Power Partners' roots go back to 1958, when Westinghouse built a distribution transformer plant in Athens, Georgia. The Athens plant was purchased by ABB in 1990, and two Athens-based organizational consultants expert in lean manufacturing and team-based work cultures, Sherrie Ford and Steve Hollis, purchased the plant from ABB in 2003 and named the company Power Partners. The 8 millionth transformer to have been made at the Athens facility was produced in 2008. In 2009, the company began producing adsorption chillers.
Sherrie Ford died in 2011. She was a visionary and was recognized worldwide as a hands-on leader in manufacturing work culture. While she headed Power Partners, it was one of the ten largest women-owned businesses in the United States. Ford successfully applied a Ph.D. in English to improving manufacturing operations. She found her calling working with manufacturing companies and their employees while working at Athens Technical Institute, now Athens Technical College. In 1991, at the college, she started the Center for Continuous Improvement, whose mission was to help companies in North Georgia develop organizational leadership and vision and adopt lean manufacturing principles. In 1996, she founded Change Partners, a consultancy that helps companies improve their operations by encouraging them to embrace world-class manufacturing techniques and lean production principles. At Power Partners, her deep engagement as a leader and personal knowledge of her associates was a fundamental part of her and of the culture-making she practiced.
Power Partners was one of seven winners of the SJF Institute's 2011 Green Jobs Award, which honors private businesses that contribute to both the economy and the environment. Power Partners also received the Excellence in Sustainability award at the 2011 Manufacturing Innovations Conference, a national event sponsored by the National Institute of Standards' Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP).
In 2012, Luke Faulstick, whose global operations teams and manufacturing plants at other companies have won numerous awards, became co-owner, president and CEO of Power Partners. Steve Hollis, who had been President and CEO of Power Partners since he and Ford bought Power Partners in 2003, became Chairman of the company and also its Executive Vice President for Development. Hollis and Faulstick established PPI, a corporate holding company, in 2013 and Power Partners is its principal brand.
THE PPI WAY
At PPI, we are transforming the world through innovative manufacturing.
PPI people are raising the bar every day – by taking our goals and values to heart, by training, and by using PPI’s tool box, which is equipped with custom tools based on contemporary manufacturing concepts. We manufacture the PPI Way, and that’s how we continuously improve our products and processes and exceed customer expectations.
Goals of the PPI Way: Create the safest work environment possible. Improve customer experience. Improve quality. Reduce lead time. Reduce total costs.
PPI Values: Safety, quality, delivery, cost -- in that order. Thrill the customer. Rise to the challenge. Enthusiastically improve everything we can. Take pride and be passionate about all we do. Encourage and serve daily. And think like an owner.
Training: Employees participate in a number of training programs, including Pay-For-Skills, Training within Industry, the Lean Apprentice Development Program and Facilitator Skills. In addition, all employees are encouraged to take advantage of cross-training opportunities.
The Tool Box: The Kaizen Blitz, a focused, intense, short-term project to improve a process, is the key catalyst for all the other tools in the PPI Way Tool Box. Other primary tools are value stream mapping, process mapping and the 7S and Visual Workplace, and our tool box includes a wide range of other lean, Six Sigma and T.O.C. (Theory of Constraint) concepts that PPI’s employees and Leadership Team are expert at using to full effect.
INNOVATION
PPI is an innovator, both in the century-old electric power industry in which it has deep roots and in the renewable energy frontier it began to explore only a few years ago. Our collaborative culture enables us to bring together people, process and technology and sustain a high level of innovation.
Developing Next-Generation Adsorption Chillers with DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
In the renewables sector— barely a year after PPI’s Power Partners business began to produce an innovative adsorption chiller that uses water and silica gel to convert waste heat or heat from solar collectors into chilled water for air conditioning and other processes — the company’s ECO-MAX chillers were featured in the prestigious Technology Showcase at the ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit. Hundreds of top technologists and cutting-edge clean tech organizations compete to participate in the annual Showcase, which presents America's most promising prospects for winning the future in energy.
The Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is now working with Power Partners to utilize PNNL's advanced materials and develop next-generation adsorption chillers that are smaller, more efficient and affordable enough to be used more frequently in commercial buildings. The powerful adsorption chiller being developed takes advantage of PNNL's metal-organic heat carrier technology and new types of refrigerants.
"More efficient methods of cooling represent a great opportunity to reduce energy consumption in buildings, and in doing so, greenhouse gas emissions as well," said PNNL Laboratory Fellow Pete McGrail, who is leading the research project. "The ARPA-E program represents a unique opportunity to move a recent laboratory discovery to the mainstream HVAC and commercial buildings marketplace in just a few years."
In a second project, PNNL, Power Partners and Oregon State University are partnering to adapt the nanomaterial-using adsorption chiller system for field military bases on the front lines of battle. By using up to 50 percent less diesel than the air-chilling technologies currently used by the military, the system could save soldiers’ lives by reducing attacks on troops who transport fuel in supply convoys.
The system will be a next-generation adsorption chiller that is specially designed to be smaller, lighter, more efficient and operate under the extreme temperatures experienced at bases on the frontlines, also called forward operations. The chiller will use a novel nanomaterial called a metal organic framework, or MOF. MOFs are crystal-like compounds made of metal clusters connected to organic molecules, or linkers. Together, the clusters and linkers assemble into porous 3D structures that can hold up to three times more water than the silica gel used in today's adsorption chillers. This helps make PNNL's test adsorption chiller system much smaller and lighter, and PNNL’s McGrail says the result will be the most advanced adsorption cooling system ever developed.
Power Partners is playing a key role in this project by providing the engineering talent and development for the controls to optimize performance and system functionality. PPI will also conduct extensive testing and operational prove-out of the chiller on its world -class test cell.
“I was very pleased to find an American company that was actively engaged in producing adsorption chillers,” said McGrail. "When I visited Power Partners for the first time, I was stunned to learn about their dedicated chiller test facility, which is the perfect match for testing the new sorbents and chiller designs we set out to develop on the project.”
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