Water Treatment Equipment


Engineering and Industrial Water Treatment Equipment

When I graduated in 1972 I planned on taking an MBA at Harvard. The picky guys up in Boston put me on the waiting list and said that they preferred that candidates had some industrial experience before entering the program. As I was broke anyway, I thought it was probably for the best anyway. I applied and was accepted to the MBA Program at the University of Western Ontario together with scholarships and bursaries enough to cover tuition, books and some living expenses. We were expecting our first child in August so this were a little tense. They decided that I was not eligible for one of the bursaries which destroyed our budget. So much for the graduate program.

I applied to 10 companies for a job as a chemical engineer from Princeton. I received 10 yeses including an interesting marketing job with Exxon. I worked for Exxon for about two years, first in Ottawa and later in Toronto. It was an eye-opening experience. For the first time in my life I noticed that politics often was more important than being correct. That was a wake up call. My father asked me to help him out for a little while at Anderson Water Systems Limited as he had experienced some unexpected turnover in his staff. It was a difficult decision. Work with my family in a small 40 person company or with a conglomerate like Exxon. I a decided to try the smaller pond at least temporarily.

The layman thinks of water treatment as the city chlorinating and filtering his drinking water, maybe as a household water softener if the water is hard in his town. That is water treatment, but AWSL specialized in industrial water treatment. The equipment purified water to extreme levels for use in the electronics, pharmaceutical and high pressure boiler industries. Many industry must treat their water before they use it in their products or in their processes: breweries, distillaries, soft drink manufactures, anodizers, plating companies, steam creation, laundries and many more. The job was demanding and very interesting. AWSL provided high quality products and service with complete customer support in a fairly competitive marketplace. As the 70's closed out, the competition started to become more price oriented. This disappointed me as I took pride in supplying the best possible engineering solution for the multitude of applications. Sometimes best is not the least expensive. Rather than reduce our standards, we expanded into offshore markets, we put more emphasis on the US market. The Canadian market for most products was always at the whim of world trends. Canada acted like the US but did not have the base markets to justify our marketplace attitudes. As prices were squeezed by lowering quality, I became less and less enamored with the Canadian industrial water treatment market. I started up Anderson America Inc. in Atlanta to address the US market in 1984. After 3 years, the same quality deterioration began in the US. The almighty dollar was reigning supreme and finally I folded AAI and moved on.

I loved the engineering and the industrial water treatment market for about 10 years in the late 70's and early 80's. Maybe it was just me, but the fun was not longer there when it became just another bottom line driven market with little or no consideration for quality or service. I watched this happen to many markets. It is amazing to me how many players worked the 'manufacturing' marketplace. At least 20 times I watched as I wrote the purchase specification for the consulting engineers, bid competitively on the project and lost out by less than 2% to a lower, less experienced bidder. That in itself is just ho hum, but here is the punch line: the bid winner would come back 3 months later asking for extras and the final price to the client would be 10 or 15% higher than my original complete bid. Maybe I was just too ethical, or perhaps naive for the engineered systems marketplace, but that's my story and I am sticking to it.