A new collaboration of 4 U.S.-based industrial manufacturing companies has organized under one new name and management umbrella to offset the effects of supply-chain and geo-political interruptions, while at the same time boosting manufacturing efficiency.

The new company currently boasts customer portfolios in manufacturing for agricultural equipment, aerospace providers, conventional and alternative energy entities, automotive equipment, consumer products, construction and off-road equipment manufacturing, military/defense contractors and the recreational vehicle market. 

Caldera Manufacturing Group, located in Reading, Pa., was formed in 2023 with Summit Steel & Manufacturing Inc., Fairlawn Tool Inc., Laser Specialties Inc., and Summit Storage Solutions coming together as a comprehensive, rebranded single-source manufacturing solution serving many providers building equipment for a wide range of industrial products. The business will have financial oversight from the board at Lorraine Capital.

Mark Jurman, the new CEO comes to Caldera with more than 25 years’ experience in global manufacturing and will be responsible for the company’s overall operations while setting strategic direction to maintain the participating companies’ successes and expanding Caldera’s services and capabilities. Jurman most recently was CEO for Dedoes Industries, a global leader in equipment for the automotive refinish market. He also worked for Silver Eagle Mfg. Co., Rheinmetall Automotive, Superwinch and Novawinch.

“The world is changing, and we saw the need to re-shore American manufacturing as a time to come together and work as a team to provide products and services for many in the U.S. manufacturing industry,” Jurman explains. 

Currently all of the facilities under Caldera’s umbrella possess 2-D and 3-D laser cutting capabilities, bending and forming, robotic and manual welding, powder coating and value-added assembly, he explains. 

“Each location has its own specialties, however, and that’s why partnering makes us much stronger and allows us to provide our customers additional services.

“Summit, for instance, has centerless grinding, CNC saws for precision cutting, and extended CNC lathe and mill capacity with significantly large capacity. Fairlawn, in Westminster, Md., can also provide tube world-class bending, stamping and turret punching. 

“Laser Specialties, in Tulsa, Okla., our latest acquisition, allows Caldera to take on bigger and heavier jobs with thicker materials, infrastructure and architectural jobs, and projects in agriculture,” he says. 

“Also, Summit Storage Solutions, also in Reading, provides Caldera with U.S. market leadership in automated vertical storage for warehouse situations, eliminating much of the need for fork-lift sorting and retrieval and human climbing to reach inventory.”

Jurman says currently Caldera’s customer base and capabilities are quite broad but adds he wants to explore deeper in each of his company’s specialties to identify additional customer needs and attempt to provide solutions. 

How does Jurman see improved efficiency taking shape under Caldera’s organization?

“Coming from a manufacturing background I know handling a bunch of suppliers can be like herding cats,” he laughs. 

“It’s very difficult and each of them has specific unique personalities and systems. By providing one supplier who can do more for you, you’re only managing one supplier — hopefully us. Your resources can be used to do other things to grow your business and move along instead of just trying to get orders in and processed.”

An Ear for Agriculture. He says he foresees specific attention to customers in agriculture, particularly through Laser Specialties in Tulsa. 

“When I got out of the military I spent some time delivering seed corn, my first real interaction with farmers,” Jurman explains. “I kept seeing these really unique and creative solutions to problems, and in my later career I learned a lot of those same problems exist in factories.

“So, by getting closer to our agriculture customers in the Midwest and Southwest we want to get involved in the development process of solutions for them earlier. We could speed innovations to the market for these guys, because they’re continually developing things and if we could collaborate with them to design something that could be mass produced more efficiently we could boost their efficiency.

“We want to improve our customer touches through Laser Specialties. We want to get to know them, as well as the manufacturers themselves — it’s also about knowing the end users.”

Jurman says Caldera will be participating in more farm shows and expositions along with the heavy equipment trade to start “listening” for feedback.

“If we can take that feedback into our process and share it with our customers we’re better able to serve them. There’s nothing better than when a customer says, ‘We need one of these,” and we can say, ‘Well, we’ve been talking to some farmers and they say if you tilt it five degrees to the left, it would work a lot better.’ Customers appreciate that insight and it also demonstrates we care about their business. We intend to listen.”