Clear skies and smooth cruising ahead

ELK GROVE VILLAGE, ILL. -If you really wanted to, you could stand outside Industrial Repair Service's shop northwest of Chicago and watch planes take off and land at O'Hare International Airport all day long. 

The shop lies less than a mile from the northwest corner of Chicago's primary airport, one of the world's busiest. The shop is next to the airport not so much to ease the shipment of products as to facilitate the movement of people.

"We may have customers come in to visit," explains shop manager Adam

Kuehl. "Or we may have in-house sales people come in from Atlanta" to visit customers in the region.

The Elk Grove facility is one of five operated by Industrial Repair Service. The others– apart from the headquarters in Cumming, Ga.-- are in Apache Junction, Ariz., Farmers Branch, Tex., and St. Louis.

It comes as a surprise to many that Elk Grove Village is among the busiest industrial zones in the U.S. In an industrial park almost six square miles in area, there are nearly 3,600 businesses here employing about 100,000 people.

For transporting products to and from customers as well as to and from headquarters in Georgia-the Elk Grove Village branch relies primarily on its three drivers and on FedEx.

One of these drivers covers the territory from northern Illinois into Wisconsin. Of the other two, one is "kind of a roamer," Kuehl says, while the third covers Southern Illinois and parts of Indiana. "A couple of times a day, a local customer will come in and drop off their own stuff," Kuehl says.

Four people, including Kuehl, work at this location, covering one shift per day. There aren't any account managers here yet, but one was set to begin working the week after Electrical Apparatus visited in early March.

The Elk Grove shop opened about three and a half years ago. Kuehl was hired at that time to get the shop up and running. "I was all by myself for about three months," he recalls. "I was doing shipping, receiving, repairing, customer service a bit of everything."

But that was then. Now, "we're getting aggressive about expanding this shop," Kuehl says. "We're bursting at the seams, so we're definitely looking to relocate." The company is also looking to expand its services. Wind power, for example, "is a big-time opportunity," says Kuehl.

The Elk Grove Village shop doesn't offer the entire suite of services offered by Industrial Repair Service as a whole. Jobs that Elk Grove isn't equipped to handle are shipped to headquarters.

The items repaired at Elk Grove include a-c and d-c motor drives, PLC controllers, various types of power supplies, IO cards, circuit boards, timers, and counters.

"We don't repair motors, pumps, or valves," Kuehl explains. "We ship those to Atlanta. If we move to a larger facility, hopefully we'll be able to do motors."

So instead of handling all jobs itself, this shop, like Industrial Repair Service's other branches, is focused on serving a particular geographic region. This is not a situation in which each location has a specialty that it shares with others. If there's a need to order parts here, the order will be put "through Atlanta."

Given the breadth of the company's national footprint, the U.S. is pretty well covered. The Phoenix location, for example, covers the West Coast. "Dallas gets a chunk," says Kuehl. "St. Louis will get a chunk of the Midwest. We get a chunk of the Midwest."

Atlanta is the hub of the wheel, so to speak. The several locations deal with Atlanta, not with one another.

By this means the company intends to grow and not just the corporation as a whole, but each individual branch. "We hope eventually to get as much test equipment as they have in Atlanta," says Kuehl. The objective is "to make it more convenient for the customers as far as having things done locally and having a faster turnaround time."

At several places on Industrial Repair Service's website, the point is made that repairing electronics is often a better alternative to replacement. This is a principle that appears to be lasting longer in the electronics than in the electromechanical realm, where motors of ever-higher horsepower are becoming disposable.

In the area of electronics, repair is firmly established for companies with the tools and expertise to offer it. "I don't think it's going to go anywhere soon," Kuehl says of electronics repair generally. "Even with the progression of automation, we still see boards that are 30, 40 years old."

So like the aircraft taking off at nearby O'Hare airport on the sunny day Electrical Apparatus visited, Industrial Repair Service appears to have clear skies and smooth cruising ahead. As Adam Kuehl says, "there's always going to be something to repair."-Kevin Jones