COMO Filtration Systems designs, engineers and manufactures a line of filtration products to help industries meet economic and environmental concerns.
JANESVILLE, Wis. — From the ground waters of Mother Earth to the reaches of outer space.
That's the motto of a Janesville company with its hands deeply entrenched in both.
COMO Filtration Systems designs, engineers and manufactures a line of filtration products to help industries meet economic and environmental concerns.
"We serve small mom-and-pop operations as well as large industrial companies, including suppliers to the Big Three automotive manufacturers, the military and even NASA," said Doug Schade, president and chief executive officer of the company that employs about 20 people in its 25,000-square-foot plant on Freedom Lane.
"We serve the very large to the very small."
COMO makes industrial fluid filters that clean and recycle both petroleum- and water-based fluids.
Schade said the company's filters extend oil change intervals and eliminate downtime when machines get "crudded up" with dirty fluids.
Those filter systems range from the very small to the very large, said Bart Furey, COMO's vice president of engineering, sales and research and development.
The filters, each of which has up to 700 square feet of surface area, can be adapted to any customer's needs, Furey said.
"We can add modules as volumes grow," he said. "That's how we can address situations without having to change our basic system."
COMO started in the filtration business in the early 1980s, when Doug Schade's father, Harvey, expanded on a line of filters that he'd been working on in the 1960s and 1970s.
"A friend of my dad's came to him in Edgerton and wanted an after-market filter for his car," Doug Schade recalls.
Eventually, the company was approached to come up with a filter for a Rockford, Ill., manufacturer that struggled with the disposal and filtration of dirty oil in its bolt-making machines.
"My dad saw there was a market," Doug Schade said.
The company is still using a design very similar to the one developed decades ago, Furey said.
"Our filters grab more dirt," he said. "There is far less dirt to mar the parts of the machine."
Furey said COMO filtration systems are capable of handling tens of thousands of gallons of fluid per day.
That's one of the reasons the Janesville company has partnered with Crawford Resources in Ohio on projects for NASA at the John Glenn Research Center.
"NASA is an ongoing opportunity for us," Furey said. "They are a business."
Furey said continuous filtration is vitally important to NASA, which often conducts experiments for shuttle flights in tight time frames.
If a filtration problem delays an experiment for a shuttle flight, it could take another two years before another opportunity comes along for a shuttle ride, he said.
"Not only do we have to perform, but we have to prove it," Furey said.
Robert Crawford, vice president of engineering for Crawford, said the filtration systems must improve reliability in fluid-based equipment and reduce maintenance problems and costs. Those systems must also provide a relatively short return on investment, generally less than a year, he said.
COMO's filtration and separation systems help decrease the expense of maintenance, downtime, labor and disposal costs required by today's environmental concerns, Schade said. Compared with the expense of replacement or costly disposal of industrial fluids, recycling is the only answer, he said.
Furey said the company's computer systems rival those of competitors 10 times COMO's size. Those computers are capable of programming distant filtration systems via the Internet, he said.
And that's true whether it's a system bound for outer space or one filtering fluids away from Mother Earth's ground waters.
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Source: Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
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