Welcome to Advanced Automation, a podcast by Calvary Robotics, where you'll find industry leaders and experts sharing their thoughts on the world of automation. Hello, and welcome to our podcast sponsored by Calvary Robotics Advancing Automation. My name is Joe Gemma, and I will be your host today. I'm very pleased to welcome our guest today, mister Steve Haywood, who's the general manager of CGS Precision Technologies. Steve, thanks for joining us today and sharing with our listeners a little about your operation. Oh, thanks, Joe. It's a pleasure to be with you. So before we get started about the operation of CGS Precision Technologies, maybe you could take a moment, share a little of your background with our listeners, and particularly what led you to this point in managing this division for the Calvary Group. Alright. Well, first of all, Joe, I I've been involved in manufacturing since the mid seventies and, simply put, it's it's a field that I've always loved. My first job was in optics development for a a well known camera and film manufacturer here in Rochester you can guess who that might be. While I was there I developed a process for producing an aspheric lens assembly that was used in the in the disk camera at the time. When it came time to put that process into production, I was asked to assist with the automation equipment. Forty years later, I'm still involved with automation and machining. So it's really just something that I fell into early in my career and, loved it so much that I stayed involved with it. I've been with Calvary for, about seven years now. I was on the Calvary side of the business for for six years and then I've spent the last year over, managing, CGS. And like you, I've, been in the industry a long time. And I I gotta say the last several years have been so dynamic, so exciting to be part of this industry. It really is invigorating. But I it's interesting you said the seventies. You must have started when you were, like, five or six years old. Well, I'm not as young as I as I look, Joe. In fact, I know that. There you go. Okay. So, as you and I actually have discussed in the past, there's a great deal of capabilities in this group and has been a real value to our customers. I'm confident our listeners would like to know a little bit more about what these capabilities are in your division. And and in fact, what investments that we've made in the last few years to reinforce our capabilities. Well, to be honest with you, Joe, from the outside, CGS looks like, many other machine shops throughout the country. What makes CGS unique is our connect is actually our connection with Calvary Robotics. Through our relationship with Calvary, we're exposed to a very wide client base, which has involved us with automotive, medical, pharmaceutical, energy, and consumer products. This diverse customer base has given us exposure to many complex and unique challenges that have actually made us a much stronger company. As far as investments go, CGS generally adds a couple new pieces of machinery every year. Recently we added a new OKK horizontal and a YCM vertical. Last year we added a large mighty Viper vertical machine that has a hundred and twenty inch by eighty four inch bed. This machine allows us to do large plates in house versus having to go outside. Our next investment is probably gonna be a five axis machine. So we're we're constantly adding to the fleet of equipment here at CGS. Which which probably expands, not only our our capabilities, but also the market. So maybe can you tell our listeners about the markets that you you serve and maybe what's what do you focus on with your team? What does your team look at in terms of focus in those markets? Well, as I mentioned before, we're involved in a number of different industries, through our relationship with Calvary. In addition to that, CGS is also, involved, in the aerospace industry. We have a a fairly wide customer base within aerospace. We're not yet into, flight critical components, but, we're we're certainly headed that way. Yeah. And, certainly, the aerospace has a a lot of very unique parts that need the technologies that we can provide to help support their that industry, with our capabilities. So and, again, talking about that. So how would you say we're maybe different and why our customers come to us for their needs as to as opposed to what else is out in the market? Well, Joe, one of the things that makes, CGS unique is the fact that we're able to offer a low cost solution to our competitors. And that's really because of our we we have a full time presence, with our operation in Malaysia. Our Malaysian team sources, from more than a dozen companies in Malaysia. They're able to supply high precision parts at very reasonable cost. The parts are inspected in our in our facility in Malaysia and before they're shipped here to our facility in New York. In addition, we also source throughout a very large, vendor network, throughout the US. This allows us the ability to provide a wide range and very, product offerings including sheet metal components, weldments, precision machining, and assembly, in in addition to, our outside services being, heat treating, painting, and, plating operations. Interesting. Thanks for sharing that perspective and clearing that up for me. So, Steve, you you know, you've talked a little bit about the equipment and the resources we have. What about the people that work in your division? Have they been here a long time? What skills are you most proud of in this team? The team is, a wide variety of skills. We're very proficient with sourcing, machining, programming. In in fact, when I talk about sourcing, CGS originally stood for, Calvary Global Sourcing. We were actually built as a sourcing team for machined and fabricated components. Since then, we've really gone out on our own and and are now a cost center. And in addition to supporting the needs of, Calvary Robotics, we also, support, many of the Fortune one hundred companies, around the US. So that handles the sourcing side. Once we started that, we ended up, develop you know, building our own machine shop, our our own CNC facility, and that's how we became skilled