Ingenuity - New Orleans City Business

Intralox has adapted to the demands of clients by customizing conveyor belts through investing insmaller machines that can do specialized jobs.which tailors products for the specificneeds of each client. Such variations caninclude belts for ski resorts that needultraviolet inhibitors, others that havepoints designed to grab meat and stillothers with rounded bumps that preventsliced fruit from sticking to it. It recentlycreated a new angledProduct: Manufacturer with fivedivisions that make shrimppeeling and cookingmachines, stairs and conveyorbelts — with technologymostly invented in-house.roller conveyor belt to cutdown on luggage pileupson bomb scanning Location: HarahanName: Laitram LLCmachines in airports.“We used to think CEO: Jay Lapeyrewhat was needed was toget really good at makinga few products inhigh volume,” Hortonsaid. But then the divisionfound that everyclient wanted certainvariations. This meant buying smallermachines, which required more capitalinvestment. Luckily, Laitram CEO JayLapeyre “has a critical understandingof the role innovation plays in longtermsurvival,” Horton said. This wasapparent when Lapeyre asked him tobe plant manager. As an engineer,Horton was coming from a totally differentworld view.“Engineers thrive on innovation.Manufacturing thrives on efficiencyand lack of change,” he said. “What wehad to do was get the manufacturingworld to understand we will only survivewith change. Otherwise we canonly compete on price.”At Lapeyre Stair, change is in thewind these days as well. Founded in1981, it sprang from an idea by J.M.Lapeyre. He was fishing near an offshoreoil rig and saw a worker strugglingto get down a ladder to a crewboat.His answer was to invent an alternatingtread stair — a sort of crossbetween a conventional stair and a ladder.It’s been very successful creating aniche market but growth became limited,said Elliot Mertz, president andgeneral manager. So this year the divisionembarked on a new product line— conventional stairs.The firm foundmost conventionalmetal stairs are custom-manufacturedinlocal fabricationshops. So LapeyreStair decided to applythe technology itdeveloped in manufacturingalternatetread stairs to makecustom-designed conventionalstairs.“We can make them much fasterand more accurately than local fabricationshops, and it allows us to sellthem more efficiently,” Mertz said.A local fabrication shop wouldbegin with blueprints and cuttingmetal by hand. Lapeyre created programswith information on variousbuilding codes built in so the softwarecan design stairs that meet those codesbased on the height a client needs. Thedata goes into a computer that tellsmachines to cut the metal to thosespecifications.Mertz sees the move to this newproduct line as an extension of J.M.Lapeyre’s overall vision for Laitram.“For many years the company wasstrictly a manufacturer for the inventionsof J.M. Lapeyre,” he said. “Afterhe left us, we carried on that tradition.”— Megan Kamerick2004 Innovator of the Year 5A