Return to Back Issues main page
Motors and More
A third generation leads Longo Industries down new paths in the electromechanical equipment repair business
By Tom Gibson
On the day I visited Longo Industries, Joe Longo,
Jr.'s two children, ages 8 and 10, came to work as part of a take-the-kids-to-work
day. Sounds nice enough, like a wholesome family activity and an educational
experience that will prepare them for the real world. But in this case,
it could signify something much deeper than that, perhaps the start of
a fourth generation taking the helm of this equipment repair business
in Wharton, New Jersey.
It doesn't take a Rhodes Scholar to see a pattern here. Joe Longo, Sr. used to bring Joe, Jr. into work on Saturdays when he was little. "When he was about seven or eight, he wound his first motor," Dad recalls, and then he later worked there summers during high school and college as a parts washer, among other things. Going back another generation, Joe, Sr., now the company's chairman, started working there in 1946 as a 19-year-old fresh out of the service. Now in its third generation, Longo Industries started in 1945 when Joe, Sr.'s father John Longo founded it in the basement of his Morristown, New Jersey home.
Since that time, Longo Industries has grown and prospered, and today, it finds itself expanding into new areas in various ways. The company has facilities in Wharton, in north central New Jersey, and Linden, near Newark, and New York City. They rebuild and sell electrical and mechanical equipment and design systems for utility, commercial, institutional, and industrial applications such as wastewater treatment plants, generating stations, and manufacturing processes, serving much of the Northeast. Traditional activities have included rewinding motors and generators and designing power delivery and related systems. They sell AC and DC motors, switchgear, controls and starters, circuit breakers, and transformers.
In touring the shop, Joe, Sr. quips, "The motors get pretty big as you can see," as we stare into the stator (outer housing and winding) of a monstrous unit about six feet in diameter, big enough for a repair person to kneel inside while they work. As an example of where something like this is used, the New York Port of Authority selected Longo to rewind 36 1500-horsepower motors on three of the famed Kennedy Class Staten-Island Ferry boats. New York City's Department of Transportation wanted the motors brought back to their original condition and power after 30 years of service on New York Harbor. Longo went even further and upgraded their materials to provide motors thermally superior than the originals.
Engineers Rule
With large jobs like this, Joe, Sr. says they determined long ago that
Longo should be engineering-driven. Indeed, engineering permeates the
company, from normal repair operations to designing special jobs. For
starters, Joe, Sr. himself graduated from Newark College of Engineering
(now New Jersey Institute of Technology) with a B.S. in electrical engineering.
Engineers manage most areas of the company, and 16 or 17 of Longo's 130 employees are engineers, including the plant manager. "While it does add cost to the process, we feel the value it produces is well worth it for the buyer," Joe, Sr. says. He stresses that companies care more about making quality product and having their machines run properly than saving a few dollars upfront in buying equipment. Electrical and mechanical engineers populate the staff. As an example of the mix of skills required, John Ziomek, vice president of Longo Engineered Systems Company (LESCO), an entity they created to offer engineering services, got his B.S. in mechanical engineering from NJIT but has extensive experience designing electric power and control systems as well as microprocessor-based controls for power generation equipment. LESCO specializes in turnkey projects such as circuit breaker retrofits, installing variable-frequency drives for pumping and HVAC applications, transformer and generator retrofitting, and designing power systems as well as controls for motors, generators, pumps and fans.
While
it may make for interesting work, Joe, Sr. reveals that his only goal
in running the business has been to perpetuate it. "The business
was not run for profit or personal gain but for the establishment of a
family succession into several generations." It comes at a price.
"We have worked zealously at it, I'd say with moderate success. It's
hard. First of all, you've got a generational issue. And secondly, you
have a father-son issue." They've called in outside consultants to
assist with running a family business, and Joe, Jr. attends a family succession
program at the Harvard Graduate Business School three weeks a year.
As Joe, Jr. sees it, "There's a lot of pressure," but for other reasons. Longo deals with people that have been customers for 30 or 40 years, and "so you have to live up to the same standards year in and year out." But, he adds, "It's definitely rewarding. We have 130 people, and it's still a family business, and as it's grown through the years, we've tried to maintain that family business environment."
Joe, Jr. attended Notre Dame for an electrical engineering degree because "I knew I wanted to be involved in the family business, so I felt electrical engineering was the most appropriate path to follow since 70 or 80 percent of what we do is electrical," he explains. After graduating in 1984, he went to work at General Electric in the company's technical marketing program, which puts engineers through a marketing and sales program to turn them into field sales engineers. First came a stint in Cleveland, during which he worked at a steel mill in Akron, Ohio handling startup of equipment, and he later got into retrofits of PCB transformers. A year-long assignment in Tampa, Florida involved him in motors and their repair, in particular with the phosphate mining draglines common in central Florida.
New Ventures
Such experience with a large company in diverse areas prepared Joe, Jr.
for coming to work at Longo Industries in 1986. After working in several
positions, such as customer service representative, plant manager, and
vice president of operations, he recently became president of the company
on his 40th birthday. A nice present, but he now finds himself in the
role of expanding the business into new areas. An axiom says all businesses
must expand and revise their products if they expect to last many decades
-- or in this case, family generations -- as any product or service eventually
becomes obsolete.
