Company Profile: Advanced Design Consulting

Advanced Design Consulting

Designs and fabricates devices you don’t see every day

When I saw an offer for a catalog advertised by Advanced Design Consulting, I had to order a copy. A slick glossy publication showed up in the mail, complete with a young lady gleefully snowshoeing on the cover. But while it may have looked like an L.L Bean catalog on the outside, the inside revealed a different world. The catalog lists devices like motorized linear actuators. Or how about a Eularian goniometer? Maybe an Ultra-high vacuum translation system for Christmas? Or a high-current MOSFET polarity switch for your child’s birthday?

Located near Ithaca, New York at the southern end of Cayuga Lake in the state's Finger Lakes region, Advanced Design Consulting (ADC) is an engineering and scientific consulting firm that develops a wide variety of high-precision components and instruments for commercial, academic, and government entities. Customers include the military, national facilities, universities, and scientists. The firm’s catalog not only shows the intriguing devices they create, it also highlights the unique way they do business. After developing a product for a customer, they offer it for sale to everybody else.

Although ADC designs and fabricates a broad range of products crossing many disciplines, "There’s definitely a common theme, and that is engineering,” Alex Deyhim, the president, says. They defy traditional thinking that dictates concentrating on one area. “For us, if you’re a good engineer, you should be able to design a bridge, a chip, or a spectrometer."

In telling the history of ADC, Deyhim reveals, "We started the company in 1995 in a small garage, and we slowly grew the company." He has a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Reading University in the U.K. and an MBA from Cornell University, and between his B.S. and MBA stints, he worked at Ford Motor Company. “I completely lost interest to work for a large organization. And then I started looking into starting a company myself." He started ADC while working a fulltime job at Cornell managing an electronics packaging facility. It stayed small the first seven years, but then he left Cornell and went fulltime with the company four years ago, and it started to take off.

Another event happened about the same time that also spurred ADC, Deyhim says. IBM in nearby Endicott, New York experienced a huge layoff. "We brought some extremely talented people on board from IBM. They made a very big difference in the company. These are the cream of the crop, folks you couldn’t ordinarily get ahold of."

With ADC on the rise, "We’ve been almost doubling the company in sales and number of people every year for the last four years," Deyhim reports. The company numbers 25 people, including about six engineers, assembly people, technicians, machinists, manufacturing managers, and an operations manager. The engineers consist of mechanical and electrical types, some of them entry-levels that serve as test engineers.

ADC's manufacturing department fabricates, assembles, installs, and services the systems the company’s engineers design. "We can control the schedules, the quality, and to some extent the cost much better by doing the work in-house," Deyhim explains. A recent addition of 9000 square feet of floor space to the manufacturing department has made room for a paint booth, a welding room, EDM machining, CNC machining, and precision grinding. "We’re slowly moving to mass production. A lot of jobs are one or two or maybe 10. So a lot our machines still are manual. But we’ve been investing money recently in a couple machine centers. As we build more standard product, then we start producing them in larger quantities."

Along with manufacturing, ADC also offers a full range of environmental testing services including temperature, humidity, thermal, vacuum, thermal shock, fatigue, vibration, and accelerated life testing. Capabilities include a three-axis vibration tester, temperature/humidity environmental chamber, vacuum oven, and shock tester.

With all its areas of involvement, ADC has particular expertise in precision robotics, sub-micron positioning systems, and optical subsystems. They provide precision positioning systems to support optics and instrumentation for scientific research, and they do a lot of work in synchrotrons, used by physicists for X-ray experiments. In addition, the firm designs and builds custom cryogenic cooling systems used extensively by astronomers, chemists, physicists, and engineers as platforms for a wide variety of research instruments. Industrial customers use them for production testing of electronic devices and sensors.

One significant project has ADC developing a MEMS (micro electromechanical systems) sensor that monitors moisture, temperature, and pH within concrete as well as the concentration of chloride, sodium, and potassium ions to provide critical data for evaluating its performance. Degradation of concrete often comes from the corrosion of its reinforcing steel. ADC combines radio frequency identification devices with its MEMS sensors in a package that can mix with Portland cement and be embedded in a new bridge, building, or roadway.

Another project, sponsored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has ADC developing a system for sensing temperature and pressure at ocean depths. This will use radio-frequency communication for wireless data transfer to a hand-held computer that can plot the results.

On the mechanical side, ADC is developing synthetic rope that addresses the U.S. Navy's desire for a new generation of ropes for running rigging. These must have tensile strength and axial stiffness similar to wire rope, yet be much lighter and more flexible for easier rope handling. New materials must have increased resistance to abrasion, wear, creep, and thermal degradation.

With such a disparity of projects, Deyhim says it’s hit-or-miss on whether they become standard off-the-shelf catalog items after they’re developed for the original customer. But when the system works, "It works out beautifully. Somebody else pays you to do your product development and research. Then once you’ve done it, you can turn around, hopefully, and build the same thing, and build more of them." And it sure makes for a novel catalog.

Snapshot

Company: Advanced Design Consulting USA, Inc.

Type: Engineering consulting and research firm

Location: Lansing, New York

Website: www.adc9001.com

Phone: 607-533-3531

Contact information for submitting resumes:
Alex Deyhim, president
E-mail address: alex_deyhim@adc9001.com

Outlook for Hiring Engineers:
“We have loads of work, very steady,” says Alex Deyhim, president. "Our biggest challenge has been finding good engineers, partly because of the way we operate. We’re looking for really cream of the crop.” He adds, “Just in the last six months, we’ve hired eight engineers. That’s going to continue. I don’t see it changing at all. If anything, it will potentially even accelerate more in the next few years.”

“Right now, we’re interviewing people for a vice president of operations. We’re looking for a candidate who’s technically very strong and who’s also very good in organization," Deyhim reports. They’re also looking for a mechanical designer. "I could bring at least one on board right away." They’re also looking for an electrical engineer with an instrumentation background. They typically hire experienced as well as entry level engineers.

Deyhim says he particularly seeks risk takers with an entrepreneurial mentality. “I ask candidates if they ever think of starting their own company."

Progressive Engineer
Editor: Tom Gibson
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