Schweitzer Laboratories sees world of opportunity

Lydig Construction Tuesday topped out the new five-story Pullman headquarters of Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories. The project will not be completed until the fall, but even as workers celebrated with pop and pizza by the boxful, a rectangle of trenches a stone’s throw away was ready for footings that will support a company event center.

Schweitzer, or SEL, has become a serial builder. The headquarters and event center will be the 10th and 11th structures the company has built or purchased on a hillside north of Washington State University. They are also the first erected on 92 acres acquired in 2001 to assure there will be enough space for future expansion. Besides more office space, very tentative plans envision a campus with food services, recreational facilities, even housing.

How fast construction proceeds may depend somewhat on just how fast SEL can recruit engineers and other workers. The company employs 894 in Pullman, about 75 percent of the total worldwide. After adding 200 employees last year, SEL founder and President Ed Schweitzer says he expects to hire at least another 200 this year. The company has 80 positions open this week, including jobs for engineers, technicians, and managers.

Production workers, all full time, travel from as far away as Spokane and Lewiston, and most of the smaller farm and lumber communities in between have been tapped, if not tapped out. To help ease shortages, the company may soon approve the use of part-time labor.

Engineers are in particularly short supply despite SEL’s proximity to WSU and the University of Idaho. Schweitzer, like executives at other Washington high-tech companies, is frustrated by immigration policies that limit the number of visas available to engineers who want to work in the United States.

Legislation cleared by the Senate Judiciary Committee Monday might alleviate the shortage, but the controversial bill faces hurdles before the full Senate, as well as the House of Representatives.

Schweitzer says the U.S. needs workers, high- and low-tech. Forcing foreign engineering students trained at WSU to leave the U.S. rather than allowing them to put their skills to work here is not only foolish, Schweitzer says, it’s unfair.

“We should consider ourselves lucky if those young people would like to consider this their home,” he says.

Schweitzer says the inability to fill some positions has sometimes been a drag on SEL, which sells its digital relays and other electricity monitoring and control equipment in 110 countries. The company has 45 technical service offices worldwide, with another planned for India.

Factories outside Chicago and in Monterrey, Mexico, supplement production in Pullman.

Sales — the company does not disclose numbers — are increasing at 20 percent per year, with no slowdown in sight. Competitors include global giants like Siemens and ABB.

Although SEL sells its equipment to every utility in the U.S., Schweitzer says less than half of the outdated electro-mechanical switches that protect the nation’s electricity grid have been replaced by the digital versions that are SEL’s bread and butter. To simplify adoption of the technology, SEL now makes self-contained sheds that can be wired into substations in far less time than it would take to install all the components on-site.

Transmission grid applications remain the core of SEL’s business, but expansion been driven as well by inroads into industrial and government applications.

For example, Schweitzer says SEL was approached by the owner of an oil refinery in Greece who wanted to improve the facility’s control systems, and allow operators to shed electricity load in an orderly way should there be a blackout or other emergency. SEL developed such a system, simulated its performance and delivered the equipment to the plant. The work led to two patents — one for Schweitzer, a third-generation inventor and entrepreneur.

He says SEL is also finding new customers in the petrochemical, drug and timber industries. One new customer was attracted by SEL’s growing expertise in encryption, which was developed to protect remote-controlled equipment.

SEL is also working on shipboard applications for the U.S. Navy.

Alas for Schweitzer, all his commitments Tuesday kept him from getting any closer to his new headquarters than the construction trailer. Eventually, though, he will have a fine view, not just of Pullman, but of SEL’s expanding world as well.