The Brevard Technical Journal

International Appeal
Its small-firm, cost-conscious mentality has proven to be a blueprint of success for Symetrics Industries

by Anne Straub
Brevard Technical Journal

Tour the Symetrics Industries Inc. facility in Melbourne, and you get a feel for the international flavor of the company’s customer base.

The Palm Bay company has, at its core, the remnants of StorageTek’s former manufacturing arm at the plant. It had been part of that company’s struggling high-speed impact printer business until a Texas investor bought the Palm Bay location from StorageTek in 1996.

The plant still makes printer parts for StorageTek and other manufacturers. But making parts for the impact printer industry in a world of laser and ink-jet printers could be a modern version of a buggy-whip manufacturer. Profits are good for now, but demand is declining.

“That’s where we were, and that’s not our future,” said David Hoover, general manager.

He and his wife, Sarah, human resources manager, joined the company two and a half years ago. New owner Stan Bradshaw, whose company sells and services printers, charged them with transitioning the plant into a contract manufacturer.

Contract manufacturers take on pieces of jobs from other manufacturers who choose to outsource part, or even most, of the production of their wares. Motorola mobile handsets, for example, bear the company’s name even though they’re made by a contract manufacturer.

The option has become increasingly popular over the past 10 or 15 years, said Bill Canis, executive director of the Manufacturing Institute for the National Association of Manufacturers. The practice was pioneered by the U.S. auto industry and has become commonplace. “We see this across the board,” Canis said.

“Companies aren’t necessarily good at making everything,” Canis said. Contract manufacturing allows them to focus on their strengths – such as making another part, marketing, or assembly – and keep their costs down by outsourcing work to a company that can do it cheaper and better.

“This is one way companies can keep plants here (in the United States) and keep costs down,” he said.

There’s an award from Poland, souvenir Korean tea and pictures of executives at a Singapore Air Show. A world map on a wall is dotted with smiley faces to mark customer locations. Last month, the company hosted visitors from Spain, and the president was in Tokyo on business. And consider a 36-day business trip planned for Ron Frye, vice president of business development: He starts in Turkey, continues on to London, then Australia, Korea, Taiwan and Singapore.

Clearly, these people get around.

In almost 40 years of operation, the defense electronics company has grown from a purely build-to-print contract manufacturer to develop and market products.

“Putting more legs on the stool” is how Frye describes the expanded technical base. He joined the company in 1995, and used build-to-print as a catalyst for growth.

The strategy is producing growth of about 11 percent a year, with sales of $20 million last year. Employment has grown from about 50 in defense production five years ago to close to 85 today.

The company is privately owned after a management buyback in 1998. It had previously traded on the NASDAQ.

“They’re very well-organized. They know what they’re doing,” said Geoff Farmer, publisher of Global Defence Review and Equipment Training & Support News, a London-based publication and web site. Farmer participates in the same trade shows around the world as Symetrics. “Their stand is always popular because their equipment is popular.”

A current focus for the company is its Improved Data Modem for use in military aircraft. The technology uses voice radios as a conduit for sharing information, linking several pilots and the ground. It transmits in a digital format to get target information to the pilot faster.

The IDM also offers the option to add photo imagery in the PRISM-IDM. Rather than simply firing at a blip on the radar screen, a pilot can view a picture of the target to make sure it’s valid. The technology aims to reduce friendly fire accidents, in which a pilot mistakenly targets civilians or an ally.

IDMs have been sold worldwide, and Great Britain was the first customer for the PRISM-IDM, installing it on Jaguars.

The company markets the technology as small, light and cheap. The IDM costs $55,000, with the PRISM imagery option available for another $12,000.

“It seems remarkable for a company of our size to be the first people to have a cost-effective method of being able to put images into the cockpit,” said Jim Peterson, Symetrics director of business development.

Transmitting information at higher speeds helps military forces to be more responsive to developing intelligence data. For example, they can update the location of a moving target or identify a higher threat and change the target while the fighter is in flight.

Information also travels faster in the opposite direction. Symetrics officials recount a scenario in which a couple F-14s took off from an aircraft carrier in the Middle East. On the way to their targets, new intelligence information caused the targets to be changed. That information was sent to the fighters, who attacked the target. PRISM-IDM sent information and photos back to the ship, which then transmitted them to Washington, D.C., where the data landed in the decision-makers’ hands well before the fighters even returned to the carrier.

That’s a far cry from the days when media covering a war would sometimes have images and information before the military, Peterson said.

The company also is marketing the AN/ALE-47 Countermeasures Dispensing System, which protects a variety of aircraft by dispensing flare and chaff decoys to confuse a radar-guided attack. Symetrics began supplying the system to the U.S. Air Force in 2001, and Australia now is looking at it.

Such systems, currently used on the government’s executive fleet, could eventually have commercial potential to protect against a terrorist missile attack, Peterson said.

Farmer credits the company’s smaller-firm mentality for a cost-consciousness that produces value, seen in the IDM and the countermeasures dispensing system. “They’re probably the cheapest in the marketplace for those now,” he said of the CMDS.

Still, cost would be a major factor in any effort to equip commercial airplanes with the technology, noted Jerry Sinclair, a Symetrics senior vice president. The company has had general conversations on the topic with agencies charged with protecting airlines, he said.

The company also makes a Memory Loader Verifier Set that the Navy uses to load electronic data on its aircraft and the Data Acquisition Unit for the GATOR, a data-gathering unmanned aerial vehicle that measures less than half a foot long.

On the Web: www.symetrics.com.