For 50 years, Moore Industries International has been turning out instruments for industrial process automation and control. Chief Executive Scott Saunders credited the longevity of the North Hills company to how it has constantly evolved to meet the needs of its customers, which include oil and gas extraction and refining, mining and metal refining, pharmaceutical, specialty chemical and wastewater companies. “If there was any one thing that helped the company continue to be successful, it is that was nimble enough, and Mr. Moore had the vision to constantly change the company in order to meet the customer’s demands,” Saunders said. The nimbleness continues today, as the company introduced new products last year in the growing industrial safety sector of its market. International name The firm was started in 1968 by Leonard Moore, who is still involved with the business as chairman. In a statement released in 2008 at the time of the company’s 40th anniversary, Moore credited his employees as the key to the company’s success. “The accomplishment I am most proud of is that at least half of our employees have been with us for over 10 years,” Moore said in the statement. Spread across two buildings, Moore Industries employs about 145 workers here. Another 25 employees work from the overseas offices that allows the company to have “international” in its name. Opening those offices in London, Belgium, the Netherlands, Australia and China, some dating back to the 1970s, is another reason why Moore has been able to survive as long as it has, Saunders said. “Those offices … gave us a good global footprint early on to grow upon,” he added. Moore makes 168 products that monitor all the steps a raw ingredient goes through at a processing plant or manufacturing facility to become a final product, be it gasoline or a pill. These products check on temperature, pressure and other functions of a manufacturing process and feed data to a central control system. “There is a lot of signal processing and conversion that our products handle,” Saunders said. Thomas Burdi, president of the Los Angeles section of International Society of Automation, a professional association based in Durham, N.C., said that Moore has a good reputation in the industry from engineering firm to end users and its products enjoy positive word of mouth. “What makes them good is the life expectancy of the product,” said Burdi, owner of Advanced Process Services Inc., a process control equipment repair business in Los Angeles. “They seem to last long.” Pete Williams, owner of Sullivan Associates, in East Boothbay, Maine, a manufacturing sales rep for Moore for about 28 years, speaks highly of the company. From the standpoint of management and the quality of the products, they are second to none, he added. “That is why I think they have done well over the years,” Williams said. Equipment upgrades Saunders, who has been with Moore since 1999 and was named chief executive in 2014, said the company has gone through a number of shifts over the years to stay relevant. One such shift was the development of the cable concentrator system, a device that takes analog signals and turns them into digital signals to more easily send them over long distances, and then converts them back to analog. It solved problems such as reducing the number of wires to two from 256 used to transfer the digitized information. “That was really the first steppingstone where the company got into digital processing of analog signals,” Saunders said. “That was a huge step.” While all the equipment that Moore now makes has some type of microprocessor in them, the signal input and output remains analog. “Right now, all of our products are digital-based but they still have to have an analog interface component to them,” Saunders said And that leads to another reason why the company has been able to thrive all these years – it continues to make some of that older analog equipment, assuming that it can still get all the components. Williams said that the fact you can still get equipment from 20 years or 25 years ago from Moore speaks to the company’s dedication to keeping good products on the market. In meeting with manufacturing companies in the area of Maine he covers, they like to use replacement equipment they are familiar with and have used before. Moore’s ability to provide that legacy equipment is unique in the market, Williams said. “They have the ability to maintain those designs in the face of newer technology,” he added. “They did not abandon them because they were old.” It’s a lesson that other companies can learn, Williams said, adding that he has told manufacturing companies not to tinker with things that work or to discontinue products. “They (Moore Industries) basically are the only ones who have held true to if they have a design that’s worked well, they keep it in the marketplace,” Williams said. Safety market Another example of how the company shifted to meet customer demands is with its functional safety products. These monitors, which are all in a color scheme of yellow and black to make them stand out in an industrial setting, meet standards set by the International Electrotechnical Commission to provide safety for the personnel working in the facilities where they are installed. “They wanted it to be the best of the best because these products were going to be used as a last line of defense to protect personnel or the environment outside the plant from having a bad gas leak and injuring people,” Saunders said. Last year, Moore released three new products in the functional safety line. Another new product in the line is currently being developed that takes input from more than one pressure or temperature signal and trips an alarm if multiple signals indicate a problem. Other new products meet customer demand by providing more data and analytics for use with cloud-based analytical software to do predictive modeling of when a plant is going to fail or when a problem is going to occur, so managers can fix the problem before equipment breaks, Saunders said. “We are having to come out with products that do just that and our last couple of products do those types of things,” he said.