They make ceramic tile installation products, flooring adhesives, surface preparation products, exterior insulation finish systems and epoxy flooring for commercial and professional contractor markets. They also batch pre-mixed grouts, mortars and other products targeted predominantly to the retail home improvement marketplace. Jim Holman, president of Fox Valley Scale, New Lenox, IL, puts it in a nutshell, “They make sticky stuff.” Fox Valley Scale was called to the H. B. Fuller Construction Products plant to come up with a solution for what could have been a sticky situation.

Geoffrey Russell, production manager, and Jim Sansone, maintenance manager, recall the day they were advised that a variety of new processing and packaging equipment was being moved to the Aurora facility. Jim remembers, “We had to figure out how we could combine that new production equipment with the existing manufacturing area and be up and running in ninety days.”

Jim Sansone, maintenance manager, reviewed current production methods of the used equipment transferring to the Aurora factory. He realized that much of the equipment and processes were well over 20 years old and needed an upgrade in technology. Manual raw material weighing systems needed to be automated. The company had limited knowledge in using load cells and wanted to minimize capital spent on the relocation of the equipment. Jim notes, “We had to justify the money.”