Schweitzer Labs Expands In Pullman

Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories unveiled its new 65,000-square-foot manufacturing facility here Tuesday.

“The building here is a shell,” said Vice President of Operations Doug Voda. “It creates the opportunity for us to accomplish a purpose.”

That purpose is designing and manufacturing protective relays and communications products - equipment that digitally protects, monitors and controls the flow of electricity into substations, motors, generators and other electricity-providing power systems.

“When you see a light flicker, you see our product in use,” Voda said.

Inside the $5 million facility, more than 150 employees are already designing, assembling, testing and shipping SEL’s relays to more than 60 countries around the world.

With 506 total employees and 58 new positions now being filled, the rapidly expanding Pullman company has more than tripled the number of employees since 1995. The new manufacturing facility is SEL’s sixth building on the 40 acres it owns in the Port of Whitman County’s industrial park northeast of Pullman. And it’s not likely the last.

SEL founder and president Edmund Schweitzer III said Tuesday there are plans to construct a paved parking lot and another building by Christmas 2001.

The company also plans to automate several processes currently done by hand. The move will increase efficiency, but it won’t downsize the work force, Voda said. The automation will “elevate the dignity of work” for employees now doing manual labor in those positions, Schweitzer said. There also are plans for what Schweitzer calls “SEL University,” designed for internal - and possibly external - training for power industry staff.

Though SEL had just announced its newest manufacturing facility Tuesday, Schweitzer said the company will likely expand the building again in the near future. About 150 of Schweitzer’s 450 Pullman employees began working in the new building three weeks ago, after a $400,000 manufacturing system was installed.

The company also has 23 domestic and nine international field offices. Tuesday, Schweitzer said SEL’s future growth will likely stem from expansion from the utility market into the industrial sector.

“If you think about bulk use of electrical power, where does it go? Refineries, steel mills, airports, hospitals,” Schweitzer said. “There’s more and more industrial opportunities. In industry, electrical motors run everything.”

Schweitzer developed the first digital relay as part of his electrical engineering Ph.D. project at Washington State University in the early ‘80s. The invention has revolutionized the power-protection industry, which has begun to replace aging electro-mechanical systems with SEL’s digital equipment.

“When he started out they asked for $2,000 from a bank - the bank wasn’t willing to take a risk, but Ed did,” said Don Brunell, Association of Washington Business president.

Schweitzer founded the business in 1982 with his wife, Mary. The couple has since become major philanthropic donors in the Moscow-Pullman area, financing everything from research projects at the area’s two universities to a new aquatics center in Pullman.