Butech Bliss Executive Vice President Jock Buta said sales are up, orders pour in and line the factory floor everywhere. Orders to build capital equipment.

“We’re working every angle possible to build a team to build our future machines,” he said.

Nothing odd, just that in the face of a bustling high-strength metal, steel and aluminum alloy manufacturing sector –a direct result of auto, aerospace, agriculture and appliance industries — Butech Bliss is hurting for employees.

“If the right 10 or 15 people walked in we’d hire them on the spot,” he said.

Butech Bliss vice president Jock Buta demonstrates the depth of the special-process, heavy-steel welding required to mate two pieces of a large forged press head together. Two of the forged press heads are currently under construction at the Butech Bliss “633 building” on S. Broadway Avenue. The pieces shown here — the connecting bar and the cylinders — each have to be pre-heated to 200-300 degrees before being welded together and processed at Butech Bliss’s new weld station. (Salem News photo by Larry Shields)

They would be in addition to the 287 current full-time employees, many working overtime to satisfy the highest sales in company history.

Fifty-two people work in engineering and several other departments who are aimed at manufacturing equipment in the specialty steels, stainless steel coil and titanium plate processing industries.

“We have equipment in 40 countries,” Buta said. “All over the world. We now have orders in Europe, for a bump in sales, but we’re mostly in the U.S. and Canada.

“We’ve struggled to find engineers — electric and hydraulic.”

Experience is hard to come by, so “we’ve hired graduates … a lot of new graduates,” he said. “We’ve picked up the training to make up for this lack of experience.”

Which is also need in technical sales side, he explained.

“We have over 50 Youngstown State University graduates,” Buta said. “On the shop floor where a vocational education is needed, Butech Bliss is also challenged with finding machinists and machines builders.

Efforts to find employees reach in several directions.

Butech Bliss is a founding member in the Youngstown Business Incubator and through it is exploring 3D printing of metal.

“We work with them to get this off the ground for 3D printed (additive manufactured) parts to evaluate as opposed to the old subtractive machining,” Buta said.

The company is also one of 13 founding members in the Mahoning Valley Manufacturing Coalition formed in 2011 where over $80 million has been raised to “get local vocational schools to close the skill gap between graduate and full productivity for students,” he said.

“We have been a driving force to bolster enrollment in the trades and work very closely with the Salem High School Precision Machine Trades Program, and both the Columbiana and Mahoning county career and technical centers,” he added.

That includes a strong effort to promote adult vocational training aimed at creating more career pathways in industry, and that again reaches into Salem through the Sustainable Opportunity Development Center (SODC) to push a variety of skill sets.

“We’re indirectly trying to increase our work force,” Buta said about the long-term direction of education to build toward the future. “We’ve tried a number of things from a recruiting standpoint, television, billboards in the area, numerous signs in Alliance, Boardman — we’ve done a lot, made the effort and it’s working.”

It takes a lot of money and effort to get employees and Butech Bliss offers free health care, increased dental and eye coverage reimbursements, including prescription safety glasses while it added a forward-thinking real-time, face-time express care program through the Cleveland Clinic, along with increasing the company match to 401Ks to four percent, and employees receive raises twice a year.

The company also boosted its shift differential. A night shift employee can make up to $3.50 per hour more depending on the machine they work on. The normal night shift differential is $1.50 an hour.

“Traditionally, we have a very low turnover,” he said “But we have seen an increase in some of the manufacturing people leaving — and I will tell you that more than half come back.”

Money has been spent improving office space and restrooms. There is completely new LED lighting throughout the S. Broadway Avenue plant manufacturing area. It has, in the first year, recovered its installation cost in energy savings.

Along with the main S. Broadway Avenue plant, known as the “633 building” for its street address, there is the former Sekely Tool & Die facility on Pennsylvania Avenue. Between the two they are equipped with more than 75 machining centers.

“We’re spending quite a bit for equipment, new and used,” Buta said. But one catch is, “we’re having to think extra carefully about buying new equipment and investing in the infrastructure because we’re having trouble finding people to operate what we have.”

Subcontracting for specialized welding has grown “more than ever, because we’re running at our limit,” Buta explained.

Big equipment takes big investments in an ongoing battle to stay competitive.

While giving a tour, Buta stopped at a big, new weld station designed to handle large jobs like forging press-head building.

There is an under-construction press head set on a large iron platform. It’s one of two they’re building.

It’s pretty much the essence of what Butech Bliss is all about. Scale and size come into play.

When lifted from engineer drawings, tight tolerances in the special processes needed to make large machines have to be there.

Extensive heavy steel welding means certified welders which is another “struggle” Butech Bliss faces along with finding qualified machinists to set jobs up so the huge pieces can be welded into place.

“We don’t make the same parts,” Buta said.

So the custom-built, forged-steel press heads can be set up for welding. A cross-beam — specifically designed and constructed just for the job — is attached. The cross beam allows the 90,000-lbs overhead crane to pick up and maneuver the heads into place so welding can begin.

After the pieces are carefully aligned and mated, both sides have to be pre-heated to 200 to 300 degrees before the first drop of weld is fired in — a bit metallurgical magic that guarantees strength and purity of the weld, which in itself is a major job.

Buta demonstrated the weld height, which has to be gradually built up to a depth of 14 inches at the weld points.

Numbers tell the story: 20,000 pounds of welding rod and over 4,000 hours of welding to make both forged press heads scheduled for shipping in 2019.

“We ended up spending $150,000 to upgrade the welding bay,” Buta explained, with $60,000 of that for the induction heaters.

He said to a large extent business is driven by the auto industry’s Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards (CAFE) where an ongoing push for lighter weight vehicles made with higher-strength steel and aluminum alloys is the daily agenda.

“That directly results in orders for us,” he said. “There’s a fair chance any large piece of equipment along the way (like a farm combine or tractor)” has been in contact with something Butech Bliss made.

One other investment is the large parking area on Aetna St. was purchased for added parking and “room for potential future development but the biggest challenge now is keeping everybody,” Buta said. “It’s difficult because we continue to ask people to work overtime.”

That’s been the order of the day for two years now.

“With the sales surge we try to space orders and deliveries,” he explained.

Additional employees would help the balance between working too hard and getting the product to customers on time.

Buta jokes about it, but says he keeps repeating, “We have the best work force we’ve ever had in the history of our company.”

For more about Butech Bliss, visit: www.butechbliss.com.

lshields@salemnews.net