Unlike most companies within the automation space, Spartan is a Canadian, employee-owned company that empowers its employees, whom they proudly refer to as “Spartans”, to think outside the box and do what it takes to meet the ever-changing needs of their customers.

“Whether you’re producing oil and gas, combining molecules to create ethylenes for making plastics, mining potash for use in fertilizers, or purifying water for the city,” says President and CEO Grant Wilde, “our valves, measuring devices, and control technology are at the heart of those operations.”

Founded in 1963, Spartan Controls was established to represent Fisher Controls in Western Canada, a control valve manufacturer from Marshalltown, Iowa. Jasper Fisher, the company’s second generation of family ownership, wanted to expand and realized the most effective way to sell products beyond his regional borders would be to hire people who were invested in their own local markets. Fisher established a network of representative companies, including Spartan Controls, that would sell, supply and service the valves.

The company name ‘Spartan Controls’ was chosen by the company’s founder Bill Flegal to reflect the efficient and competitive nature of the Spartans of ancient Greece. “We’re a competitive group, and we like to win,” says Wilde. “When you think of the Spartans of history, you think about an efficient and effective culture. These values are symbolized by our name.”

Emerson purchased Fisher Controls in 1993, giving Spartan access to a broad suite of new process control and automation technologies. Emerson translates global market and technology trends into innovative products and solutions and Spartan understands the local market, provides regulatory expertise and offers responsive and flexible support to the local customer. Today, Spartan is Emerson’s exclusive representative in British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan, and is part of a group of 21 Emerson local business partners in North America.

Spartans live and work in 14 towns and cities across its territory. Their primary facility for sales, warehousing, assembly, and service operations is based in Edmonton, Alberta. The company has numerous service and repair centers from Burnaby, to the oil sands of Fort McMurray, to the heart of natural gas production in Grande Prairie and as far east as Regina. Spartan employs roughly nine hundred people and operates over 700,000 square feet of facility space to support its customers.

Committed workforce
Spartan culture is often cited as a key advantage by customers, the companies it represents, and even its competitors. From its inception, Spartan’s leadership structured the company around the concept of broad employee ownership. They understood that allowing employees to own a piece of the company and share in its profitability would result in a more committed workforce. Everyone has an opportunity to purchase a piece of the company, and this drives a high level of dedication to customers. “We’re not employees; we’re owners, and when you have owners serving customers, there’s a higher level of attention, focus, detail, and energy,” says Wilde.

The company’s values reflect this foundation of ownership culture. Spartans are focused on establishing long-term customer relationships built on integrity and trust. From a management standpoint, Spartan leadership works to support frontline people by empowering them to be leaders and to make decisions. Particularly people who are interacting with customers are given latitude to take an active role, make important decisions and act as owners rather than employees.

Creating and sustaining value for the customer
“When we talk about customer value, it’s really how we’re wired,” says Wilde. “Our strategy is about creating and sustaining value that the customer wants. Whether it’s a simple transactional order, or a broad and complex application of control technology that gets implemented over many years, we’ve built our company on being able to serve specific customers and their needs.”

Through various representative agreements and acquisitions, Spartan has continuously added to its product line, assembling a very broad portfolio of solutions and services. This has allowed the company to provide a complete process control loop solution to its customers. Before 1971, the company was only selling components as standalone products, but that year, it decided that to better serve the needs of its customers, it would begin packaging the various parts together into complete solutions. Today, Spartan is Canada’s largest supplier of control panels and assemblies for the oil and gas and petrochemical industries. Spartan encourages its people to collaborate with its customers to come up with new solutions to meet their needs.

Environmental leadership through innovation
For the growing environmental compliance needs within many process industries, Spartan has a portfolio of implementation-ready clean technology developed to address environmental challenges such as energy conservation, reduction of vented and fugitive emissions, and increased production efficiency.

“We deliver these technologies based on very low abatement costs,” says Wilde. “They are as low as two dollars per ton of carbon dioxide — very cost effective. You can achieve environmental compliance and still have a return on your investment.”

Spartan’s customers in the oil and gas industry are leveraging its patented REMVue and Slipstream technologies for engine driven gas compression controls and are on their way to reducing CO2 emissions by over 1 megatonne per year. That is the equivalent to taking about 200,000 vehicles off the roads.

