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York Haven-Based Die-Tech Thriving on Small Wonders

Posted on: Tuesday, 16 May 2006, 00:06 CDT

By Andréa Maria Cecil, York Daily Record, Pa.

May 14--A machine pulls together seven gold-plated wires and inserts the bundle into a stainless-steel sleeve. The machine then crimps the tiny part around a copper stamping.

York Haven-based Die-Tech makes tens of thousands of these less-than-half-inch-long pieces every day.

The part will eventually make it into the electronic control board of a high-performance military fighter aircraft. The bundle of seven wires -- as opposed to five, for example -- makes the part more resistant to the force of gravity and vibrations.

Which aircraft the part is destined for is anybody's guess, including Die-Tech's.

"We're so low on the food chain that by the time someone's using our product we may not even know it," Die-Tech President Richard W. Dennis said with a laugh.

The 34-year-old company, which started as Lantz Tool and Die, manufacturers precision metal stampings for the aerospace, automotive, electronics, medical, military and telecommunications industries at its 33,000-square-foot facility.

Dennis' father, also named Richard, founded the company with two partners who both exited by the late 1980s, leaving Die-Tech in the Dennis family.

The company essentially makes tiny metal pieces that go into such products as computer processors and the acceleration systems of General Motors vehicles.

At the moment, Die-Tech is building filters for General Electric's nuclear business.

"Everything is custom made," Dennis said. "It has to fit in a certain space. It has to meet requirements that are so varied."

It takes Die-Tech about four weeks to build an entire die for each product. Once the product is made, the company tries to ship it out quickly so as not to build up inventory levels, Dennis said.

The firm has a core group of about 80 customers. An additional 30 to 40 clients are infrequent buyers, such as small contract manufacturers that will buy a reel or two of metal stampings, Dennis said.

Die-Tech employs about 50 people and anticipates adding about four to six jobs in a year because it exports 48 percent of its products overseas.

Entering the international market was an accident for Die-Tech, Dennis said.

"What we've seen is -- the trend started probably a decade ago -- some processes started moving offshore to save costs," he said. "There would be a certain level of manufacturing in the United States, and then the company would decide to control labor costs and would open up a duplicate factory somewhere else in the world and then the company would shift entirely into the foreign facility."

The company was among four the Technology Council of Central Pennsylvania invited to a summit at York College late last month.

"We wanted to do this nice little commercial for these four companies," said Kelly Lewis, president and chief executive officer of the tech council.

Through the summit, Die-Tech connected with Mechanicsburg-based Technical Services Associates, an e-business integrator that provides information-technology services for integration and application development.

"We've been having some discussion on an online purchasing model," Dennis said, "to manage our supply chain so that we could actually use it to transmit information to our suppliers to give them more response time."

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Copyright (c) 2006, York Daily Record, Pa.

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Source: York Daily Record

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