_______________________________________________________________________________________________ Seyer Industries
the company’ s legacy. However, the business has evolved significantly over that time, with one of its most important strategic shifts coming around 2010, when it decided to diversify beyond its original product line.
“ Prior to 2010, we were exclusively focused on support equipment, but that segment came with huge annual fluctuations, with revenue swings of 30-to-40 percent from year to year, driven by the lumpy way customers order that type of work. It was always challenging to manage the ups and downs in terms of staffing and capacity,” Chris elaborates.“ We recognized that we had all the right capabilities to move into aircraft structures, which is a much larger and more stable segment of the market. Therefore, we decided to enter into long-term production agreements with our customers in that space. The margin is lower, but production is more predictable, which is what we were after. With a stable base of aircraft structure work in place, we could let the support
equipment business continue alongside it without its fluctuations defining the whole organization. Support equipment remains a growing part of Seyer, but we needed something in addition to this legacy piece of the business,” he reveals.
In the year following our last conversation, Seyer has invested over $ 12 million in manufacturing expansion, including eight new CNC machining centers alongside a combination of facilities and equipment upgrades. Almost everything Seyer purchases in terms of equipment has to include some level of automation, whether that means multi-pallet systems, lights-out machining capability or other features that allow the machines to run with little human attendance. The company is also investing in collaborative robots, or cobots, designed to work side by side with people on repetitive tasks. Together with its apprenticeship program, this approach allows Seyer to grow its workforce and keep up with demand,
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