Radwell International Opens
New Doors For Industry

For Immediate Release

(Lumberton, N.J.) --Twenty five years ago, Moorestown, N.J.-based Speck Industrial Controls operated out of the second story of a converted barn with nine employees. Today, the company has changed its name to Radwell International, Inc., and is experiencing brisk growth in a niche that serves the company and the manufacturing industry well--so well that the company just purchased a brand-new 70,000 square-foot building in Lumberton, N.J.

The niche Radwell has found is the buying and selling of industrial surplus controls. How does Brian Radwell, president & CEO, feel about the name change of his company? "All my working career, I've been part of a company that uses someone else's name. It was time for a change," said 37-year-old Radwell. His father, Jerry, and Jim Speck founded the company in 1979 by establishing distributor agreements with a handful of manufacturers. They added a service bench so one of the more technical staffers could perform repairs for customers who wanted their existing equipment repaired instead of buying a new unit from Speck Industrial.

One of Radwell International's brands, PlcCenter, is doing particularly well today. When industrial equipment manufacturers introduce new products, they often increase pricing of the "obsolete" older product, forcing users to upgrade. And what if upgrading isn't affordable, or, worse yet, the item has been discontinued? This is where PlcCenter comes in. PlcCenter buys and sells surplus industrial automation equipment needed by manufacturing plants with ever-decreasing maintenance budgets and increasing production demands. They need to lower costs. PlcCenter's surplus business serves as a clearinghouse for manufacturing plants with "idle assets" by buying the under-utilized equipment from the plant, enabling them to recover some value while writing off the loss. PlcCenter customers are the next to benefit from this practice of industrial recycling. They often pay less than half of what a new replacement would cost.

Visitors to the company's Web site, PlcCenter.com, can search a surplus inventory of more than 396,000 items. Or, if a client is looking to repair an existing unit, the PlcCenter.com Repair section contains 200,000 part numbers. All searches can be done by manufacturer, part number or description. To maintain its stock, PlcCenter often buys tractor trailer loads from "riggers" who specialize in dismantling a plant that is shutting down one of its production lines and needs to liquidate the assets. Selling surplus equipment was a natural extension to the company's roots in industrial distribution and repair. Having in-house repair expertise means that Radwell International can service what they sell. Radwell's service department is staffed with three teams of technicians specializing in specific product areas: drives and motors, programmable controls and general controls like timers, counters and sensors. It is this foundation of technical expertise that the company has tapped into to complement its surplus business with a Quality Assurance Team that tests all equipment before shipping.

"We don't just cross our fingers and hope it works," asserts Radwell. Does this concept work? Consider that the company recently doubled its warehouse space by buying a newly-built, two-level, 70,000-square-foot office building in Lumberton, N.J., for $4.5 million. The facility has been customized with a full industrial repair lab and high-tech inventory management system including fully automated conveyor systems, pneumatic tube systems for transporting parts, and shelving racks equipped with small elevators to facilitate the stocking and picking of parts by personnel using wireless hand-held mobile computers to control inventory. The facility consists of 20,000 square-feet of office space, 15,000 square-feet of high-tech lab space and 35,000-square-feet of warehouse space with automated inventory systems.

Radwell is adding another 30,000 square feet in 2007 to accommodate further expansion.