by Mark A. DeSorbo
Retrofitted space employs box-within-a-box concept
MSS Clean Technology Inc. (Tucker, GA) had no particular plan or stringent budget to stick to, but there was an objective. That goal was to transform a 45,000-square-foot manufacturing space into an efficient and environmentally controlled semiconductor and aseptic panel factory.
With a penchant for butterflies, as one can see emblazoned on the logo of MSS, the cleanroom component manufacturer says it considered this Dallas space as a cocoon of promise for its Concept and Integra cleanroom panel systems.
MSS purchased the building about two years ago from panel maker LSI Inc. (Irving, TX), and broke ground for its transformation a year later. Last February, MSS completed more than $2 million in upgrades, which resulted in more than 30,000 square feet of manufacturing space as well as 15,000 square feet of space for inventory, storage and incoming and finished goods.
According to Michael Ranson, chief executive of MSS, the Dallas facility will match its marketing efforts in Europe. The reasoning behind the purchase and subsequent retrofitting was to establish a facility to stock bulk raw and semi-finished goods in order to meet time-sensitive projects of its customer base.
Before MSS bought the factory, 20 LSI employees would hand-spread the adhesive, producing 60 panels a day. New equipment includes hydraulic platinum presses, brakes and forwarding machines, which allowed MSS to double the size of the panels to 20 x 5 feet and increase production to 200 panels a day.
“About 45,000 square feet of semiconductor and 35,000 square feet of pharmaceutical wall and ceiling panel are now delivered each week,” Ranson adds.
Perhaps the most intriguing part of the project is the box-within-a-box concept. That means, according to officials, that the manufacturing area is a controlled, yet unclassified clean space, and company officials maintain that the space is on par with an ISO Class 8 (Class 100,000) cleanroom. Within the environment, there is an enclosure where the adhesive is applied.
“The point of having the controlled environment was to keep nuisance contaminants out,” Steve Thomas, executive vice president of operations for MSS Manufacturing, says from the show floor at CleanRooms East 2000, held in Baltimore in late March.
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MSS parent companies have manufacturing facilities in Europe, and officials had been seeking a site to establish a U.S. factory. They found what they were looking for in Dallas. “We needed to upgrade the facility, and a lot of the technology that we use in our plants in Europe, like polyurethane adhesive sprayers, were not available in the states,” Thomas says.
James E. Kavanagh, executive vice president of operations for MSS Inc., says it took the company about a year to complete work. “The project just sort of evolved,” he explains from the show floor of Interphex 2000, held in New York City in March. “When we found out what we needed, we bought it and developed the project based on product requirements.”
According to the company, MSS entered the U.S. cleanroom market in 1994. Two years later, it completed an ophthalmic component manufacturing plant for Alcon ASPEX in Dallas. In 1997, MSS completed a cleanroom for Mallinckrodt Veterinary Biologics (Raleigh, NC), which, according to MSS, was the largest biologics plant in the United States. Last year, MSS completed a project for 3M in Singapore.