Radwell International is the industry leader in repairing and selling new, used and surplus manufacturing parts and equipment. We started off as Speck Industrial Controls in 1979 and have expanded to nine different locations throughout the United States, Europe and Canada. In 2016 we purchased a 312,000 square foot building in Willingboro, NJ to house our new global headquarters. Our new building is an interesting and functional space designed to accommodate the many facets of our business so we can support our other locations and our customers as much as possible.

Our Willingboro building was formerly an Express Scripts Medco pharmaceutical facility. Over a million dollars worth of packages ran through the conveyor systems, robots, and the automation that was in place in the facility. Radwell International took over the facility with that automation already in place. A lot of it we kept and maintained or we moved parts of it into a new area to reuse and re-engineer. By doing so, we were able to come up with a system that best fit our needs.

You can learn a lot about us by viewing our facility.  Not only are we an industrial automation supply leader, but we are a remarkable and multi-faceted organization with a clear mission statement. At Radwell we work hard, but we also make time for social activities and for giving back to the community. That’s a very important part of our culture here at Radwell. To learn more about our culture, read The Culture of Giving Back

Another important part of our culture is quality. Did you know that Radwell International is ISO 9001: 2015 certified? If you’re not sure what that means, Tom Foy, Our Global Training and ISO Manager can explain a little bit more about this designation here ISO Certification.

Now that we've completed that brief overview, let’s take a look at our Willingboro headquarters.

This blog was reposted with permission from Engineering 360-Powered by IEEE Global Spec-original post published May 30th, 2017:

Ever wonder where your circuit boards, motors and other electronic parts end up when you’re finished using them? According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), most meet their end in landfills, and sadly, many could be recycled and reused. Known as electronic waste, or e-waste for short, these pieces include far more than just the mobile phones and laptops of yesteryear. The EPA estimates that approximately 41.8 million tons of e-waste was generated worldwide in 2014 (data for 2015 and 2016 is not yet available), with the U.S. accounting for 11.7 million of those tons. By 2018, that worldwide estimate is expected to increase to 49.8 million tons.

Businesses with the tons of electronic equipment they use and discard annually – have the unique ability to make the biggest impact by recycling or upcycling their e-waste. An interesting trend has emerged in the electronics and engineering space, in which legacy equipment is sold off and warehoused by a third-party to resell to another company that is still using and in need of that equipment and accompanying parts.

Consider this: Company ABC purchased a large lot of sensors to test their own product, only to discover a few years later that a different sensor would help them better perform that test. They still had 5,000 new-in-the-box sensors from that first lot just taking up space in their warehouse, and when it comes time to move to a new facility, they consider throwing out those 5,000 sensors because it doesn’t make sense to move them to the new space. As far as Company ABC is concerned, those sensors are obsolete and completely useless. However, Company XYZ still uses the same sensors on a regular basis for a completely different application, and is finding that the inventory of their usual supplier is dwindling. They are spending countless man-hours trying to seek out these sensors, and wondering just how long they have before they need to change their operating procedures or product specifications to find a different solution.

It’s been 51 years since the birth of the Programmable Logic Controller. We look back at the history of the PLC and how replacing hard wired relay systems changed the world of manufacturing.

It was the year 1964 when a young cunning engineer, Dick Morley, was unemployed, had a new baby, a mortgage to pay and only $1,000 in the bank. Morley had previously worked a desk job designing atomic bombs, aeroplanes and communication systems performing the duties he was instructed to do. Morley did not enjoy his job, and, at that time, he had no plans in the pipeline to create such an influential piece of automated equipment. After finding his passion for skiing, Morely quit his job and focused on his hobby which eventually lead him to engineering ideas.

Morley eventually opened up his own professional consulting firm with friend Geogre Schwenk under the name ‘Bedford Associates’’ located in Bedford, Massachusetts, USA. Morley and Schwenk worked with local machine tool firms to help them evolve into the new, solid-state manufacturing sphere. Unfortunately, as his firm progressed, he began to notice that each project he worked on was practically the same; the manufacturing industry was using similar minicomputers and Morley found himself bored.

With his creativity and his engineering motive to ‘make things work’, Morley started to wonder if he could invent a controller which could automate industrial process with multiple input/output arrangements in real time. This would alternately replace the likes of hard wired relay control systems.