Fenner releases new industrial belt

PITTSBURGH—Fenner Dunlop P.L.C.'s Engineered Conveyor Solutions division is pushing forward with a new product designed to widen its reach into the industrial use market.

Patriot X is a fabric belt with single-unit construction meant to be used for light-medium duty applications. The belt, which debuted in the market in September, marks an opportunity for Fenner to provide a cost-effective line of belting to compete with imports, said Scott Frenz, senior vice president of sales and marketing for the Americas division.

"Typically, what we see for most of the importers is an offering for somewhat lower-end applications in the marketplace. Not something you're going to put under a primary crusher on a rock quarry," he said.

Fenner saw the highest amount of penetration from imports in light to medium duty applications, in the aggregate plant as a tertiary belt, the belts running light sand and gravel, light duty wood products or cement, Frenz said.

"We've seen some of that market go to imports over the years, and we wanted to come up with a solution to compete in that market with a North American-made product," he said.

The Patriot X currently is being produced in Fenner's Port Clinton, Ohio, facility, but also could be produced in the company's facility in Bracebridge, Ontario, Frenz said.

Fenner is continuing to produce high-end, heavy duty belts such as its UsFlex, NovaCore and PSR brand names, but is trying to gain back some of the market share in the light and medium duty market with a North American-made product that's a little different, he said.

"It's really similar to how we've designed some of our higher duty application products," Frenz said. "It's what we call a single-unit construction. We don't even like to call it a ply, because it isn't really a ply. It's a single unit of fabric."

The Patriot X is made with a "dual-crimp warp design," Frenz said, that allows the belt to be thinner and lighter, but perform significantly better than comparable two- or three-ply belts in terms of rip, tear and impact resistance.

"Not only is it a North American produced product that can compete from a cost standpoint with those belts, it is different in that its design is different, and its construction is different than really anything else that's out there," Frenz said.

The Patriot X currently is being launched through the company's existing distribution channel, its Total Conveyor Solutions Distributors.

The belt is a kind of new generation of Fenner's original Patriot line of about two years ago, which was a two-ply and three-ply belt that made some headway in the market, but didn't provide the market penetration Fenner was after, Frenz said.

"It did well, but we felt like we could really change the game by coming out with this single-unit dual crimp warp construction," he said.

Restructuring

The Patriot X is the result of Fenner's research and development resources over the last year, and stands to be the main product from Fenner in the next year or so, Frenz said.

It comes as the company is recovering from the significant downturn in the coal mining market when the company saw restructuring and the partial closing of its Port Clinton facility, and a cut to its work force of about 20 percent in 2016.

Prior to that, the Americas operations work force overall had been trimmed by 11 percent in 2015, and consolidated its belting divisions with a Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere/Asia-Pacific split. At the time, Cassandra Pan, former president of the North American operation and ECS Americas, took early retirement. Managing Director Edwin Have came on board to take her place.

"At Port Clinton, we did close a portion of that facility, but it was some very old and outdated equipment. It was still capable of producing good belts, but it was not the most efficient line in our system," Frenz said. "We did close a portion of one plant, and we did have some contraction in the number of employees in the organization, like many companies that were dealing with the downturn in the coal industry. But we're proud to say we did not close any complete facilities."

The 2016 restructuring of ECS Americas meant several shifts for the company's goals, including an increased focus on industrial belt markets, a refocused presence in coal to reflect deterioration in the industry and other measures to address overhead and non-belt manufacturing activities, according to a Fenner company overview report from July 2017.

Bringing the focus back to the industrial belt market as the coal market begins to recover is part of the reason for the Patriot X line, Frenz said.

"We've seen the coal business start to bounce back to an extent. It's not to where it was three to five years ago, but it's steadily coming back," Frenz said. "We feel like the industrial markets were fairly steady even in the challenging times in the last couple years.

"We really did want to have a product for every portion of (the industrial) marketplace, from the toughest of the tough applications, all the way down to the lighter duty and medium duty applications. That's really what this was a response to, really doubling down on the industrial markets and making sure we had a strong position from top to bottom in that marketplace."

As the coal market begins to rebound and the industrial market continues to grow, Fenner is better positioned to capture significant growth after its restructuring, Frenz said.

Another part of the company's restructuring included moving some responsibilities and roles out of its plants, particularly in manufacturing, to its Pittsburgh headquarters to centralize them. That move brought more efficiency for Fenner, Frenz said. The company has not recovered its employee total from before the restructuring, and might not going forward as efficiencies continue to show up.

"Will we ever be as large as we were five years ago? Probably not," Frenz said. "I think we recognized that we can run our business a bit more efficiently and effectively than before the downturn."

But as opportunities grow, Fenner is adding some additional roles, including three new sales resources in the western part of North America, he said.

"We're expanding in areas where we believe it will impact our business for the positive," Frenz said. "And we are staying firm in some areas where we feel we've potentially gained some efficiencies in the restructuring of our business, and will continue to benefit from the leanness we took as an approach a few years ago."

Currently, ECS employs 2,072 globally, according to its annual report.

For Fenner, the market looks "cautiously optimistic," Frenz said. Though the coal mining opportunities aren't what they were five years ago, they're likely to be better this year than last year, and the industrial and bulk markets likely will remain steady.

"There's always going to be some portions of the market that struggle when others perform well, but right now, it seems that most of the markets we play in are either doing moderately well to very well," Frenz said.