Case Study for Power Mechanical, Inc.

Puget Systems Provides Serious Computing Solutions for Power Mechanical

About Power Mechanical

Power Mechanical specializes in the manufacture, rental, repair, installation and sale of industrial energy equipment. When a major manufacturer has a catastrophic power plant failure, they get the call. If an international airport’s thermal system fails and ice is forming on the runway, their phone rings. They are relied on to provide a mobile boiler plant or an immediate replacement from their extensive inventory of energy products.

PMI is vertically integrated to handle every aspect of a plant failure. At a moment’s notice, they can ship a product that otherwise would have a 16 week lead time. They have an in-house craning service to load equipment onto their in-house trucking fleet, then install the equipment at the customer’s plant using their in-house mechanical contracting division. Their client list ranges from the White House to the US military, Dow Chemicals to Cornell University. Power Mechanical provides serious solutions for serious problems.

PMI was founded in 1985 by Rick and Sonja Reuter. Sonja retired from the business to form a not-for-profit specializing in the rehabilitation of abused horses. She takes in over 100 horses per year, restores them back to health and happiness then finds a loving family to adopt the horse. Rick is still president at Power Mechanical and runs the rental equipment division. His three children, Nick, Rochelle and Ericka, play critical roles in the operation and management of the company.

“Power Mechanical has 105 dedicated employees, several of which have been with us since day one. We place a very large emphasis on personal development and contributing to our local community.”

Tools of the Trade

At Power Mechanical they use an incredibly diverse range of tools to serve their customer base. On the administrative side they utilize 5 in-house servers, 50 PCs, 100 mobile devices, 14 buildings, 20 acres of storage and a multi-million dollar spare parts inventory with over 3,000 individual SKUs.

“Software usage here includes CNC machine control software, programmable logic control interface software (Siemens, Allen Bradley), in-house app development, Autocad, SolidWorks, Photoshop, Great Plains, etc.”

For ‘rolling stock’ they have two cranes, an 80 ton mobile gantry crane, 12 forklifts (including two awesome 50,000lb off road forklifts bought from the military), 50 service vehicles, 7 semi-trucks and over 150 trailers. To service the rolling stock they have full time mechanics with every mechanic tool you could imagine.

The outside guys have the coolest tools out of the group. Dozens of torches and welders, huge drills, lathes, CNC plasma cutting tables, plate rollers, CNC bandsaws, metal shears, pipe benders, steel pipe corrugators etc. Working on boilers is a very tough job so they feel it is critical to provide their guys with the tools they need to serve customers efficiently and safely.

Challenges

PMI’s extreme dedication to vertical integration (they subcontract almost nothing) and flat corporate structure requires them to manage a very diverse range of products and tasks 24/7. Leaders at Power Mechanical have to be able to shift gears efficiently in a moment’s notice. In a 5 minute span they can shift from sales to engineering to logistics to product support, whatever it takes to solve the problem and get their customers up and running. Several people have called them ’25 companies in one’; which is a good description. They want the best infrastructure, tooling and systems in the world so that they never have to say ‘no’; to a customer. As Nick Reuter at PMI put it:

“In my case this required a computer that was no joke. When I’m working I am working. Lagging computers or downtime is not an option.”

In particular, Nick mentioned during the consultation process that he has a massive amount of emails and other data which need to be accessible without delay. He also multi-tasks heavily, with dozens of web browser tabs open at the same time as more intensive programs like AutoCAD and Photoshop. To view all of this at once, he uses six monitors – one of which is actually a 50-inch TV.

Puget Systems Solutions

In order to provide Nick a computer with all-around excellent performance for the wide range of programs he uses, we built a Genesis I workstation with an Intel Core i7 eight-core processor.

We selected a pair of NVIDIA Quadro K1200 graphics card that are optimized for running multiple monitors. With 128GB of memory there is plenty of memory for all the programs that Nick might be running at the same time, and a spacious solid state drive (SSD) lets those programs start up quickly and helps keep the system responsive even when heavily multitasking. A few hard drives were also included for additional storage space.

While the system is built for performance, we knew Nick would appreciate a system crafted with quiet operation in mind. By using high quality components along with upgraded Noctua fans, Puget Systems was able to deliver a system that wouldn’t distract from the many projects Nick is working on at any given time.

Why Nick at Power Mechanical Chose Puget Systems

In his own words:

“I chose Puget Systems because they have a reputation as the best in the business. The Puget customers I spoke with were serious people who needed serious solutions. And they were beyond satisfied with their machines. That was enough for me.”

Are your needs similar to those of Nick and Power Mechanical? If so, we can build a system for you too! Check out the solutions-oriented systems we provide, or contact our consulting staff to discuss your specific needs and uses.

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