Pexco brings industrial customer focus to new development center

Pexco LLC is opening what it calls the Extrusion Center of Excellence at its Morrisville, Pa., facility to provide engineering and design services for customers, particularly in industrial markets.

The center, which will open Oct. 7 to coincide with Manufacturing Day, is housed in a 65,000-square-foot plant that underwent a 20,000-square-foot expansion in 2015. The facility now has 12 extrusion lines with three devoted to product development for customers wanting to collaborate with Pexco engineers and production specialists.

“We find a lot of customers don't necessarily always understand what can and cannot be achieved through extrusion, especially when they're incorporating more complex, tighter tolerance requirements,” Matt Robida, Pexco vice president of business development, said in a telephone interview. “This launch is intended to foster a closer working relationship between Pexco and its customers and their engineers. That's really the driver.”

Based in Alpharetta, Ga., the private equity owned Pexco is primarily focused on custom industrial and medical products after selling its aerospace division for $496 million in May 2015.

“In the last 18 months, we've been redirecting the business in its wake and emphasizing our history and capabilities on the industrial extrusion side,” Robida said. “Part of the rationale in establishing a true center of excellence is to maintain and streamline tool and die development and engineering optimization for our customers, who increasingly, we find, are challenged by the parameters and capabilities of extruded plastics.”

Pexco CEO Neil Shillingford put it this way in a news release: “Customers who don't have deep in-house plastic engineering capability benefit from our experience and engineering expertise. We work together to find real answers and the right solutions.”

Pexco's industrial customers serve end markets mostly related to lighting, filtration, defense and traffic safety with specialized plastic extrusions or molded parts. The business made a “slight strategic shift” and got into injection molding in September 2013. Most recently, in January, Pexco bought Scientific Plastics Corp., a custom injection molder in North St. Paul, Minn., that serves mostly industrial markets but some medical.

“With our extensive resources, Pexco is well positioned to support our customers in the dynamic industrial market,” Shillingford said. “Stability, technical expertise, value-added engineering, and program management will all be available in one place.”

Pexco's engineering executives and experts are all based in Morrisville, where several extrusion lines were added as part of the building expansion so product development projects won't cut into production and vice versa.

“What we bring to the table is pretty unique,” Robida said. “We've grown over many decades through the acquisition of smaller custom extrusion businesses that each have their own experiences and sets of capabilities. We folded that into an aggregate business that draws upon that wide experience and is able to bring it to bear across just about any industrial application you're going to find. Pexco's history is one of incorporating best practices and turning them into standardized solutions that we can deploy for our customers.”

Pexco is part of Odyssey Investment Partners and has more than 1,000 active customers, according to its website, which also says it has about 1,200 employees processing more than 400 materials with close to 200 extruders and 50 injection molding presses.

With an estimated $200 million in sales, the company ranks No. 21 among North American pipe, profile and tubing extruders, according to Plastics News data.