Electri-Flex Core Values | Manufacturing Innovation

Founded in 1955, Electri-Flex has nearly 70 years of success manufacturing Liquatite® flexible conduits. Manufacturing over those years has been mainly at one location, world headquarters located at 222 W. Central Ave., Roselle IL USA. Success hasn’t come without adaptation and change. Throughout the Company’s history, many factory enhancements, building renovations, and expansions have taken place. Most recently, Electri-Flex set out to install new technological innovations to improve production capacity and efficiencies and implement new environmentally sustainable solutions.

Roy Hunn, VP of Operations, shares with us these latest manufacturing projects, and what that means for our products, employees, and customers. Roy recently celebrated 45 years with Electri-Flex, until his retirement in June 2023.

What are the new innovations Electri-Flex has implemented, and how do they improve production?

Here at Electri-Flex, we have recently put some new enhancements and additions into our manufacturing and have implemented new improvements for production flow and processing. We’ve eliminated operators having to do any manual lifting of raw materials by upgrading form rolling machines that utilize new technologies, as well as steel and copper packaging.

We’ve redesigned the extruding department layout, added new extruding processing equipment, improved product flow, reduced material handling bottlenecks, reduced extruding setup time, and increased productivity. We incorporated self-contained water reservoirs for our chilling and curing liquidtight conduits during the extruding process so that we’re not dependent on city water. We’ve also introduced new bailing machines for our corrugated scrap.

How do these improvements support environmental sustainability?

We reduced raw materials scrapped by nearly 50% over the last few years. We reduced our requirement for additional lubricants and oil products by more than 45%. We reduced our wastewater by nearly 50%, and we implemented an efficient recycling program for all corrugated scrap. Nearly 100% of our processing scrap today is completely recycled.

What are some of the benefits that employees and customers will experience? And how does that shape the future of the Company?

Plant employees will benefit from a cleaner and healthier work environment. Machine operators no longer have to lift raw materials, which will reduce common injuries such as back pain or fatigue.

Partners and customers will also experience a much cleaner, environmentally friendly manufacturing facility, such as cleaner work areas, better lighting, and a more welcoming atmosphere. Besides the visual improvements of our manufacturing process, our customers will also realize significant improvements to the quality of the products that we supply to them. These and several other innovations that we are going to be presenting in the next few years will continue to keep Electr-Flex at the forefront of being the quality solution provider that we’ve always been for nearly 70 years.

With the addition of new technologies for coil processing and extruding, Electri-Flex is prepared to meet all the needs of our customers and continue to be the leader in developing and offering the highest quality conduit solutions.