May 2009 - After waiting too many times on outside companies to build his fans and missing service calls on units for which he couldn’t get the parts, Mike Orseno decided he’d had enough.

It was time to move his industrial fan manufacturing from vendors to his facility. But this demanded several million dollars’ worth of equipment, along with skilled labor, which is what prevented him from doing it in the first place.

But now Orseno, president of Champion Fan Corp., Carol Stream, Ill., had a way to make it work: merging with his brother’s company, Vibra-Mech Inc., also in Carol Stream, Ill. "After mulling this over for several years, I decided by merging my brother’s company and Champion, we would have enough money and resources to purchase a building and bring all the fabrication work inside," Orseno says. "So this was a perfect fit for both of us. We build, fix and service the fans."

Champion Fan has a long history dating back to 1874. At that time the original founder, Henry B. Keiper, was only 16 years old. He watched a blacksmith shoe one of his horses, and as the blacksmith was working a bellows to keep the iron hot, Keiper had a unique idea. This epiphany led to the origins of Champion Fan, then called Champion Blower & Forge, Lancaster, Pa. Keiper realized a rotary blower would relieve the blacksmith of pumping the bellows to add oxygen to it in the forge. With this idea, he developed a rotary fan.

Champion Blower & Forge was a family-owned business until the mid-1960s, when the grandsons of the original owner started selling it off. After it was sold in 1969, the headquarters was relocated to Roselle, Ill. In 1978, it was sold again and stopped operations in 1986. Mike Wolf, Orseno and Wayne Hildebrand purchased the assets and began operation as Champion Fan Corp. in 1987. A new facility in South Elgin, Ill., was opened in November 1996. Orseno was vice president of engineering and later bought out the other partners and moved to Carol Stream with a 16,000-sq.-ft. facility and 12 employees. In January 2008, he merged his brother’s service company, Vibra-Mech, into CVM Cos. Inc., the umbrella for both organizations.

Originally, the company had an extensive catalog of stocked industrial fans used for various applications, including ones for HVAC. But Orseno moved away from standard fans for HVAC applications because they had a slim profit margin. Now, he produces fans for unusual applications that no stocked fan could handle. One example is a one-of-a-kind, all-stainless-steel fan used to move high volumes of air in a corrosive environment. Other models have fan rotors 11 ft. in diameter. Champion will build a fan with a 12-in. fan rotor all the way up to one with an 11-ft. rotor, which are all made to order rather than stocked. But he does carry a few fans that have high sales volume.

In-house solutions
"When we purchased the company in 1987, one of the partners was a metal fabricator," Orseno says. "He had a line of hydraulic equipment. So rather than duplicate all the machinery needed to make the fans, when we purchased the old company, we decided to be a sales and engineering company. We had an office and outsourced all of the fabrication to my partner’s fabricating company. His interest in the company was to broaden his sales without having to do any marketing or sales. This gave him more volume for his raw goods purchases, saving him money. We didn’t have the cash to put up a new building or purchase all the equipment we needed right away. So this worked great for all of us."

But as the years went by, the fan products were competing with the partner’s hydraulic products for fabrication time. To help solve this, one of the partners constructed a building in South Elgin, where he did the fan manufacturing processes, building the main fan components. Then Orseno would get the basic burned and sheared parts from the fabricator and form, weld, paint, assemble and ship them.

"Even after our original partner sold his fabricating business, we continued to work with the new owner," says Orseno. "The prices were right, and we had a good relationship with the company. But I often couldn’t get timely service or the turnaround I needed for my customers, especially for emergency work. Sometimes it would take a week or two to process these parts. So here I am, turning down business because I can’t ship that part quickly, or I can’t ship them a replacement fan in two to three weeks. And we didn’t want to pay a premium for overtime.

"Sometimes a fan can shut down a plant. We had a fan that pushed volatile paint fumes into an incinerator. If it broke down, the customer would have to shut the plant down within four hours because of EPA’s restrictions. Therefore, this type of emergency means the customer needs to have that fan running as fast as possible, and these are the types of situations we deal with. We had to have the ability to make parts in-house."

By making his own fans and parts, Orseno says it also allows Champion to control its costs and even reduce them because the company no longer has to deal with markups on steel or labor. "I would save money this way and make a lot more money by having additional sales because I can now get my parts faster," he says. "It allows me to take advantage of emergency or overtime work that have higher billing rates."

In 1975, Champion Blower & Forge was one of the first companies in the Midwest to buy a computer-controlled plasma system. "It had a 20-ft.-by-28-ft. table," says Orseno. "It was my job to program it. So I was familiar with this process. When we decided to purchase a plasma system, we did our homework. We went to trade shows and saw various manufacturers. But with my experience, I felt I knew what to look for in a machine. There were several machines we didn’t even look at because of their poor construction. We wanted a specific system, one that’s compact to take up less space and [is] heavy-duty."

This eliminated several plasma manufacturers right away, says Orseno. There were also light-duty machines he didn’t want either. "We needed something with a heavy-duty table to handle steel plate that was up 11/2 in. thick. Angle-iron frame tables wouldn’t cut it. So based on this, we quickly narrowed it down to three manufacturers."

Orseno says he wanted a unit that had a down-draft table rather than a water table. He had experience with water tables and knew cleaning them could be time-consuming.

"We did our homework on this equipment and went to see all the machines being used before we made a final decision," he says. "We talked to each manufacturer extensively, and then we decided that AKS Cutting Systems’ plasma unit [Cleveland] was the best for our needs. It was also economical compared to other manufacturers.

"We found that the people at AKS Cutting Systems were knowledgeable and easy to deal with. They wanted a new machine in this area, and they were willing to work with us on a couple of things. But you never know what will happen after you sign on the dotted line. It’s only something you find out through experience, but the AKS people were great."

Orseno bought a plasma system with a 6-ft.-by-12-ft. bed using a Hypertherm HP230 plasma torch and a Farr air filtration system. "It’s beefy and compact," says Orseno. "It had all the features that every other machine had, and it serves every need we have." FFJ

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