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[edit] Description
Grace Engineered Products, Inc is a Subchapter S corporation based out of Davenport, Iowa, specializing in manufacturing and distributing electrical safety products to the industrial and commercial market. The company’s customers include nearly every fortune 1000 company in the United States.
[edit] The Founders
Grace Engineered Products, Inc began as Grace Engineering and Integration, originally started by Phil and Edward Allen, two brothers formerly of Los Angeles. They both graduated from California Polytechnic University. Phil majored in Industrial Engineering and Edward majored in Electrical Engineering. After graduating, Phil took a job with Allen-Bradley but was unsatisfied with the corporate life. Seeing the up and coming computer market, Phil and Edward felt compelled to form a new company specializing in integrating computers and machines. Soon they had accounts with many major industrial manufactures.
[edit] The GracePort®
In 1993 while working on a friction welder retrofit project at John Deere, Phil Allen faced an extremely dangerous panel where the drive and the high current main feed were located behind the machine’s I/O. The only way for electricians to access the machine for maintenance was to open the door to the panel. The maintenance supervisor understood this caused a potential shock hazard. The supervisor wanted to keep his people safe by keeping the doors to the panels closed. He urged them to put a PLC programming convenience interface or panel interface connector on the operator consol where all the I/O were located. Grace responded with a panel interface connector that contained a printed circuit board and cable solution housed in a NEMA 12X rated housing. Over the next couple years the brothers kept designing variations of the same product. Foreseeing its potential as a whole new product category, the programming interface category, Phil decided to focus on this part of the business, naming it Grace Engineered Products, Inc. Edward stayed with the company as it came under the ownership of Tri-City Electric.
[edit] The Early Years at Grace Engineered Products Inc.
The people at Grace recognized that the customers only needed their exact combination and started promoting itself saying, “Any Cable, Any Connector, Any Combination.” Business continued to grow partly due to the Rockwell Automation’s Encompass program which allowed Grace to develop close ties with the Industrial Automation market by allowing Grace to show products at two major types of events in a year. The first type, Complete Automation on the Move (CAOTMs), is a series of regional events that local companies are invited to in order receive training and to be made aware of new products in the marketplace. The second type, Automation Fair, is the largest Industrial and Automation tradeshow of the year.
[edit] Marketing Means
Realizing it was a small company, Phil believed efforts must be made to creatively market Grace to attract customers. One of the creative approaches Grace has utilized is cartoons to convey the somewhat complicated idea of integration. Other methods include press releases and “white papers” (technical papers) that explain how customers apply products in their existing electrical safety Lockout Tagout procedures.
[edit] Sales Approach
Early on Tom Howard, Grace’s former sales manager, started focusing almost exclusively on the end-user. By creating excitement among the end user, a ripple effect would occur through the chain of command to the management. The company contributes its sales increasing every year to focusing on the end-user. The company also began forming a rep/distributor channel that could effectively target the majority of the market driven by the Fortune 1000’s need for integrated supply.
[edit] NFPA 70E
This safety specification changed the way companies protected their people and the way Grace sold its products by developing regulations to protect personnel from arc flashes. Avoiding lawsuits was great incentive to keep the panel doors shut. OSHA regulations requiring all employers to supply PPE to their employees also drove the demand for Thru-Door safety devices. These regulations, led upper management to become interested in electrical safety products.
[edit] Grace Products
GracePorts® VoltageVision® ChekVolt® TempCovers™ InsideOutlet®
