My Peddinghaus Story - SL Chasse Steel - Hudson, NH

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In order to remain competitive in the evolving structural steel industry, fabricators understand the need for CNC technology. This "My Peddinghaus Story" features SL Chasse, in Hudson, New Hampshire, USA, where Steve Chasse and his team have increased their profits by 23% in only 9 months. Discover how they are able to increase productivity with a new shop layout and Peddinghaus machinery.

We're located in Hudson, New Hampshire. We're north of Boston, Mass, I would say, about 45 minutes.

Our total building size under two buildings is roughly 50,000 square feet. We're on roughly 8 acres of land.

We are pretty--we try to be a stand alone company. We fabricate structural steel. We fabricate miscellaneous metals.

We install our own materials. We erect our own buildings. We have our own cranes. We do in-house detailing. We try to do everything in-house.

It makes the business much more controllable, allows us to serve the customers much quicker, much easier.

It's one-stop shopping. They don't have to deal with a bunch of different contractors. They can deal with one. It's much easier for them, and they seemed to like it.

The layout of the shop itself starts with an overhead crane. Steel is offloaded outside. It's placed on cross-transfers. It comes into the building through two small overhead doors. It goes through a drill line and saw--in tandem.

And it also goes through a saw--two different machines. From there, it goes through the coping machine, down the line transfers, over again to the other side of the shop to where the fitters and the welders are.

That's where they take over, putting parts on welding, down to paint, back out the door again, loaded on a truck. Very streamlined, very efficient, very fast.

The land in New England is much more expensive than it is down south, out west, that type of thing.

So we have to be a lot more thoughtful of how we're going to place a building, how we're going to do the layout of the building, how we're going to do a layout of the land to get the most out of the land that we have to be as productive as possible.

We had a certain size building to work with when we were going to build a building. We had a certain amount of land.

We brought Peddinghaus in to help us layout how the steel was going to flow. It was a little out of the ordinary because it wasn't in a straight line.

We didn't have a straight line to work with. So all steel runs into a left direction.

It doesn't basically--it doesn't really turn corners, but it moves from left to right and then back in a straight line again.

Peddinghaus worked with us on that design, helped us lay it out, helped to place the machines where they needed to go to optimize production.

And it works very well. Steel processes and flows through the shop very quickly. And it's just a great, great layout. I'm very pleased with how everything worked out with Peddinghaus.

We finished installing all equipment in March of 2014.

The last three quarters of the year, our revenue grew 23% just by installing the equipment. This year, we're on track to do another 20% to 23%.

It's been an amazing ride to watch what we can do after we automate it to the point we are now.