ElectroCraft

Specializing in fractional-horsepower motor and motion solutions, ElectroCraft has been a pioneering and innovative manufacturer for decades. Today its custom manufacturing services cover a diverse array of products, from rotary motors, linear actuators and gearboxes to drives, controls, and integrated motor drives.

Headquartered in Dover, N.H., ElectroCraft’s lean business process and worldwide resources allow it to meet global customer needs on thousands of different applications. In fact, the company’s products are found in air conditioners, pumps, office equipment, medical devices, aircraft and beyond.

“Four years ago when I was talking to the team about joining the company, I found out that ElectroCraft literally wrote the book on electric motors, controls and servo systems way back in 1972,” President and CEO Mike Karsonovich says. “This book has been and remains a key resource for thousands of engineers in the industry.”

Standing Out

Thanks to its long legacy, ElectroCraft has leveraged its foundational knowledge and experience to expand its expertise as well as the value that it brings to customer partners. Having grown through acquisition, ElectroCraft supports its customers with more than 700 employees in seven manufacturing and design centers strategically located in the United States, Asia and Europe.

One of the main differentiators between ElectroCraft and other pure electric motor manufacturing companies is its design experience. The company’s expertise enables it to partner with customers and solve their most challenging motion solution requirements.

“Our customer focus and global footprint provides our customers with valuable solutions delivered through flexible logistics options,” Karsonovich says. The company’s strong relationships with vendors and suppliers help ensure strong ties to customers. ElectroCraft firmly believes that these kinds of relationships are built by being closely involved with all stakeholders.

“Our vision at ElectroCraft is to be the most trusted and valued specialized motion system partner to our OEM customers, suppliers and employees,” Karsonovich says. “This is a three-legged stool. If you shortchange one of the legs, you significantly weaken the foundation. You have to keep them all balanced, which can be challenging at times. But we do our best to make it happen.”

Always Improving

At present, ElectroCraft is working on a number of initiatives focused on building on its suite of products and services to improve its offerings to the marketplace. The main initiative is its focus on the customer. ElectroCraft’s customers and their challenges drive its strategies, whether the strategy is to acquire a company that fills a key portfolio gap, expand its engineering organization so the company can spend more time with customers to better understand and address their key issues, or expand its training efforts so that its team is better educated on the products and applications that its customers require.

“This customer focus is augmented in our design centers where we utilize this customer feedback to develop next-generation products that are truly differentiated in the marketplace and that address the immediate and future needs of our customer base,” Karsonovich says.

Earlier this year, ElectroCraft released a number of new products. In January, it expanded its Brushless DC Motor offering with the RPX22 and RPX32. These 22mm- and 32mm-diameter motors are the first in a complete line of BLDC motors and gear motors planned for release. The RPX family is designed to have a sleek form factor and to be powerful, energy efficient, controllable and durable. The company believes its RPX series will have a big impact on the market, as the motor design was optimized to perform with peak efficiency at more traditional motor speeds, offering significant advantages to customers, not only in torque but also in reliability and overall cost.

In June, it released the new ElectroCraft TorquePower Enhanced, Size 11 stepper motor (TPE11) and the ElectroCraft AxialPower Plus Enhanced, Size 11 linear actuator (APES11). Both the TPE11 and the APES11 extend the current ElectroCraft stepper and linear actuator product families while providing customers an additional choice for optimized performance when applying these technologies in their applications.

ElectroCraft also works to make sure that it is aware of all current factors that are impacting its operations, customers and industry, devising strategies that allow it to handle ongoing trends and remain relevant within its competitive landscape. The main trend that the company is seeing in the marketplace right now is a tightening in a number of areas. Customers’ budgets, inventories, development timelines and more are all tight at present. What this means for ElectroCraft is that it must be incredibly flexible and even more responsive to its customers’ needs.

“When a customer calls and outlines a particular challenge, the work begins and the entire team kicks into high gear,” Karsonovich says. “Overall, we are doing everything that we can to reduce our operating costs so that we remain globally competitive while we continue to deploy additional assets and expand our support and responsiveness to customers globally.”

Among the main critical areas of investment that ElectroCraft says it has been focusing on lately include continuing to roll out its global ERP system and expand the use of business intelligence tools to provide better access to data and improve efficiency and effectiveness in making data-based decisions. The company is expanding its expertise and use of lean principles to reduce costs, allowing ElectroCraft to continue to make investments in its customers and employees.

“We have expanded our product development and commercial organizations so that we can get closer to our customers and position our organization to better support them in providing timely solutions to meet the challenges that they face,” Karsonovich says.