Facility Expansion

As preliminary work for the 2009 budget was being performed back in Q2 of 2008, it became apparent to management that Sil-Pro was headed for a period of extraordinary sales growth. Many of the development activities the company had been engaged in over the past few years were starting to take shape, and were scheduled for production volumes in the coming months. In preparation for this growth, Sil-Pro’s management team went to work making plans to provide the manufacturing space that would be necessary to accommodate the increased sales.

To that end, Sil-Pro started planning a dual approach to increased manufacturing space. First, architects were engaged to design a 25,000 sq/ft addition to the existing building in Delano, which would maximize the property and provide the company with state of the art manufacturing space large enough to service the growth needs of our customers for years to come. These plans have been approved by the city of Delano, and Sil-Pro is committed to breaking ground on this addition sometime over the next 5 years as sales volumes dictate.

The second aspect of the plan was to remodel existing space in the facility. A diverse team of personnel was assembled to participate in a week long planning exercise to dramatically remodel all of the non-cleanroom space available in the building. The team included several experts in lean concepts, and the others received a crash course to ensure that the remodel plan absolutely maximized manufacturing space and process efficiency. The resulting design ideas were vetted with personnel company wide, as well as the trades experts that would be contracted to perform electrical, engineering, HVAC and cleanroom design.

Work began on this remodeling activity in November of 2009. While portions of the remodel are complete, the entire project is not scheduled for completion until early March of 2010. During the construction period, great care has and will be taken to minimize any impact to existing operations. In any case where we believed there may be an impact, customers were notified and conditions closely monitored to ensure our facilities met specifications at all times.

Once complete, this remodel phase will add roughly 3,500 sq/ft of cleanroom space inside of the existing facility. In addition, the new areas of cleanroom will incorporate state of the art environmental control and processing equipment. It will provide room for a substantial amount of new production cells ensuring that we have room to grow until such time as the addition becomes necessary.