By NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — Superior Boiler had the ribbon cutting for its new watertube boiler facility Wednesday afternoon, but the important thing to note from Wednesday's event is that the company has a sense of its history and is striving to make new history even today.
"Hugh Gass founded Superior Welding just off of Main Street in Hutchinson back in 1917," said President and CEO Doug Wright. "There's no doubt he and those few workers would be astonished at what their small company has turned into today. Only a half of one percent of all companies make it to see their 100th birthday. Yet, here we are once again, taking another step forward in our company's history. How do we continue to be an industry leader and stay relevant? We innovate and deliver a very reliable, high quality product, a product that is built to outperform."
Wright had a major innovation announcement to make on Wednesday.
"We've been working on another new boiler design over the past two to three years," Wright said. "It does take a little bit of time and effort. We've been conducting testing in our own state of the art testing facility for a little over a year now. We feel that we now have an industry changing boiler to bring to the marketplace."
Wright then thanked the two main engineering staff on the new boiler, Mohktar Matallah and Trent Thurston for their hard work on the project.
"I'm especially pleased to announce publicly today that we are officially introducing our newest hot water condensing boiler, the Cheyenne."
Don Whitman also thanked everyone, including Governor Laura Kelly, for coming out and honoring the everyday working man with such an event.
"I've been doing this for 32 years and I can tell you, we've got the best team of boilermakers I've ever worked with here," Whitman said. "I'll repeat what Doug said. If you know somebody, if you've got a brother or a cousin that needs a job, we want you to come out here and work. We're hiring every week. We've got more boilers, more backlog than we know what to do with, so we need Kansans to come to work.
Sundeep Bodapati, Vice President of Engineering was also honored, as plaques were presented to him to signify the two patents he has obtained.
"The first patent was for his multiple pass flexible water tube boiler," Whitman said. "It's 11,060,717B2, dated July 13, 2021. Then, his second patent is the one I'm really excited about, this is for a high-temperature fluid generator, so high-temp hot water, which we see our industry moving more and more to. Sandeep and his engineers anticipated that and started going to work to find a product that's easy to build, better quality and higher efficiency with an integral economizer to give our customers what they really need. This patent is 11,947,596B1, dated June 29, 2021."
With the first patent, they've already sold five units, representing 7300 man hours, so their innovation is literally adding jobs.
In fact, Wright told Hutch Post they're expanding faster than expected.
"Right now, we have 15 open positions that we're trying to fill and having a hard time doing," Wright said. "If we could fill those positions, I think we'd be where we need to be and that's about 155 employees. Right now, we're at about 140."
Wright and Hutchinson Chamber CEO Debra Teufel even joked on the platform Wednesday about needing to do further expansion in the future and that he's glad there is an additional 18 acres out there when they are able to grow.