The decline of smokestack industries in this country has caused the traditional electrical repair market to mature and lose growth potential, with several factors causing the maturity, according to Joe, Sr. Manufacturing processes have advanced, so instead of a motor requiring manual rewinding, a machine can do it. Overseas manufacturers have flooded the market with cheaper motors. The throw-away-or-buy-a-new-one threshold for a motor has increased to 75 or 100 horsepower, and as a result, repair shops have declined, with some consolidating and others closing.
To change with the times, "We're expanding into driven equipment. We went upstream before to the power source -- transformers, switchgear, circuit breakers -- and now we're going downstream with pumps, fans, and blowers," Joe, Sr. explains. "Pumps are becoming an important part of our business as time goes on." This makes sense, as rebuilding a pump involves the same technology as rebuilding a motor, since they're both rotating machinery. Likewise for rebuilding fans, blowers, gearboxes, and clutches. They handle pumps up to 42-inch impeller size and fans and blowers to 96-inch wheel diameter.
To
handle such large jobs, Longo built a new 70,000-square-foot, $3-million
facility in Wharton and brought it on line in 1997. They can now handle
motors and generators up to 30 or 40 tons, compared with 10 tons for the
previous plant. Their facilities can handle electric motors from fractional
to 15,000 horsepower, and test facilities have also increased.
Saving Resources
New business for Longo also comes with the push for improving efficiency
to save electricity and ultimately resources and the environment. Fans
and pumps in infrastructure and processes increasingly use variable-frequency
drives (VFDs) and high-efficiency motors. "That's where I think the
major market is," Joe, Sr. says.
A major market it is, considering that 75 percent of the energy consumed in the U.S. feeds electric motors. As Joe, Jr. observes, "Everybody takes it for granted because when they go in their house, they turn on the air conditioning, and when they go shopping, they use an escalator or an elevator, and they turn on lights. Everything we use on a daily basis is impacted by a motor or generator."
Longo installs and services solid-state VFDs, which rectify AC current to DC and then reconstruct it to simulate a sine wave for powering an AC motor at frequencies that vary from the usually constant 60 hertz to vary the speed. What does this accomplish? "The load on fans and pumps goes down with the cube of the speed," Joe, Sr. explains as he scribbles a graph on a pad of paper. If you need only 80 percent of the air or water in a process, "You save 50 percent of your energy and only reduce the flow 20 percent."
With high-efficiency motors, Longo has made inroads in the New York metropolitan area because utilities now offer enticing rebates to large power consumers for retrofitting their motors. "Energy-efficient motors are a tremendous bargain," Joe, Sr. states. They can have a payback of as little as three years. In a project at the City College of New York, they replaced about 350 motors and 70 to 80 drives with new, energy-efficient models.
Motor manufacturers have improved efficiencies by developing materials that can handle higher temperatures and still provide the required insulation life expectancy, so motors run hotter and generate higher horsepower with the same energy input. They've reduced losses in motors with better windings and laminations that use superior steel and iron alloys and thinner layers. Also, they machine motor stators and rotors with less air gap between them, and today's improved bearings reduce friction.
In yet another direction, Longo has ventured into the field of predictive maintenance. As Joe, Sr. says, "People are beyond this thing of just waiting for stuff to break down, because it's entirely too expensive." Done while a machine runs, predictive maintenance involves plotting various parameters over time and observing trends to establish alarm levels that tell when a piece of equipment will probably fail. "Repairs are reduced, the time line is defined, and the manufacturers have better production and performance." You can apply it to any rotating machine, and even some reciprocating types.
For
mechanical machines like pumps, blowers, and gear reducers, predictive
maintenance technicians can monitor vibration and analyze gear oil. Plotting
vibration level versus time on a graph, they can predict when vibrations
will reach a point of imminent failure. Monitoring the size and quantity
of wear particles in the oil yields similar results.
For electrical equipment, Longo uses infrared thermography, which involves scanning equipment such as substations, motor control centers, circuit breakers, and motors with infrared rays to measure temperatures and detect hot spots. Joe, Sr. says, "The thermographic has really worked out well. We have found some things that could've been calamitous." Thermal imaging can find an electrical connection problem resulting from loose wiring or dirt or moisture, which can result in electrical arcing, overheating, or even fire. And it can detect abnormal temperature signatures of electromechanical equipment, such as a motor, before it fails.
With all its expanded capabilities, Joe, Jr. sees a new overall strategy emerging for the company. "Our business is moving more towards total solutions, in other words, handling systems rather than just a portion of a customer's plant. This means doing motor management, equipment management via the Internet, keeping track of history and maintenance records for them, diagnosing troublesome equipment, and doing predictive maintenance services for them -- really providing them a total package. I like to call it an HMO for equipment."
This would leave a lot on the table for Joe, Jr.'s children to tackle should they grow up deciding to enter the business and keep Longo Industries in the family for yet another generation. Will it happen? "If they want to do it, they're welcome to," Joe, Jr. says. "They're going to have to make their own decisions." If they do join the business, their ancestors will have left them with a healthy operation and bright prospects.
For more information on Longo Industries, visit www.elongo.com.
Progressive
Engineer
Editor: Tom Gibson
2049 Crossroads Drive, Lewisburg, PA 17837
570-568-8444 * progress@jdweb.com
©2004 Progressive Engineer