The company has also brought together a dedicated team focused on supporting customer operational excellence. This group brings together solutions and expertise to help optimize customers’ plant operations, making them safer and more reliable while performing better, resulting in more output with fewer material inputs and a reduction in energy and emissions.

“When you combine a number of our local innovations and solutions that we have been developing for 10 to 15 years now with those of Emerson’s, we can help our customers collectively reduce CO2e emissions by more than 15 MT,” says Wilde.

Industry recognition
Spartan’s commitment to its customers, Spartans and communities has not gone unnoticed. For the past 17 years, Spartan has been recognized as one of Canada’s Best Managed Companies and is now considered a Platinum winner. This is an annual award given to companies that can demonstrate a clear strategy, an ability to achieve the goals that they set, financial health and stability, and a culture of commitment to the company.

Focused on the safety of its people, Spartan has also been recognized by the industry for its exemplary safety performance. It has received a Certificate of Recognition including being rated number 1 out of 190 industrial supply companies by the Workers Compensation Board.

“We recently received the Instrument Societies of America (ISA) Corporate Achievement award for the field of automation, The University of Calgary’s award for Corporate Leadership and maybe most rewarding is the United Way Division Excellence award for outstanding campaigns in charitable giving,” says Wilde.

Support for education and community involvement
Investing in future experts of the industry through support of education is another core value at Spartan. In partnership with Emerson and other principals, substantial investments have been made to provide students in post-secondary institutions with the most comprehensive suites of technology. Spartan supports key technical training institutions such as the British Columbia Institute of Technology, Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, Southern Alberta Institute of Technology, Saskatchewan Polytechnic, and other leading centers of learning with over $10 million of its equipment in place.

Spartans are encouraged to be active in the communities in which they live and work. Through various community initiatives, such as a fundraising campaign for the United Way, supporting families in need during the Christmas season, and assistance for community infrastructure programs, they strive to support families and children in need.

As an employee-owned company, Spartan is dedicated to customers, Spartans and communities. Like the Spartans of the past, they are tirelessly devoted to the success of the vision they share.

The post Motivation and Innovation<p class="company">Spartan Controls</p> appeared first on Resource In Focus.

Steeltec is the company’s welding and millwright division. Operating in plants and mining camps throughout Northern Ontario, this division provides a broad range of services including onsite equipment repairs, fabrication of steel components, and much more. The Bucket Shop is its bucket manufacture and repair division. It specializes in providing life-cycle extending wear solutions for heavy equipment buckets, and offers a number of related products and added-value services.

The Bucket Shop began its life in a 5000 square foot shop with two employees. From that location the company began to develop its expertise and build a reputation in the region. That effort lead to enough success that it expanded its shop space twice, settling eventually in a 26,000 square foot facility. But the growth continued, and in 2018 the company was awarded a one million dollar repayable contribution from FEDNOR under the Targeted Manufacturing Initiative for Northern Ontario (TMINO) program toward building its fourth expansion, a ten million dollar 65,000 square foot plant in Timmins’ west end.

This new state-of-the-art facility has been equipped with industry leading technology including ventilation and fume extraction systems to keep workers operating in a safe environment, cutting and bending machinery to expand the companies fabrication capabilities, and a 70 ton overhead crane, one of the largest in the region. The company hired twelve new employees to staff the new shop, adding to their existing workforce of roughly one hundred people. Prior to the expansion, a lack of space was a major limiting factor on the company’s growth. This expansion has enabled it to increase capacity and operate more efficiently.

In the mining industry, heavy equipment buckets are used to move earth and rock. They’re used to dig trenches, to excavate, to dig up and carry heavy rocks in a process called mucking, and much more. These processes can be hard on the equipment. Constant stress and heat can wear down even the most durable machines, so a special category of accessories known as wear solutions are essential. The Bucket Shop offers a line of high performance wear solutions that are capable of extending the life-cycle of mining equipment by three to four hundred percent.

According to The Bucket Shop’s website, its central goal is to help customers in the earth moving sector reduce operating costs and improve overall productivity by extending the life of their equipment. The company leverages a metallurgical expertise toward the creation of metal components made of specialized alloys that are designed to prevent equipment wear. Beyond improved durability, it has created a number of innovations that can help customers improve their productivity.

