Company Profile
CMC Industrial Electronics, Inc.

Reprinted from Grain Journal July/August 2014 Issue

Accidents are bound to happen. It’s a reality that every grain handler faces daily, one that can have devastating consequences – a fact that Doug Forst, president of Burnaby, BC, Canada-based CMC Industrial Electronics, Inc. knows firsthand.

In the early 1970s, Forst was witness to an explosion and devastating fire at an elevator in the port of Vancouver, BC that claimed the life of a young man he knew well. As a result of that experience, he has dedicated himself to improving safety in grain handling facilities.

So when he opened the doors to CMC in 1997, “our focus from the beginning was to improve the safety and operability of grain processing facilities and also to reduce the installation cost of certain types of equipment in those facilities,” he says. Not surprisingly, the company’s mission statement reflects that singular vision: “Protecting human life and property.”

“That’s what we do. Everything we do is focused around that,” says Forst. “That’s who we are.”

Make no mistake: CMC is not in business simply to build a better piece of safety equipment; it wants to change the way people think about hazard monitoring altogether.

“It’s not just the hazard monitoring equipment we provide,” explains Bob Reis, vice president of operations. “We’re working in partnership with our grain customers to help change the approach to safety from being an after-thought, to embracing a culture of safety in their daily operations,” he says.

Different Approach

Working under the premise that safety is a proactive process, CMC’s employees have used a different tactic in its product development. Unlike many standard hazard monitoring systems on the market that rely on heavy aluminum boxes that are designed to prevent an ignition in a facility where hot gases have escaped and created a potentially dangerous (explosive) condition, CMC looked to a methodology developed by the Europeans in the late 1990s called “intrinsic safety” when developing its line of hazard monitoring equipment. As such, CMC’s products are manufactured as very low-voltage, low-energy systems that don’t allow energy in the cabling that might cause an ignition.

“So that’s what this key product – what we call our ‘bus converter’ – does. It contains a safety barrier,” says Forst.

Additionally, CMC’s bus-based monitoring systems provide a constant data stream of information about all areas of a grain processing operation. The company’s human machine interfaces (HMIs) let an employee instantly know the present status of equipment with data including temperature, rpm, vibration levels, humidity, AC current flow, thermocouples, and other analog signal outputs. In short, it watches over the machinery leaving workers to do their jobs better.

The company’s EZSentinel 128 hazard monitoring operator interface has a unique, user-programmable graphical interface for most types of machinery in grain, feed, and milling facilities. It provides a perfect illustration of how this integrated, automated, and real-time approach to hazard monitoring works.

“When there is an alarm,” explains Forst, “whether it’s a hot bearing, a slowdown, a rub, or whatever it may be – the least knowledgeable operators can walk in and look at the graphical interface, and in under five seconds know exactly the nature of the alarm, the location of the alarm, and then it provides them the ample information immediately to decide what to do,” he says. “So it takes the guesswork out. That’s a huge benefit,” he notes.

In fact, the EZSentinel is so easy to use and install, Forst likes to refer to it as the “iPhone of hazard monitoring.” What CMC essentially has done with the EZSentinel is remove all of the complexity of a PLC (programmable logic controller) indicator out of the equation and make it easy for just about any grain professional to use.

“When you go to set it up, the typical country elevator electrician can easily set it up and deploy the EZSentinel 128,” says Forst. “They don’t do any PLC programming or graphics programming whatsoever. It’s like setting up an iPhone.”

The simplicity of the interface and the information it provides are part of the genius of CMC’s approach to hazard monitoring, because they not only address dangers when they arise but also change the way people think about safety.

“By using this data proactively, looking at it proactively, and recording it, bringing it to headquarters to have a look at it, we can actually stop the behaviors, before we even get to the point where the machine is damaged or we have a problem,” explains Reis. “And that’s where the industry needs to move, if you want to talk about forward-thinking in the industry and where it needs to go. We need be proactive about safety, not reactive,” he suggests.

HazMon-in-a-Box

When it comes to the installation of hazard monitoring systems, once c again, CMC took a completely different approach from what is typical in the industry – literally thinking “out of the box.” With its innovative HazMon-in-a-Box kit, CMC has taken speculation out of the installation process and enabled virtually any field technician or electrician to use it while offering comprehensive on-site and on-line education and technical support.

Here’s how it works: When the electrician arrives at the job site, he has a kit of parts that contains everything he needs to mount CMC’s system onto a piece of machinery, such as a conveyor or a bucket elevator. All the necessary hardware – screws, brackets, conduit, fittings – everything an electrician needs to install the product on a piece of machinery is prepackaged in the HazMon box.

“So the big advantage for our customers is that they have high consistency between installations,” says Forst.

During a typical installation done the old-fashioned way, he notes, the quality of the job largely depended on the electrician himself and raised a lot of questions in the mind of the grain operator, such as: Did he use brackets? Did he use the proper steel? Did he use the proper bolts? How did he put it together?

“You would have large inconsistency from one install to the next,” he explains. “If you use our kits, you have absolute conformity.”

Not only that, but customers who opt to use the HazMon-in-a-Box also have the peace of mind knowing that they have technical support and ample training available to them, if they need it.

Comprehensive Training

“We go beyond [the sale] by providing on-line training to anyone who installs our systems. It’s a very comprehensive training,” says Forst. “We also train site personnel, and we supply in-depth, detailed best practices documentation, which you can get off the website. And we have seven-day-a-week technical support available,” he adds.

The training that CMC offers to its customers illustrates its commitment to its mission statement to help create safer grain handling facilities. As an educator and a thought-leader in the market, CMC has formally launched a program called the Road Map to Safety™, in which it will conduct site assessments for customers to help ascertain what sensors and products they may need to ensure that they are compliant with OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) and NFPA (National Fire Protection Association) regulations.

“We will actually provide the training,” Reis says. “We’ve also assisted several of our customers in helping them write their maintenance programs and how to maintain their hazard monitoring systems. So it is a formal program, and we will actually go on these sites with our customers,” he adds.

Expanding Markets

Forst and Reis note that the electronics manufacturing industry is now a global marketplace. While CMC manufactures equipment in the United States and Canada, it constantly searches the world for the best possible suppliers and manufacturers of components for its products – “wherever we can get the best quality and the best price for our customers,” says Forst.

Today, CMC focuses most of its sales in North America and Mexico, where there is the largest number of grain elevators. Forst says the company is entering the world marketplace this year and has developed new products approved for global markets including the European Union.

At the International Association of Operative Millers (IAOM) 118th Annual Conference & Expo in Omaha, NE in May, CMC officially announced its plans to expand into the grain processing market with the introduction of its Millguard Pro rollstand monitoring system. Given that grain processing is an “allied industry” that represents half of the overall grain market, CMC sees this as a huge focus for the company going forward because of the need for improved safety in these processing facilities.

“The problem is that the [processing] facilities are very old; they’re reaching maturity – let’s put it that way,” says Forst. “We have found a way to put electronic monitoring on those machines to improve the performance of those mills.”

The announcement comes at a critical time in history, as developing countries are catching up with modern agricultural practices at a quickening pace.

“One thing we know for sure: we need more grain,” says Forst. “The world is getting bigger, and it’s getting more people in it, and more and more of those people are achieving some degree of wealth and eating animals instead of vegetable products. So we’re needing more and more food for both humans and animals all the time,” he adds.

The good news is that CMC’s entry into global markets will help ensure that as more grain facilities are constructed around the world, safety won’t be an afterthought; it will be built in.