Souderton, Pennsylvania based AES, now 35 years in the making, continues to gain traction in the world of scrap collection, baling and dust control. As more and more manufacturers rely on them for critical fire safety and air quality requirements, AES products also help their clients’ operations be more profitable, productive, and sustainable.
Their exponential growth, in terms of products, technologies and its people, says it all about the bright future that lies ahead.
“Tenfold easily,” said Jeff Dietterich, who founded the company in 1989 with his wife, Jill Dietterich. “We’re expanding the AirShark product line, adding new components and broadening our reach within the packaging industry and outside the packaging industry.”
The AES AirShark is a rotary material separator that offers high air handling capacity in a compact footprint for indoor and outdoor applications. It is hailed as an alternative to traditional screen separators and bulky cyclones that can eliminate the need for dust collectors.
AES has found strong applications for the AirShark with Packsize machines and “Right-sized Packaging on Demand” solutions used in robotic warehouses. AES piloted a system recently in New Jersey, and the first full-scale installations will happen in California in November.
“It’s almost like origami the way they cut and fold, and they have little chips of disposal. We gather them from up to 50 to 70 Packsize machines at a time and then convey that away from the process. So that’s no touching of the scrap, no noise, and no dust,” Jeff said.
The AirShark is a vast visual improvement as well. One customer was happy to have old rusty cyclones removed from their roof and replaced with AES’s streamlined air handling equipment with dust flowing only upwards through the collector.
At AES, they are always moving forward and that includes industries outside of box converting and printing that are utilizing next-generation technologies. Currently they are working on a specialized material separator that will support one of the largest electric vehicle battery manufacturers in the world.
To fully appreciate the origins of AES, it’s necessary to look at Jeff’s background. His career started in the direct marketing printing industry in the 1980s where his talents soon flowed from operations to engineering, helping design in-house printing and converting equipment, electrical controls and eventually a scrap conveyance system.
With his growing expertise in scrap systems, Jeff soon found himself in demand. At night, it wasn’t unusual for him to be in the shop or even his spare bedroom building panels and working on UL certifications to ensure that his electrical industrial power panels met the standards for safety and proper construction. All his hard work laid the groundwork for developing a product that integrated all the fans, shredders, balers, and dust collector processes into a seamless system that could be sold and manufactured. By 1989, Jeff and Jill were well-positioned to start their own company, AES (Advanced Equipment Sales).
Several years ago, Jeff said they decided to make one of the integral pieces, the air material separator that separates the scrap, dust, and air, resulting in a clean, efficient baling operation. “We have clean fresh air flowing back to the plant and we capture and put the dust to beneficial secondary uses,” he said. “That is what makes most modern manufacturing operations tick.”
Box manufacturers see the value of grade segregation as scrap is being generated more and more quickly, he said. “When you have grade segregation, you can manage your return on investment by creating higher value scrap bales to sell. Some of our customers are really dialed in on that and run three or four balers just for the purpose of great segregation when they have a particularly high value of material they want to recover.”
Jeff said that TAVO Packaging, which produces three grades of paper bales sold to recyclers, is a good example of great segregation.
“Fiber prices go up and down, but if you handle it right, you’re always going to come out on the plus side with it,” Jill said.
“And having that automation in place, having clean running systems in place, that’s where we help our customers complete that piece of their production because they really can’t run without dealing with the scrap. If you can turn that scrap into a valuable commodity — all the better. Extra revenue in your pocket.”
AES gets to know its customers extremely well; that’s because their relationship is ongoing. They provide preventive maintenance services to keep balers up and running and they operate a 24/7 emergency hotline so that resources can be deployed to them as soon as possible if something goes wrong.
“That’s really a big part of our business — supporting that customer from the time we do that installation and throughout the service life of the equipment,” Jill said.
“We really pride ourselves on having that holistic relationship with that customer. We want them for life, and we want to take care of them. Our sales engineers keep in contact with that customer to make sure that we can help and support them throughout. They have questions, they call us.”
Each box company is unique and that’s how AES treats them. “Every one of them is different. They’re all customized, their equipment and their production and their products and those nuances are important to get right,” she said.
Jill’s role at the company spans multiple departments from marketing director and process improvements to insurance and contracts. Jeff said that one of Jill’s most important contributions in the past five years has been integrating Salesforce customer management software into their operations and automated accounting software for better real-time information to gauge company performance in the field.
“We need to be able to react in real-time to control costs and to catch potential problems early in the process. We’re big on controls and managing proactively as opposed to reactively and Jill has helped us build the tools in-house so that we’re nimbler, we’re more able to respond to different situations so that little problems don’t become big problems,” Jeff said.
The Dietterichs say they are bursting at the seams with activity at their plant. They have staff in project management, engineering, accounting and are fortunate to be in a financial position that allows them to attract and hire the best people.
“We’ve got a great team in the field,” Jeff said. “We decided to do more with our own installation crews and develop that talent in-house so we’re less reliant on outside crews. We can improve our margins and improve our quality by doing that. That was one of our goals for this past year is to reinvest in people.”
Originally, AES operated in Langhorne, Pennsylvania, then nearby Skippack before building a facility in Souderton, Pennsylvania, 34 miles north of Philadelphia, in 2001. Jill said the area has changed over the years to their advantage in terms of land values and major highway access, which fuels the number of distribution center warehouses in the region.
“We’re really stretched to the max; we do some of our manufacturing offsite. We have a lot of storage offsite because we don’t have the space to store our work-in-process inventory here. We have our shop which is constantly funneling through baler rebuilds that we do and some sheet metal fabrication, but we’re a little bit limited until we grow our footprints,” Jeff said.
Situated on three acres in a 10,000-square-foot facility, the Dietterichs already have plans drawn when the time is right to expand their headquarters.
Though the Dietterich’s offspring are not in the business, AES has a multi-generational family feel with second-generation employees in the management ranks.
“We know that pedigree and we want to develop that next generation,” Jeff said. He loves to see their enthusiasm for the capabilities of their product, their competitiveness, and the ultimate excitement when a customer selects their equipment. Additionally, there are employees in their twenties with mechanical aptitudes who are interested in learning from the ground up.
“We have some very talented young people here and we’re looking to get younger, intentionally. We need smart young talent and that’s what we’re trying to attract,” he said.
At AES, they are always moving forward and that includes industries outside of box converting and printing that are utilizing next-generation technologies. Currently they are working on a specialized material separator that will support one of the largest electric vehicle battery manufacturers in the world. For more information about AES, visit advancedequipmentsales.com.
