Optimation Blog

You may be a startup firm with some promising IP and a dream, a researcher with a lab scale manufacturing line, or a manufacturer with an established product and a great market who needs additional manufacturing capacity. In each case you need a new manufacturing machine or a new production line, and you need a firm skilled and capable of designing and fabricating the unique and custom manufacturing equipment and systems to meet your requirements. There are a lot of different products and even more ways to manufacture them. Your product may be a food product, a pharmaceutical or a chemical. It might be a discrete product requiring machining or assembly or an item manufactured at high speed on a roll-to-roll process and then converted to its usable form. Independent of what it is you need and how it is manufactured, how do you find a qualified company to design and build it for you? In many cases you will start a search on Google or ThomasNet, testing several key words try to find a few qualified suppliers that you can talk to. After you do that, how do you vet them, check capabilities, and make the best selection for what you need to have engineered, designed, fabricated, and commissioned?

Electrical safety is important because electricity may cause serious injuries, or even fatalities.

Many companies making high tech sophisticated products require testing prior to selling and/or end-user installation. Putting these products thru a thorough and vigorous test process will not only satisfy client requirements but will also give you peace of mind that your products can withstand the rigors of real-world environments once they have left your company. A heavyweight boxing champion in the US once said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." Just like sports, that is true in our fabrication & testing industry.

Technologies such as fuel cells are not just for NASA. It is true fuel cells helped get humans into space and to the moon 50-60 years ago and will soon perhaps to Mars. But those fuel cells weren’t cost-effective enough to become accessible to other applications that are more familiar to us, like driving a car or powering our offices and homes. Nuclear plants, coal-fired utilities, and natural gas along with petroleum led the way for decades.

90 million Americans received the $1,400 stimulus checks this week. The recipients are part of the first wave of payments that totaled more than $242 billion, the Treasury Department, IRS and Bureau of the Fiscal Service announced Wednesday. Additional batches of payments will be made in the coming weeks. Recipients of this first tranche include those who provided direct deposit information on their 2019 or 2020 tax returns, or who submitted their information through the IRS non-filer tool last year.

Skilled trades are needed now more than ever.

America is facing a massive skilled labor shortage. According to the Department of Labor, the US economy had 7.6 million unfilled jobs, but only 6.5 million people were looking for work as of January 2019 and it is more apparent than ever that our country is suffering because of it. 

Each year the Monroe County Professional Engineering Society (MPES) facilitates the award of several scholarships to High School students going into engineering curriculums in college.  Optimation sponsors one of the MPES scholarships each year.  Usually the scholarship recipients are recognized and celebrated at the Rochester Engineering Society Gala.  Unfortunately there will not be an RES Gala this year, but this does not mean we should not celebrate Dylan Tompkins, our 2021 recipient, in every way possible!

At Optimation we design and fabricate manufacturing equipment. We have about a hundred creative and inquisitive engineers and another hundred creative and talented tradesmen. Optimation engineers create the designs. Skilled journeymen craft workers bring these designs to life in Optimation’s 100,000 square foot fabrication facility. Collaborating as a team they can design and build almost anything. Our passion at Optimation is to grow the manufacturing base in the United States. We have a very diverse client base and the ideas and concepts they want to bring to realization are just as diverse. Recently Optimation was selected by the Rochester Technology Manufacturing Association as a winner of the Manufacturing Innovation Award, Large Company Division. This was a recognition for the talents of our team. We do thousands of projects. It is hard to pick preferred clients or most unique projects, but I have picked a few of our favorites to tell you about in this blog.   While we serve many industries and many technologies some or our most challenging, innovative, and transformative projects have been for the food industry.  

National Engineer's Week in the United States is held every year in February during the week of George Washington's birthday. George Washington, the nation's first President, was also an engineer and a surveyor. He also served as an architect and designed his estate and the buildings at Mount Vernon. Washington also was a design engineer. He invented and fabricated new farm tools including a plow that rotated and dispensed seeds. Washington was a strong advocate for the advancement of engineers in the young country. Many of his military strategies were successful because of his knowledge and use of engineering. One of Washington’s greatest engineering achievements was his work on the Patowmack Canal. Washington’s plan was to allow navigation and access to Ohio by widening the Potomac River and building canals and locks around the most turbulent parts. His engineering efforts were sidetracked for eight years when he was elected president. He went back to the project after his second term was completed but died three years before the entire project was completed.