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DIRECTAIR® started with a customer
that had a requirement for us to supply compressed air to them,
rather than have us sell compressors to them
and service them on a service contract basis.
They asked one of our sales reps, you know, can we just buy the air
and fortunately, we had a culture and some folks on our team
that were always willing to ask the question.
We actually had an individual in our company who was our best compressor
technician, who actually knew how to write code.
His name was Gary Nelson.
And Gary, when I went to him, said that, yeah, he could write software
that would communicate to the compressor panels and also to the dryer panels,
and then we could communicate with that PC remotely.
And back then it was a dial up modem.
So with with the squawking kind of a modem.
And it was a little bit of a slow process.
And I think sometimes
it was faster to drive to the site to respond to it than the to do dial up.
When Gary
first wrote that code, it was really just to save him
from having to go down there and push the same reset button every time.
That's the cool part about this is all the software we put in
is that brainchild that Gary started, you know, and all these different,
you know, inputs from the field, to, to get us what we need.
Yeah.
Guys like Gary Nelson, Gary Tomlin, Kevin Cramer,
really made an impact here that we still follow today.
I was actually student number one of
Gary Tomlin compressor spools just up.
And that awesome guy, right. You know, we get emotional talking about it.
But he contributed so much to the development of our technical team.
You know, not just the technicians in the field
but support and everything we did around it.
You know, we got the people in-house with the skills to make that happen.
Trying to build a facility on site was very onerous.
It was difficult so quickly realized that doing it in a modular, pre
manufactured way of doing it was the smart thing to do.
That was the thing that that separated us from anyone else.
To be able to do something like this.
You know, short of
manufacturing the actual air compressors, we take everything in-house.
So all of the engineering for the modules, the manufacturing of the modules,
the control system, the operation
and in the service of the site is all done within OTC.
And that's given us a lot of flexibility to grow.
Instead of doing one a year or two a year, we were starting to do three
or 4 or 5 a year.
This is something that I think is a real opportunity for our company
to take a leadership role in the world.
We realized people that were insistent that 100% reliability
was critical to their operation would be good candidates for this.
Compressed air is the FOURTH UTILITYSM.
So if you're going to manufacture add value to a product,
you really need not only raw materials, but you need utilities.
And the electricity, gas, water and air.
Without compressed air, these facilities would be dead in the water,
would not be able to make their product on a daily basis.
That's where DIRECTAIR® comes in and truly offers
compressed air to the end user as a FOURTH UTILITYSM.
They never have to worry
about purchasing, maintaining, replacing a compressor, drier
air filters ever again with DIRECTAIR®, we're guaranteeing certain
KPIs such as pressure flow, dew point, and efficiency.
And when we do that, then they no longer ever have to worry about downtime
and loss production and their factory, which they may have incurred before.
The thing that our customers love so much about DIRECTAIR® is
it truly is a hands off experience.
What they say is, since DIRECTAIR® went in, I've not been involved.
I can't really tell you what's going on because the air is just there.
We've only scratched the surface of the potential that DIRECTAIR® can be.
Sometimes it takes you 30 years to become an overnight success.
It's a great product for our customers with a great track record.
Ultimately, we're helping products make it to the end users.
We're partnering with that customer, right, because they have an obligation
to hundreds, millions, the whole nation,
millions of hours of operation without a single hour of lower pressure,
millions of hours meeting our customers quality requirements,
and we're the leader.
We're the by far the world leader in supplying compressed air as a utility.
It's a team of people that are just completely dedicated
to making compressed air for facilities.
I'm excited to see what the next 30 years brings quite honestly.