When moving large volumes of high-voltage electricity from a source as powerful as Niagara Falls across vast geographies and into people’s homes, investing in the best hardware that money can buy is crucial.
After 115 years of helping to connect Canadians by forging premium, mission-critical transmission, distribution, and communication infrastructure and hardware, Slacan Industries Inc. has built a fine reputation for excellence and trustworthiness. The company has achieved this through commitment, reliability, tight quality control, and in-house fabrication, producing even its smallest parts in its own facility.
Standing apart
Here, product longevity and resilience guide a daily mission to be Canada’s best in its industry. As a result, continuous investment in technology has brought Slacan’s count of next-generation machinery to 10 units—and that number is growing. During a recent visit of around 20 engineers, all from a prospective client company, the company’s value proposition once again became as clear as ever. The longevity of its products and its capabilities speak for themselves.
Slacan Industries is not only known for service and hardware excellence, however. The company is also the proud owner of a vast cache of historic dies and hardware worth a few million dollars, which it maintains to continue servicing older infrastructure. In the process, the team serves most of Canada’s largest utility providers through distribution partners; some have been customers for the past half-century, while another giant served by Slacan is Bell, one of Canada’s leading telecommunications providers. And with in-house processes including Steel Forging, Hot & Cold Stampings, and Casting, among others, the team is able to serve a variety of other markets as well, including OEM, Agricultural, and Mining.
The company is in fact so robust in its capabilities that it asks clients removing spent parts from their old infrastructure—anywhere from 30 to 70 years old—to return worn parts to Slacan’s factory for in-depth study and further product development and improvement. With fully-fledged engineering design and product engineering teams, the company takes both pride and pleasure in improving on earlier designs, and with a collection of around 30,000 products, it receives requests to reproduce about 10,000 of these annually.
While it is common amongst competitors to source raw materials, engineering, and fabrication from foreign suppliers, Slacan is proud to source most of its raw materials for forging on Canadian soil. Because here, price and product are not the only important considerations. Slacan’s legacy, quality, generational knowledge, and product guarantees are as much a part of its value proposition as its engineering prowess, and these attributes are not necessarily the case when working with offshore facilities.
Service above all
Located in a 200,000-square-foot facility on a 14-acre property in Brantford, Ontario, with both Toronto, Ontario and Buffalo, New York just 70 miles away, Slacan Industries is perfectly situated to serve customers across an impressive footprint. Serving the breadth of Canada from coast to coast, its superpower resides in having developed the foundational elements of many of these service providers’ hardware components itself.
Trading in this industry at such a high level is an expensive endeavour, however, as many of the tools needed to maintain such lines cost in the region of $30,000 to $40,000. For this reason, Slacan historically outsourced its large tooling while making its own smaller tools. But that recently changed when it invested in acquiring the appropriate equipment to become self-sufficient in all its tooling needs. Now, when customers call in with the name of a broken line under its care, replacing old hardware with new hardware—no matter how long ago it was installed—has become significantly easier.
Once, when a client called in to request repairs on towers that collapsed under six inches of ice during an extreme weather event, the team was able to go back to its records, find the original part designs, and then locate the dies in its die store. “They had helicopters landing on our 14 acres here to pick up parts because they were so desperate. There was no power there at all,” shares Director of Sales and Marketing, Tom Lepera. “We’re not just here to sell; we’re more of a partner. We take the good with the bad,” he adds, describing the company’s approach to loyalty.
Lepera notes that some clients arrive with requests for small-volume, high-cost component fabrication. Fulfilling such orders is expensive, but the company takes the work on anyway, even when it takes four to five hours to set up the machines needed to fabricate the parts. This is just one way in which it demonstrates its commitment to its customers’ success.
A top team
Of course, none of this would be possible without the people behind its success. “We have a tremendous amount of respect for our people as we realize how hard they work in our factory, especially as temperatures get hot and they are working in a very hot forging environment with very heavy steel parts,” Lepera says. For this reason, the company has invested in exoskeletons to minimize physical fatigue for team members stationed at its forging hammers. As this is a heavy and laborious industry, Slacan ensures that the team’s health and safety are protected as much as possible in the workplace by maintaining high standards.
It also honours legacy staff. To this end, the company took the opportunity to invite a number of former team members who had been retired for some time on a tour to show them its latest transformation. Most of them had started working for the company 50 years before the major overhaul, which, of course, now includes extensive automation and robotics.
“It was thanks to them as the pioneers that led the way to perfecting the quality and operation of our processes that led us to build what we have today,” Lepera says, noting how much the company’s owner also appreciated the letter of thanks that followed their visit.
The road ahead
With roads and other infrastructure being installed to service Canada’s Ring of Fire, the famous mineral-rich area in James Bay’s lowlands of Northern Ontario, Slacan will be providing poleline hardware to which it also holds the patents.
Moreover, as the demand for utilities drives U.S. companies to reach out to poleline hardware fabricators in Canada, Slacan Industries is ready to expand its presence across the border. Currently, the projected expansion includes a possible new fabrication facility in the Chicagoland area. The strategy will allow for U.S.-made products alongside its existing Canadian-made ranges to serve a wider audience.
The time is ripe for such expansion; the past few years have seen Slacan making significant capital investments, bringing its collection of large, updated automation machines to about 10. Preparing for the inevitable has meant tripling its capacity over the past half-decade and securing supply chains.
“We will continue to make huge investments in equipment and people as well as alternate facilities to support our growth in both Canada and the USA,” Lepera tells us. “There is and will continue to be huge projects across North America in the next 15 years with electrical infrastructure of 340KV to 765KV, which will put massive demand on all products associated with transmission towers and our high-quality hardware,” he continues. Such Extra-High Voltage (EHV) infrastructure is responsible for minimal energy loss when transmitting large volumes of electricity over impressive expanses of land.
By positioning itself as a high-quality engineer and fabricator serving the critical utilities market across the United States and Canada, Slacan Industries is committed to remaining relevant in the high-voltage market over the next century. Once prospective customers visit its facilities and understand the level of long-term quality and top safety standards its products provide, any quibbling about price goes out the window. And a new customer walks in the door.