One such innovation is a mechanically attached front lip for buckets. Because the front lip section of a bucket is under the most stress it will tend to wear down much faster than the rest. Rather than replacing the entire bucket when this happens, the buckets are designed so that the lip can be removed and replaced. Typically these pieces are welded on, so the replacement process requires the old front to be cut off, and a new front to be welded into place. For an underground mining operation this often means transporting the equipment to the surface for the repair. This creates down time which can be very expensive for large scale operations.

The Bucket Shop has designed an innovative front-end piece that can be mechanically attached to the bucket without any welding. The process can be quickly performed underground, which is a significant time savings, which translates directly into cost savings for the customer.

This lip system is a part of The Bucket Shop’s high performance “HiPER” product line, and beyond its mechanical attachment feature, a number of other innovations have been made. The lip is cast from a specialized wear resistant alloy that can improve the life of the component by up to four times. The contours of the lip have been specially engineered for maximum penetration, and the lip shrouds, or teeth, of the lip are designed so that the way they wear down results in a self-sharpening effect. Special inserts made of a different alloy with a higher hardness rating are strategically placed on the lip further improving wear resistance.

While the lip of the bucket experiences the most wear, the second most stressed piece is the heel, or the back portion of the bottom side of the bucket. The HiPER line includes a high performance heel protector cast in wear resistant alloy that also features mechanical attachment and additional alloy inserts. These, and the HiPER cast lip components, are available for all makes and models of scoop trams and front-end loaders.

Complimenting these products, the company offers a wide range of auxiliary components for related applications. These include shrouds and other hardware for bucket repair, undercarriage parts like shoes and rollers for tracks, wear plates, dust collection equipment, and much more.

Due to the extensive capacity of its new facility, the company is able to provide additional support services to its client base. It has gas and plasma cutting tables, a painting area with sand blasting capabilities, a fleet of trucks for transporting heavy equipment, and a fleet of equipment available to customers for rent. By providing this line of accessory components and these additional services, The Bucket Shop is able to offer a lot of added value to the mining industry and has become an important asset to its customers as a result.

Buckets are the company’s specialty, but it has also found a market for working on large truck box assemblies. The Bucket Shop offers full assembly and repair services for new and used truck boxes, as well as specially engineered liners that are customized to fit any truck bed.

With 30 years of field experience and a well developed understanding of the needs of the mining industry, The Bucket Shop has built a solid reputation. Its focus on providing value to customers has earned it a great deal of recognition within its industry, and it has won a number of prestigious awards as a result. In 2017 the company was nominated for two awards by the Timmins Chamber of Commerce at the NOVA ‘17 awards ceremony. It was selected as a finalist in the Business of the Year category and won a President’s award. Later that year it was honored with a Judges Choice award at the Northern Ontario Business Awards ceremony. This recognition demonstrates the companies commitment to the work it does.

More recently, The Bucket Shop has focused its efforts on expanding its reach into global markets. Beyond Timmins, the company has worked in remote locations throughout Canada, various places in the United States, and as far away as Africa. It hopes to extend its reach even further in future years.

The post No Holes In This Bucket<p class="company">The Bucket Shop</p> appeared first on Resource In Focus.

EnerCorp was established as the result of a joint venture between two sand management companies: Dynacorp, a Canadian company founded in Calgary Alberta in 2008, and Energes Oilfield Solutions, an American company founded in 2013. The companies operated independently until March of 2016 when the two collaborated on a project in the Permian Basin. By December of the following year, Energes and Dynacorp merged to form EnerCorp Sand Solutions.

The company has grown substantially by keeping its attention on the changing needs of the industry and its customers. EnerCorp has been able to stand above the competition and push sand management technology forward with its innovative products. “We’re a research and development company with a full line of patented products on the leading edge of sand management,” says Vice President of Business Development Bruce McKenna. “EnerCorp is by far the leader in adopting new technology, new products, and new ways to solve sand management challenges.”

Managing the sand is vital. If the flow of sand is not effectively controlled, it will erode mechanical valves and other important mechanical components. The result is costly maintenance and repairs, at best. At worst, sand erosion can result in explosions, fires, and other serious risks to the safety of everyone working at the site. As shale producers drill deeper and longer laterals, more frac sand is pumped in multiple stages in order to keep these tight formations open for oil and gas production. Even when only small percentages of this frac sand is returned to surface it can amount to thousands of pounds over various time frames. Enercorp products are designed to handle the largest amount of sand returns versus other competitors. Managing and monitoring the sand return with the most efficient technology is what separates Enercorp.

