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and capabilities,” he states.“ Much of what we do is short production runs, but we’ re modernizing our machine shop through a multi-million-dollar investment in technology and equipment. Based on our calculations, we believe this once-in-a-generation investment will allow us to increase our annual output by ten times within our existing footprint. We’ ve also added 9000 square feet of manufacturing space to our Vero Beach facility, aimed at increasing production of our traditional extended line shaft pumps. We’ ve also relocated our 120-inch vertical turret lathe to the Vero Beach site, which enables us to turn pumps up to ten feet in diameter.”
Part of this investment is the deployment of Red-D-Arc’ s welding cobots.“ Red-D-Arc are a great partner, and their lease model works well for us as we increasingly embrace automation,” Dana says.“ The advantage of these cobots is that they conduct repetitive processes and take less training than welding robots. After trialing some, we realized that we needed cobots with a higher capacity, and our flexible partnership with Red-D-Arc meant we could easily swap the first model for larger ones.”
As our conversation closes, Dana turns his attention to MWI’ s 100th anniversary and we ask what factors he believes have been crucial to reaching this milestone.“ Although there has been lots of hard work across the four generations, MWI’ s success is down to the grace of God,” he shares.“ When I was eight years old, my dad was considering selling the business, but I cried and explained that I wanted to build pumps like him. I remember the conversation as though it was yesterday; we made a deal that if I was serious, I would start working in the business after school and during holidays, and he would hand the business over to me when I finished my engineering degree. That’ s exactly what we did – my dad continued the business instead of retiring, and I went on to study engineering.“ Aside from growing up in the business, my degree has provided me with a deeper
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