- By Dan Veaner
- Business & Technology
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Transonic Systems hosted a major celebration Monday to mark its 30th year of operations, a new branding and structuring strategy, and the opening of an addition to its Lansing plant that doubles the size of the company's world headquarters. The 30,000 square foot manufacturing facility was made possible by the Warren Road sewer project, which freed land needed for a septic system, effectively keeping the company in Lansing."It's the tip of a very large iceberg where we redefine and restructure our place in the medical device business," said CEO Cornelis Drost. "This fantastic new building is quite an improvement over my garage on Hickory Circle, where we started in 1983. We plan to do a lot more of the amazing things we achieved in the past."
At that time the company had three employees. Today Transonic Systems employs 175 pople in the United States, Canada, Holland, Taiwan, and Japan. About 130 of the jobs are based at the Lansing facility. Transonic Systems' President Bruce Kilmartin says that the old and new buildings together can facilitate about 200 employees at one time.
"I would say this building has maybe 70 or 80 manufacturing people total right now," he says. "Surely this building can go up by another 25, or 50 employees, and that's only one shift, so we could run multiple shifts. We should never have to build another building."
When a Lansing municipal sewer project died in 2007 Kilmartin approached the Lansing Town Board along with Tompkins County Area Development's (TCAD) Heather Filaberto to see if a smaller, limited sewer project would be possible. Then Councilman Bud Shattuck, who had chaired the town sewer committee worked with Town officials, engineers, Village of Lansing officials, and committee members Andy Sciarabba and Noel Desch to put together a project that would feed off of the Village's sewer system, and run north along Warren Road past the Warren Road Business Park to Farrell Road. Today the Warren Road Sewer Project is referred to as 'Filaberto's Sewer' because of her relentless promotion of the project.
"Municipal waste water was absolutely essential to this expansion happening," Filaberto acknowledges. "They would have had to move their entire facility elsewhere if we couldn't have made that happen. It was really a community effort between the Town of Lansing, the county, Cornell Real Estate, TCAD, the Lansing Sewer Committee, and the businesses in the Warren Road Business Park that really came together."
The company specializes in flow meters that have the capability of monitoring blood flow without impacting the flow of the fluid it is measuring. The technology, originally developed by Drost at Cornell University for use in veterinary medicine, brought a non-invasive way to monitor fluid flow. Drost wanted to bring the technology out of the realm of research so it could benefit people in the real world, so Transonic Systems was formed to continue researching the technology while bringing it to the medical market.
Befroe and after: the new manufacturing facility (right) is bright and spacious s compared to the old space (left). The new building features an enormous flexible space with clearstory windows, clean rooms, loading docks, and storage.
An archway visually ties the new building and the old together. Electricity, Internet, and all utilities are routed below an innovative flexible floor so that they can be used anywhere in the facility. This makes the manufacturing space entirely flexible so it can meet today's and future needs simply by removing a panel where access is needed.When Drost came to Cornell in 1973 he was hired by Dr. Alan Dobson at the Veterinary School. Dobson was on hand Monday to cut the ribbon that officially opened the new manufacturing plant. Lansing Supervisor Kathy Miller, Tompkins County Legislature Chair Martha Robertson, and a representative of New York State Senator Michael Nozzolio were also part of the more than 200 people, many of them Transonic employees, who joined in the celebration.
"I want to congratulate you first of all for keeping the world headquarters of Transonic right here in Tompkins County," Robertson said. "For doubling the size of your facility, and making it possible to being new and better innovations in fluid measurement in medical settings."
Filaberto says that facilitating the ability of the company to stay in Lansing is a big win for the Town and Tompkins County because of the quality of jobs the company keeps in Lansing, and will continue to add to the local workforce.
"It's a huge success. It's a great success not only for Tompkins County and the Town of lansing, but for Transonic Systems," Filaberto says. "They can expand their manufacturing facilities, and expand more into the global marketplace. It took us several years to finally make it happen, but it was worth the wait."
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