MEDRAD finds home in Clinton
CLINTON TWP — MEDRAD's facility in the Victory Road Business Park, which opened in January, cemented a future for the company in Butler County.
Eventually, it will employ more than 500 people and become MEDRAD's key distribution center for North America.
The 120,000-square-foot facility has a clean room at its core and produces sterile packages of syringes and intravenous tubing used to inject imaging dyes into patients undergoing computed tomography, radiological and other health care scans.
The facility is the only Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design-certified manufacturer in the county, according to Rafael Lopez-Cepero, plant manager.
This means it has met strict measures and tests of its energy efficiency and environmentally friendly construction. It includes natural lighting, biodegradable materials and was built using construction practices that reduce human impact on the site.
It won the 2007 Conservationist of the Year Award, which is given to a developer or construction project doing an exemplary job of land and water management, from the Butler County Conservation District board.
"It's not easy. It takes a lot of effort and coordination, but it's satisfying to be an environmentally friendly facility," Lopez-Cepero said.
Signs of this environmental awareness are apparent all over the facility, from the prominent "low emissions and fuel efficient vehicles only" spaces in the parking lot to the numerous recycling bins inside the building.The Clinton Township facility went from groundbreaking to start-up in only 10 months."The plant was designed and built to manufacture the high-runners, basically the bread-and-butter of MEDRAD," Lopez-Cepero said.He said the location hunt was "a worldwide scouting effort," but MEDRAD decided on Butler County because of its skilled personnel and proximity to other MEDRAD facilities."What's most important is the quality of people we can find in this area. I am very impressed with the technical personnel," Lopez-Cepero said.Along with competitive pay, Lopez-Cepero said MEDRAD offers training, development and continuing education incentives to its employees."Each year we do benchmarking. We always try to be above average," Lopez-Cepero said.The facility features a fully equipped cafeteria and kitchen for employees, as well as an "information lounge" equipped with Internet-ready computers and numerous magazines and newspapers.The Victory Road Business Park that houses the facility is a Keystone Opportunity Zone, which the state developed to encourage businesses to invest in Pennsylvania.
Gov. Ed Rendell's job stimulus package provided a $4.2 million grant toward the facility's $44.7 million cost.The Saxonburg facility has three loading docks to accept component deliveries from manufacturers and an inspection lab on the docks to verify the quality of incoming goods.The components are stored in a warehouse, which is capable of holding about 800 full pallets.The components are placed into oven-sized "pass throughs" to the clean room once unpacked to ensure they enter dirt-free.Air inside the clean room is changed 40 times per hour by the facility's seven air-handling units, according to Lopez-Cepero. It is replaced with a mixture of recycled air and fresh air from outside.Workers inside are garbed in sterile coats, shoe covers, face masks, ear plugs and safety glasses.Only one assembly line is currently active, the "SAL-7" line, which produces the Stellant sterile disposable syringe.Four components are loaded into an automated assembly machine: the dust cover, cap, syringe and plunger. The machine assembles about 3,000 syringes per hour."We look at technology to improve production and minimize risk. Safety is first, then profitability," Lopez-Cepero said.The assembly line in Saxonburg uses less than half the labor of its Indianola facility counterpart.Once assembled, the syringes pass on conveyors past several inspectors who check for defects, deformities and particulates.Packaging trays are then molded in-house from styrene film, and two syringes are placed in each. Workers add a primer tube and low-pressure coiled tube to each tray by hand.Before they are sealed, the trays pass through a machine equipped with four cameras, which checks that all components are in the tray before sealing it."We've automated a lot of the processes," Lopez-Cepero said.The trays are loaded about 20-per-box by hand and pushed along rollers out of the clean room to the "palletizer," a machine that organizes, packs and shrink-wraps the boxes on a pallet by itself."The time we manufacture is batch-dependent. We average 15,000 to 20,000 units per eight hour shift," Lopez-Cepero said.MEDRAD uses a combination of private and public services to distribute its products, renting spaces to use as distribution centers. But one will soon be built at the Victory Road location.
Its main U.S. distribution center is in Medrad's Indianola facility, which produces the tubing for the Saxonburg facility's syringes. Eventually, both operations will be moved to Saxonburg.The Saxonburg facility started up in January with about 40 employees running one assembly line for one eight-hour shift. It has since expanded to three shifts and about 70 employees working 24 hours a day, five days a week.By the end of this year, a second production line will be added, bringing the employee total to about 125.When it is fully functional in 2011, the facility will run five assembly lines employing 500 workers. About 80 percent will be directly involved in manufacturing, and the remainder will be support staff, such as engineers, planners and buyers.MEDRAD has 20 acres on which to build at its Victory Road site. The company has grown about 15 percent each year for the past ten years."Not many companies invest in innovation like MEDRAD. We invest a lot in research and development," Lopez-Cepero said. "MEDRAD has expanded its portfolio from imaging to cardiovascular."Last month, MEDRAD bought Possis Medical Inc. of Minneapolis. The company produces catheterization equipment used to remove blood clots by injecting fluid at high-pressure, then vacuuming it out.MEDRAD's corporate and administrative headquarters is in a 125,000-square-foot facility in Warrendale. Its Indianola facility on Route 910 in Indiana Township, Allegheny County, is home to the company's three business units, research and development, sterile disposables manufacturing and warehousing.About 16 miles away in the RIDC Park in O'Hara Township, MEDRAD's Heilman Center houses vascular injection system production, magnetic resonance coils and accessories production, and research and testing labs.MEDRAD has more than 1,700 global employees, 1,200 of whom work in the Pittsburgh area.Its European headquarters office is in Maastricht, The Netherlands, with other international offices in France, Germany, Italy, China, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Japan, Norway, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Singapore, Egypt, Mexico, Cyprus and Australia.MEDRAD reported 2007 global sales of $49 billion.MEDRAD was founded in 1964 by Dr. M. Stephen Heilman, who created the first flow-controlled, angiographic power injector in the kitchen of his home near Pittsburgh."He started with an idea and a need," Lopez-Cepero said.Heilman was an emergency room physician, and he saw tremendous potential in angiography, an X-ray technology, that made it possible to visualize blood vessels inside the body.Power injecting a contrast agent — a dye — into the vessels would enhance the image and make it possible to diagnose the heart disease and stroke patients who regularly came through the emergency room.MEDRAD later introduced the first injector technology for computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging. It has become the leading provider of ancillary devices for the magnetic resonance suite.
