the process of moving into the new space, Harvey said. The company was awarded tax abatement from the state and county governments in exchange for investing $2.5 million and adding 20 jobs over the next three years, he added.

Right now, the hose producer employs close to 200, and Harvey said the additions will push it to about 215. Flexaust employs 255 company-wide.

The first part of the project, which will bring the combined facility to about 240,000 square feet, will be to centralize its finished goods inventory into one location. The inventory had been fragmented throughout three buildings in Warsaw, but Harvey said the addition will allow it to be located in one.

"It will have a tremendous benefit for efficiencies in our shipping department, and order fulfillment will be a lot easier and a lot faster, especially on our 24-hour ship items," he said. "It will also allow us to inventory more product to maximize our runs in each of the departments to gain some efficiencies of scale there."

That means instead of setting up and running certain product lines up to four times a month, it may only need to be run twice a month. "A lot of times our runs were limited to the amount of space we had to stock it," he said.

The revamped footprint also will free up nearly 30,000 square feet of additional manufacturing space. Once the layout is organized, Harvey said Flexaust will look to add one or two additional lines to produce its Flexadux line and two to three additional lines for its Genesis products.

The Flexadux products are made of polyurethanes, thermoplastic elastomers and polyvinyl chloride. They are used in such applications as maintenance and repair operations, woodworking, general purpose hose, air hose, lawn and leaf collection, and some agricultural uses.

The Genesis line is Flexaust's plastic commercial vacuum hoses, made of polyethylene and EVAs. The goods are used in commercial cleaning applications, car wash vacuum hoses, industrial vacuum systems and residential home central vacuum systems.

In addition, Harvey said Flexaust is adding at least one horizontal injection press and two to three more overmolding presses at a third plant in Warsaw that manufactures the Dayflex line of made-to-order assembled hoses. That facility is a 55,000-sq.-ft. structure across the street from the main building.

The Dayflex operation utilizes TPEs, PU, PVC and polyethylene to make hoses for commercial cleaning, sump pumps and commercial floor scrubbers, along with products for the recreational vehicle and marine industries.

Flexaust also has a fourth factory in Warsaw, a 35,000-sq.-ft. unit that is home for operations obtained when it purchased the United Electric Co.—known in the business as TUEC—which is a manufacturer of commercial and industrial vacuum hoses and vacuum cleaning attachments. There, Flexaust has reorganized the warehouse to have six-foot aisles, freeing up space to store all raw materials for use at the four Warsaw plants.

The growth is prompted by increased business across all of Flexaust's markets, according to Harvey. "Unless the bottom falls out, we'll have a record year in sales," he said. "And next year looks like it could be another record year, based on what we're seeing from the distributor world and with all the OEMs the distributors work with, and what they're forecasting for 2018."

He added that this business cycle has been different in that normally some markets go up and others drop, and vice versa. "It just seems everything is steadily going up," Harvey said. "Nothing too crazy. It's just that everything is going up at the same time. I don't know if over 2015 and 2016 everything was so soft for manufacturing, that people have just started reordering again and refilling the pipeline."

Flexaust has a good deal of business with the military and Navy, and he said business with the Navy yards has been strong since December 2016.

Flexaust also has manufacturing facilities in Amesbury, Mass.; El Paso, Texas; and Las Vegas. Harvey said Flexaust plans to add two Genesis product lines to complement the normal Flexaust-style hoses being produced there.