Ductmate Industries: Clearing the air for nearly a half-century
Sitting placidly along the Monongahela River, essentially a baseball throw from Washington County, Ductmate is a large-scale provider of products and services to contractors and builders in the heating, ventilation and air-conditioning industry – commonly known as HVAC.
An HVAC system controls temperature, humidity and air quality of homes and businesses. To be precise, it clears the air.
“We started in 1978 in West Mifflin,” said Doug Poundstone, director of manufacturing operations for DMI Companies Inc., the parent of Ductmate Industries.
Ductmate was the original operation in the company, which underwent a restructuring and addition of the DMI name in 2005.
The manufacturing firm’s corporate office is at 210 Fifth St., Charleroi, and has a Monongahela mailing address. But the company actually runs in Forward Township, the southernmost municipality in Allegheny County.
Poundstone led a recent public tour of the company’s facilities, organized by the Washington County Manufacturers Association.
The hour-long walkthrough was illuminating, featuring robots, automation and an efficient human workforce as well. Technological advances enable robots to do much more than they could a decade ago, such as welding metal rings that have split.
Two of the company’s robots so ingratiated themselves to staff, they have merited the names Betty and Denise.
This is a busy operation, with day and night shifts. Ductmate has a workforce of about 500-plus, including 205 factory employees – all of whom are unionized. They belong to Local 12 of Sheet Metal Air Rail and Transportation (SMART).
“About 60 million pounds of cold rolled steel is processed here each year,” said Poundstone, a Uniontown native. The local company is one of DMI’s four manufacturing locations, along with those in Lodi, Calif., Wagoner, Okla., and Portsmouth, Va.”
Ductmate, according to its website, sells products “through a network of more than 400 distributors in the United States and a consortium of manufacturers and distributors worldwide.”
“We ship to Australia,” Poundstone said. “We do business around the world. Tariffs are always a concern. Business is affected by the economy.”
The local DMI operation has displayed resilience. COVID-19, which struck Southwestern Pennsylvania in March 2020, did not profoundly affect operations at Ductmate, Poundstone said. “We had no layoffs and worked through the pandemic. We did duct work during the pandemic.”
And emerged unscathed, he said.
Poundstone said Ductmate strives to be environmentally responsible. “We recycle all metals and we started a zero waste to landfill in 2015.”
Minimizing landfill waste is the goal of this endeavor, and Ductmate did its best to do so by reducing waste generation, reusing materials and recycling.
He said Ductmate Industries also is devoted to community outreach. The company has organized and hosted an annual Manufacturing Day for students from regional high schools for the past seven years, which he said has drawn about 100 students.
The event highlights job and financial opportunities in manufacturing that may be available to teens who are ambivalent about attending college and/or incurring debt.
Poundstone said Ductmate also recruits would-be employees and “and we’re involved with co-op programs,”
Acknowledging the rise of automation in manufacturing, Dana Smith, manager of design and engineering at DMI, stressed that “this is not about replacing people, but freeing them up for something else at the company.”
“We always need people,” Poundstone declared. “We never have enough.”
Near the end of the tour, Poundstone, a manager with a heap of service time, touted the possibilities that could lie ahead for a job candidate at Ductmate.
“There are a lot of options here,” he said. “I’ve been here for 25 years and am now in this position.”