Orion Industries is a 60-year-old high-performance coating company that got its start in the early 1960s coating parts to speed up race cars. Today, the Chicago-based company is coating aerospace and defense materials for use in outer space, in defense machinery and munitions, and on the ocean, as well as coating parts for most industries and markets.
Design-2-Part magazine recently interviewed Orion Industries for its September-October edition. Here’s an excerpt from the article.
“Orion doesn’t produce parts; we provide functional industrial coating services,” said Patty Martucci, Orion Industries marketing manager, in an emailed response to Design-2-Part.
Orion’s coatings are essential for parts that perform in extreme environments and temperatures – for example, up to 270 degrees Celsius or as cold as minus 270 degrees Celsius. In addition to helping parts withstand harsh environments, its coatings increase resistance to wear, abrasion, and corrosion, and their lubricity helps reduce friction.
They also help customers hold tight coating tolerances, a key attribute when parts expand and contract in extreme temperatures. As an example, Orion’s coatings are the choice for an industry that puts a valve in the desert and leaves it unattended, fully expecting it to work in eight or 10 years.
“We have the expertise to apply over 100 different coatings for a variety of unique applications,” said George Osterhout, former company president, now senior advisor to Orion Industries. “Our in-house coating lab with an experienced chemist and staff, gives us the unique ability to formulate our coatings for specific customer needs. After we fully understand the customer’s technical and use-case requirements, we determine the right coating formulation and application process to resolve issues such as friction, adhesion, product release, corrosion, noise, heat, and abrasion to improve the performance of their finished products and components.”
Orion employs more than 100 people in two facilities. The company expanded in 2014 into a 68,000 square-foot facility at 5492 N. Northwest Highway in Chicago, while maintaining its previous production facility at 5170 N. Northwest Highway. It employs numerous long-term team members with decades of service, and it has retained key technical staff, giving it the ability to apply solutions learned from old customer projects to new challenges.
Orion Industries is AS9100D and ISO 9001: 2015 certified, as well as ITAR registered. The AS9100D certification gives global recognition to a firm that meets the highest aerospace quality standards by offering excellent parts and services. Most defense OEMs won’t accept work from a company without the AS9100D certification.
In addition to the ability to repeatedly produce consistent, high-quality results, one of the certification’s many quality requirements is designed to stop the use of counterfeit parts in the aerospace supply chain. It is based on an internationally understood and followed quality management system. To meet the standard, Orion maintains consistent, repeatable high quality, and promotes a continuous quality improvement culture inside the company. This certification opens the doors to selling to major original equipment manufacturers.
“Orion creates greater product performance through functional industrial coatings. This means consistent, repeatable results, long lasting customer partnerships, a people-focused culture, and the courage to go beyond expectations,” Martucci said. “We use over 100 quality control devices and tools for measuring and testing specific part and coating parameters.”
Orion Industries serves primarily large and mid-size manufacturers and component suppliers in a wide variety of industries beyond aerospace and defense, such as automotive and marine, chemical and material processing, food processing, cookware, bakeware, industrial and manufacturing, water service, and others.
Scott Yoder, Orion Industries’ regional sales manager, explained that an important step in Orion’s coating process is figuring out what the customer wants to do. “We use a lead risk assessment form,” Yoder said. “A customer reaches out through a call or the internet. Our job is to listen. [If they say] they want a particular type of coating, we start digging.”
Yoder said Orion keeps asking questions, and the answers lead to coating decisions. A critical step in this process is pretreating the material to make certain it can be coated properly.
Continue reading this article on Design-2-Part.
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