Equipment Maker to Relocate Headquarters

Plastics production equipment maker Conair is moving its world headquarters to a new campus in suburban Pittsburgh.

The company is moving from leased space in Emsworth, Pa., to another Pittsburgh suburb, Cranberry, at the end of 2007. The new location in Cranberry will host the company’s administrative, sales and engineering personnel as well as the Conair Technical Center. Conair’s manufacturing plant in Franklin, Pa., about 60 miles to the north, has not been affected.

 “While our current site is a fantastic showcase facility and has served us well for the last decade, the lease expiration gave us the opportunity to explore new options and, in the end, the decision was easy,” says Conair President Chris Keller. “This beautiful single-story building will allow for vastly improved workflow and communication, giving us the opportunity to improve how we operate and how we serve our customers. The new, full-size Tech Center will accommodate everything we had in Emsworth, plus added space for a product showroom and lab space for customer application testing of material conveying, dryers, blenders, heat transfer, granulators and extrusion equipment.”

The one-story open floor plan in the new office space promises to bring together departments that have been spread over three wings and three different levels in the Emsworth building, according to Keller. “By bringing marketing, sales, engineering and service into closer proximity, we expect to be able to respond to customer needs more rapidly and with better coordination than we could before,” he comments.

The company’s Tech Center will include:

• a raw-material-flow analysis lab
• operational extrusion equipment, including a full-scale medical-tubing line
• blender testing and application development facilities
• a granulator lab, where part feeding and size reduction efficiencies are analyzed
• mold temp and chiller testing and application development facilities
• a plant-wide control demo unit of ControlWorks™, where processors can learn how to gain process efficiencies through Conair’s integrated auxiliary system control and data-gathering equipment
• demonstration equipment for the complete range of Conair loading controls systems — from the Intelligent Loading System (ILS) to the new entry-level ELC control
• a 1,125-sq.-ft. dedicated showroom that offer visitors the chance to see all the latest Conair products in a year-round tradeshow-like setting
• meeting rooms designed to accommodate training sessions as well as educational seminars conducted by independent, outside experts.

“Conair is, and will continue to be, the leading innovator in auxiliary equipment for plastics processors,” Keller concludes. “Customers can feel confident that this new facility will help us continue to improve our quality, product reliability and service for years to come.”

Conair makes resin drying, blending, feeding and conveying handling equipment, heat-transfer systems and temperature-control equipment, granulators and downstream extrusion systems.