in, machining and programming. In addition, we're very good at project management, which allows us to be able to seamlessly collaborate with our customers, providing both in house resources and supporting our, our vendor network. In addition, we also offer full service quality, inspection. We have our our own in house quality lab. We have two coordinate measuring machines and along with a portable arm that allows us to take, take that arm right out to the machines to be able to do precision of measurements right at the machine. So we really are full service. In addition to that, we also do our own assembly, partnering with, Calvary. We we have, our own assembly capabilities. We're able to build our own our own fixtures, small machines, material handling devices. So so we really are, full service. We have roughly twenty five employees here in Rochester and another half a dozen or so in Malaysia. Some of our employees have been with us for over twenty five years and of course, we're always on the look, for fresh new talent. Yeah. And and you mentioned the quality labs. So, in some of the work that we get comes in from Malaysia. So is it do we have a quality lab set up also in the Malaysia facilities? We do, Joe. In fact, the, the the QC lab that we have here in Rochester is duplicated in Malaysia so they have the ability to to inspect all of the parts and components that are manufactured in Malaysia before they come here in fact every single component that is manufactured in Malaysia does go to the CGS facility in Penang where it is inspected and then consolidated for shipment to, Rochester, New York. So and I and I got another question for you. You kinda touched on, I think, the the answer, but I'm gonna ask anyway. What what are the most common questions you hear from new prospective customers, and and how do we typically respond as an organization to that? Well, probably the one question that we hear the most is, what are the services that we provide? You know, we we believe that we differentiate ourselves from from most, you know, typical machine shops. So the question is, how how do you differentiate yourself? So the answer is, we consider ourselves to be a full service solution provider, not just a provider of machine components. We believe that we provide solutions. We can provide, as I mentioned, everything from fixtures and tooling for customers, to produce their own parts. We do low to medium volume production of simple to high precision parts. We can even do assembly and qualification of the customer's product and even to the point of building, small machines. The majority of those are are build to print nature. So along that line, if somebody comes to us and says, look. I you know, this is a new product, and I I don't really have the capacity in my flow right now to manufacture this, but we want you to help us with the the process and the manufacturing and get started with it as a lower volume process to eventually go to high volume and bring on our flow when we're ready. Could we support something like that? Absolutely. In fact, we we see that in in quite a quite often. One of the things that, that we like to do is when when we're manufacturing components, for a customer, we'll often ask them, how are you going to assemble this? What what what does this part go into? And, they could show us a a bigger assembly. And if we need to to ramp up a small production facility, we can do that from the CGS side. If it start goes into, higher volume, then we're able to to reach out to our friends at Calvary and have them support that activity. So we really can be one stop shopping from individual components all the way through to a, a fully assembled component. And and that's a great handshake between the organizations. Again, bringing a full value to the customer base from the Calvary Group. Oh, absolutely. And and we are located in the same facility, so so we we work with each other, seamlessly, you know, throughout the day. So now, if our viewers or our listeners, would like to hear more about your team's capabilities or have a project that they'd like to talk to you about, what is the best way for them to reach out to you or you and your team? Well, there's several, several ways to to get a hold of us. The easiest way is our is our website, c g s fabrication dot com. It does have a contact link within the website. The name of that website, Joe, will be changing shortly. We are now we are rebranding ourselves to CGS precision, and so our our website will become c g s precision dot com. Email of inquiries can be made at info at c g s fabrication dot com. We have our, phone number five eight five three four seven six one two seven. And our director of sales, Larry Lening, can be reached directly at five eight five seven three two zero zero six seven. I certainly honored that we have the opportunity in this podcast to introduce the, the idea of the new branding of CGS Precision Technology. So thank you for giving us that opportunity to share that with our audience. Well, this audience is is the first group to hear this. It it is official. We are we are in the process of of rebranding the business. And and and the the need to rebrand, Joe, is really to to better highlight what it is that we do for the for our customers. You know, we are no longer, just a fabrication business. We are very much a high precision, machining and tooling house. So we thought it'd be appropriate to, to change the name and really let people know what we're all about. Well, I'm I'm excited for you as we continue to grow the organization. Well, thank you, Joe. And and I'd like to thank our listeners and viewers for tuning in today. We're very excited about the solutions that we provide for our customers, and we'd like to share that excitement and provide solutions for for our customer base. So, Joe, thank you very much for for giving us this platform to to be able to share a little bit about the, the CGS story. Again, thank you, Steve, for being our our special guest today. And be on behalf of the Calvary Group, we thank you for tuning in and learning more about our CGS precision technologies, and we hope you'll tune in for more podcasts in the very near future.