EnerCorp’s patented sand control products enable operators to flow back sand at a higher rate, resulting in much higher initial productions than have been possible in the past. Its equipment allows for much faster and much safer output throughout the entire lifecycle of the well.

EnerCorp’s products consist of three product types that are each in a state of constant evolution. All three of these lines, including the dual and triple horizontal sand filters, vertical sand cyclone, and flowback test separators, are patented proprietary products that have each significantly improved the way sand management is being done in oil fields throughout North America. These products have been widely adopted and are considered state of the art, but EnerCorp refuses to rest on its laurels.

“We’re not happy just inventing one or two products and saying ‘Here’s what we’ve got. We’re the nicest guys in the world. You should use us,’” says McKenna. “It’s continuing to strive to enhance our product line and staying ahead of the curve.” Despite the success of its products, the company concentrates on research and enhancing its equipment and is always working to push the technology even further.

The first of EnerCorp’s three main product types is its horizontal filtration solution. Dual and triple horizontal sand filters use innovative, field-tested, patented technology to filter sand particles as small as fifty microns. Competing equipment often relies on velocity-knockout to allow sand to drop out of the production stream. This process is very inefficient and ineffective. While this process allows much carryover of sand, Enercorp’s screen-based solution will remove even the smallest particles.

A major oil producer located in the Delaware Basin was having trouble with one of its separators. When a seal failed after only a few days, the company realized that sand was passing through the filtration system and accumulating in the equipment. As a result, equipment was always failing, resulting in significant and highly expensive downtime. The company installed EnerCorp’s horizontal filtration system and eliminated the problem entirely.

While the horizontal filters can handle up to five thousand pounds per square inch (psi) of pressure, the vertical cyclonic system is designed for much higher volume and higher flow rates with up to 15,000 psi of pressure.

As well as offering these products for sale, EnerCorp also maintains a rental fleet with installation and maintenance services and operator training. This means that customers can reduce the initial expense of becoming operational. The company’s rental agreements are flexible enough to allow an operator to rent high-capacity equipment to use during the early high volume production stage and then switch to different equipment for longer-term use. The company has complete training services for all of its equipment, ensuring that, whether owned or rented, the customer will be able to operate it safely, efficiently, and for a very long time.

After more than a decade in business, EnerCorp has grown to be the largest sand management company in North America, with nearly three hundred employees at two locations in Canada and seven in the United States. The company is poised to expand even more in the future.

“Our reach currently is all of North America, but we do some work in South America,” says McKenna. “The vast majority of our field service work in completions and sand management occurs in the United States. We are very successful in the Montney and Duvernay zones and we fabricate all of our equipment in Canada, but we want to continue to evolve internationally. We see a lot of opportunities abroad. We want to build more of an international base and show those producers why we’re the leader.”

A key component to the company’s success is a strongly held commitment to its values. These are reflected in the company’s commitment to research, development and an engineering team that has consistently worked at the leading edge of sand management technology to create quality of the work and a solid reputation. Every employee of EnerCorp believes in its principles and operates accordingly, driving the company to so much success.

The company has also been very active in giving back to the communities in which it operates. EnerCorp supports many charitable organizations and educational programs including the Alberta Children’s Hospital, the Ronald McDonald House of Southern Alberta, Women in Trades, the Special Olympics, and many more.

“We’re very passionate about giving back to the community and supporting various charities,” says McKenna. “Giving back is a big thing for us.”

As the oil and gas industry changes, EnerCorp will keep investing in research and development to help minimize sand problems and increase production for producers as this ever-growing industry evolves.

“Traditionally, sand is a pain, and a lot of companies struggle with it,” says McKenna. “They’ll use whatever they can to try and get by, but what we do, and what our company strives to do, is to continue to lead the industry with continuous research and development. We aim to be a full solution provider, rather than just a product provider. We need to continue to adapt to that and stay on the leading edge of what we’re offering.”

The post True Grit<p class="company">EnerCorp Sand Solutions</p> appeared first on Resource In Focus.