In the midst of World War II, one man from Aberdeen and another with deep ties to Portland vowed they would go into business together if they made it home.
Today, that business, Rogers Machinery, is an at times overlooked, yet important, manufacturing business with one of its foundational facilities located in Centralia.
“That was 1949, and our company has been growing as a third-generation family-owned business ever since,” Rogers Machinery Vice President of Operations Eric Forslund said Friday. “We're privately held, and the family continues on with a sustainability plan that keeps going forward in the future.”
The Association of Washington Business (AWB) stopped in Centralia on Friday morning, Oct. 2, to visit Rogers Machinery as part of an annual statewide tour dubbed Manufacturing Week. For 10 years, the association has spent at least a week each year visiting manufacturing sites across Washington state.
At around 9:15 Friday morning, which also happened to be National Manufacturing Day, a Manufacturing Week-branded coach bus pulled into Rogers Machinery. As if from an episode of “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” the vehicle, decorated with signatures from other manufacturing companies, unloaded roughly a dozen excited employees and association members.
A room full of Rogers Machinery personnel led by Forslund waited to greet them. Over the next hour and a half, Forslund provided the group with a crash course on manufacturing industrial strength air compressors and vacuums, the products the company has specialized in for more than 75 years.
Throughout the tour, Foslund and others emphasized the many aspects that make the Portland-based company unique. For starters, Rogers is a true manufacturing company. That means the company has unique designs for the products it sells. But they are also different from others in that they do not manufacture all of the components they use. Rather, the company is focused mainly on assembly.
“Our specialty is in packaging,” Forslund told AWB attendees at the start of the tour. “We put systems together and create solutions for customers. We do that in a unique way, in that we manufacture some products, and then we also buy a lot of products that are accessory items to pull the system together.”
Forslund added that their habit of partnering with many different component manufacturers has at times been a major advantage as they are able to pivot to new parts when there are delays or quality issues with one manufacturer.
Another aspect that makes Rogers Machinery unique is that its primary customers are other manufacturers. In his introduction, Forslund referred to compressed air as the “fourth utility” necessary to most manufacturers behind electricity, water and gas. He added vacuum “must be the fifth or sixth somewhere down the list.”
“Almost all manufacturers use compressed air, and when a compressed air system is down, the plant is down,” Forslund said. “So, a lot of our focus and how we do things and what we do is based on reliability and sustainability, so that we can keep plants running 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”
Throughout the tour, the group visited two different buildings on the Rogers Machinery campus in Port of Centralia Park 1. Starting by viewing two large air compressor units that were nearly ready to ship, the group saw every part of the manufacturing site from the assembly line and storage of components to minute electrical work and even engineering and design work.
The first machine viewed during the tour was a hulking 400-horsepower non-oil air compressor unit. During the tour, Forslund said Rogers Machinery builds both machines that use oil and those that don't. Those that don’t are more expensive and complex, but also in demand for industries where air purity matters.
“This is predominantly for high-tech industries applications where the purity of the air is very important,” Forslund said. “We'll use this for breathing air. We'll use it for the electronics industry where the contamination levels for microprocessors get very sensitive.”
In the last stop on the tour, the visitors got to see the design engineers at work, each using advanced computer aided design (CAD) programs to design new assemblies, including one developing a stack of three air compressors intended for a hospital.
According to Rogers Machinery Seattle Branch Operations Manager John Sitko, vacuums and air compressors sold to hospitals and medical providers are a major part of the company's business in the Seattle metro area.
“Most of the hospitals in the Seattle area in my territory are powered by our equipment,” Sitko said. “Almost every hospital, if you've got any kind of surgery or anything like that going on, you've got both medical air, which is the compressor, and medical vacuum.”
Both Sitko and Operations Director Mike Stinkeoway added the company is putting in effort to make vacuums an even bigger part of the company, which right now is focused largely on air compressors.
“We’re trying to make it a bigger part, a consistent specialty item as a standard offering,” Stinkeoway said.
After the hour-and-a-half visit, the members of AWB piled back on the bus ready for their next stop.
The Manufacturing Week tour, started on Sept. 28 and included stops in Olympia, Centralia and the Vancouver area Friday and was set to take the tour eastward this week.
Before departing, AWB President and CEO Kris Johnson thanked Rogers Machinery for hosting the tour and also spoke briefly to the importance of existing manufacturing in the Centralia area.
“Most folks probably don't even realize here in Lewis County,” Johnson said. “There's 94 manufacturing companies here; 3,500 people wake up every morning and go to work for a maker right here in Lewis County, and those products go, as you just heard, anywhere in the country or all across the globe.”
This week, AWB will travel to Spokane, the Tri-Cities and Yakima and the surrounding areas to visit more than 10 more manufacturers on the eastern side of the state.
For more information on AWB manufacturing week visit https://www.awb.org/events/manufacturing-week/.
