Parts of the Whole

Plant Manager Sadiq Elias

Sadiq Elias knows precision manufacturing is a challenging business.

“It’s long hours. It’s the type of industry where it’s not always a 9-to-5 job,” Elias, plant manager at Ace Precision Inc., told BusinessWest. “We’re making military components here, for the government. And we all know their demands; they don’t care if it’s Sunday, they don’t care if it’s Christmas, they don’t care if your kid was just born — their priority is getting their parts so they can move on with their projects. So that makes for long hours, long days, and that could be a turnoff for some people.”

But there’s a certain satisfaction that comes with this work, he added, that makes it a good fit for young people looking for a rewarding career that engages both their brain and their hands.

“The biggest thing that I’ve always enjoyed is knowing what you’re building,” Elias said. “We’ve made components in the past that are on the Hubble telescope. One of my customers told me at one point, ‘you know, every plane in the sky has a part that Ace Precision made.’ And it’s something you can tell other people — ‘we have parts on space shuttles and satellites, submarines and aircraft carriers, commercial airlines, F-35s.’ It’s cool to know that you can look at a submarine or go to an airshow and look at some planes and say, ‘oh yeah, we make parts that go on there.’ It’s a cool feeling.”

Ace Precision has been creating those feelings — and, more importantly, cutting-edge components — since Elias’s father launched the business in 1980.

“We’ve made components in the past that are on the Hubble telescope. One of my customers told me at one point, ‘you know, every plane in the sky has a part that Ace Precision made.’”

From that original location, in a 9,000-square-foot building on Suffield Street in Agawam, the business continued to grow and thrive, with some important milestones along the way, from achieving ISO900/AS9100 certification in 2013 to relocating to a new, much larger facility at nearby 17 Ace Precision Way in 2021.

“My father started the business with one machine and a lot of ambition. We’ve grown into a 20,000-square-foot facility here in Agawam with roughly 30 employees,” Elias said, noting that the company’s main manufacturing focus is in the aerospace and defense industries, both locally and with a footprint stretching from the South to the West Coast.

The company touts capabilities ranging from prototyping to production work. “We have a pretty good engineering team here. Sometimes we’ll have customers come to us with a design that hasn’t yet been built. And we’ll work hand-in-hand with them, taking those drawings and models and turning those into parts, and then further down the road into assemblies and testing those out for them. Eventually, that may turn into a production order for them.”

Ace Precision moved into its current, 20,000-square-foot headquarters in 2021.

For example, “we do a lot with with Collins Aerospace, developing tools to help them in the field for maintenance purposes and aircraft repairs and overhauls and just routine maintenance,” Elias said. “Also, we do quite a bit with the Navy, where we’re doing launch and recovery systems on the aircraft carriers, as well as with a company that does a lot with commercial airlines, on the mechanical side of things, on the bodies of the planes. So many of those components are built right here at Ace Precision.”

Specialized Services

The Agawam facility houses computer numerical control (CNC) equipment, from lathe mills, grinding equipment, and saws to coordinate measuring machines (CMMs) to check parts. “It’s pretty high-end,” Elias said. “We try to keep up with the latest and greatest equipment that’s out there so we can stay competitive.”

And it is, indeed, a competitive field, he added. “There are a lot of firms in the area that do this type of work — not as many as there used to be, obviously, as manufacturing has gone downhill a little bit in the last 20 years.”

He explained that precision machining involves holding tight tolerances while working on specified materials, such as engine components for aircraft that have very little leeway for tolerance errors.

“So we need really well-trained talent in the shop that can operate the equipment that we do have on hand,” Elias said. “There are other shops out there that don’t necessarily work with precision manufacturing, which is not to say anything bad about them, but it’s just a higher class of workmanship here, I guess you could say.”

That’s why making the move to more than double the floor space was so huge, he noted.

“Moving into a larger facility allowed us to streamline production, creating a flow from in to out. And we’re all under one roof right now. Before, we were in a building that had several different roofs, and it wasn’t very streamlined. So now we’re in a very clean, new facility. It’s a great working environment. People enjoy coming to work to a clean atmosphere, and also it just helps communication within the company.”

Sadiq Elias, pictured with Andrea Sibilia, vice president of Purchasing, says the current space lends itself to a more streamlined workflow and better communication.

At the same time, client needs are always changing as well. “We’ve been working with the same four major customers for many years. Their products have changed, and for the better. There have been design changes and models that have changed configurations completely. We try to use the latest software to help model these parts up and also equipment like 5-axis machining or 3D scanning on CMMs, trying to stay ahead of the curve with technology. That makes us attractive to customers as well as making our job here at Ace Precision easier, and at the end of the day, we become more profitable and prosperous.”

That customer loyalty from a few major, long-time clents has been a critical component the success of Ace Precision, Elias noted.

“There’s one motto that I stand by, and I’ve always stood by: don’t give your customers a reason to go elsewhere. That means give them a quality part, and give it to them when they expect it. Those are two big key factors in keeping your customers happy. If you give them an excuse to go elsewhere, then, obviously, they will find someone else to make their parts.

“There’s one motto that I stand by, and I’ve always stood by: don’t give your customers a reason to go elsewhere. That means give them a quality part, and give it to them when they expect it.”

“There are plenty of shops in the area or in the country, for that matter, that are capable of doing these types of things,” he went on. “So customer satisfaction is huge, and it’s a driving factor in keeping a long-term relationship with a company, so your customer can rely on you. They can pick up the phone or send an email and say, ‘we’re in a pinch; we need something right away.’ And when you get it to them, they’re happy, and you’re happy. They have that feeling of ease that they can rely on you to deliver their parts when they’re needed. That’s what it’s all about: customer satisfaction.”

From the Floor Up

Elias said he always had his eye on working at Ace Precision, even from childhood.

“I kind of grew up here as a kid, coming on weekends with my dad, and he taught me from the bottom up, from sweeping floors, taking out the trash, getting my driver’s license and making deliveries, running on the saw, just doing what I had to do. He groomed me into the man I am today, and basically I run the business now.”

And the plant continues to grow, he told BusinessWest.

“Obviously, everybody hit a big roadblock during COVID, which put a damper on production, but we were able to come out of that strong, if not stronger, due to the fact that our industry is versatile, and we don’t put all our eggs in one basket. So we were able to get through COVID with no problems, and we’ve definitely increased our capabilities and our profitability.”

That said, recruiting and retaining talent is a struggle these days across the manufacturing spectrum.

“You find that a certain age group of older talent may have retired, may have moved on to something different in their lives,” Elias noted, and they’re not necessarily being infilled at the same rate with younger talent. “There’s a little bit of a gap in age where there weren’t that many people out there that said, ‘oh, I want to get into manufacturing.’ Everyone wanted to be in IT or a desk job. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But it’s hard to find that talent and the good help that you need.”

But Ace’s clients continue to demand parts and expertise, Elias was quick to add, and they always have new products in the works.

“So we hope that we’ll get a part of that, if not all of it. We’ve been growing, and we’ve been at a steady pace of growing for the last four years since COVID. It seems to keep going in that positive direction every year. So I just stay positive.”