Although its name isn’t all that well known within the industry due to its moderate size and targeted product lines including wire harnesses and dash panels, 4-year-old, Syracuse, Ind.-based Quality Engineered Services LLC (QES) has posted a pretty impressive growth curve lately in the production of wire harnesses for the marine, bus, RV and specialty markets to the extent that it’s expanding its reach accordingly.
“About two years ago, we were primarily focused on wire harnesses and dash panels for the marine space and we came to a determination that diversification was something we should really entertain, and so we’ve done that,” Managing Partner Joel Devries told RV Business during a recent visit to its Syracuse plant, about a half hour south of the RV-building center of Elkhart.
“So, we diversified into two areas plus one we’re going to just call a specialty space, which involves some customers in the medical field in addition to the transportation bus market plus add-on components to the RV industry and so forth,” said Devries. “And, at the same time, we also started working in the RV space on coming up with an evolutionary – if you want to call it that – product where we’re professionalizing and we’re engineering (custom) electrical systems for RVs to take that to the next level.”
As a result, according to Chris Ganshorn, director of engineering for the 200-employee firm, current plans call for an expansion of the company’s physical footprint in 2025 with the opening of a second Syracuse plant supplementing a smaller existing facility in the nearby village of Cromwell. That will entail the February opening of an additional 54,000-square-foot space in a former PolarKraft marine manufacturing plant in mid-town Syracuse where all of the RV harness production will be housed.
And the current 45,000-square-foot Syracuse plant – already utilizing a million feet of wire a week as part of its current two-shift-a-day format – will then be dedicated to the marine and other business clients when the upcoming move is completed.
Looking ahead, QES expects to its employee count to perhaps grow by February by about 20% to approximately 250 after adding the new plant – assuming the nation’s business economy actually experiences a moderate uptick in 2025 as many industry people are anticipating.
“With the addition of our third facility, QES on January 1, 2025, will have over 100,000 square feet of manufacturing space,” said Ganshorn. “So, while we started primarily with a marine focus, we are growing quickly in the RV segment due to the increased focus on quality and efficiency gains realized in custom wire harnesses.
“QES has invested heavily in automated wire processing equipment along with a significant advancement in engineering design systems,” he explained. “One of the keys to QES’s success is our ability to turn a concept harness or panel into prototypes and production very quickly while maintaining a very high level of quality.”
At the same time, he added, QES is turning up its focus on towable RVs while continuing to upgrade design standards and test every wire harness that goes out the door.
“Warranty is also greatly reduced as wires are properly terminated, spliced and plugged,” Ganshorn explained. “Due to QES’s highly automated and very accurate wire processing equipment we are also able to improve the standard motorized wire harnesses to an automotive style of harness with molded connectors and dedicated circuits.”
In the big picture, meanwhile, Ganshorn and Devries feel that focusing on electrical systems is the right thing to do – ethically and commercially – inasmuch as electrical systems are generally in the top five – if not the top three – sources of warranty work.
“Electrical repairs are costly and lead to dissatisfied customers,” Devries added. “As technology continues to evolve in both the marine and RV spaces, the wire harnesses that connect these systems also have to improve. QES is on the front end of this trend and looks forward to growth in both the marine and RV industries.”
Although the boat business accounted for a majority of its business early on, however, Devries says the marine sector now accounts for less than half of QES’s business as the company grows in the other sectors to which it has turned for business.
“So, customer service is a big focus of QES,” Devries noted. “We spend a lot of time talking about that as a team and so we like to think that our service style and what we bring to the table, whether it be with our customer retention through our service support or through our engineering software system that Chris has developed, we have a new engineering system that’s, I think, cutting edge for our markets that we serve, and it puts us in a position to provide even a better base of service because of some of those infrastructure components we’ve put into QES.
“But then it’s also the fact that we’ve gotten into more automation with our equipment, so we can turn product quicker, more efficiently, higher quality. Our quality stands alone really in the spaces that we serve,” he said. “So, those are some of the reasons why I think we’ve caught fire and the customers that we served have been very responsive. New customers have come into the fold. Specific to the RV industry, we have, I think, five major RV customers now that are in the process of evolving their electrical systems with us, where we’re moving the electrical system to more of an automotive designed approach.”
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