As an industry leader in sheet metal duct and fittings fabrication, Mestek Machinery is proud to be a SMACNA Premier Partner. It is our honor to collaborate with leading organizations and contractors in the sheet metal and air conditioning industry to advance technology and drive innovation in the construction and HVAC sphere.
At the 2025 SMACNA Product Show, Mike Bailey, Mestek Machinery's Senior Vice President Sales, spoke with SMACNA about the importance of creating a more connected shop floor while discussing Mestek's partnership with Stratus on the new Lockformer Spiral Status Technology platform for data-driven contracting. SMACNA also spoke with Jake Olsen, CEO of Stratus, and Matt Cordova, Director of Construction Technology at Hermanson, to learn more about the success of the digital integration. Check out the conversation below!
This is our 10th, almost 11th year being a Premier Partner with SMACNA, and every year just gets better. We continue to meet more and more people. We learn more things by being involved in the industry and being out in the duct shops and the mechanical contractors. This past year, our whole job has been about innovation. So we've been pouring a lot of research, a lot of resource and money into new innovation.
One of our new products is the Lockformer Spiral Tubeformer, which is now being downloaded from the Stratus platform. So we started looking at Stratus about 3 years ago with data-driven contracting. And I started thinking, why are we not doing something similar with the machine tools? So now we have data-driven contracting, meaning data-driven manufacturing.
Our mission at Stratus is to enable data-driven contracting, and that means a complete digital workflow all the way from design through fabrication, shipping, logistics, and how to install. And we really look across that whole workflow and try to find any pieces that are not digitized yet, that's where we go and try to find solutions.
One of those is this new partnership we found with Mestek. So we have a joint customer, Hermanson, up in the Seattle area. Big Stratus user, big fan of Mestek, but we had their spiral line was not yet in a digital workflow. We're connected to coil lines and some of the other parts of their shop, but they were doing a lot of spiral, kind of manually nesting, manually planting the spiral. So we got together with Matt Cordova over there and then with Mestek, our partners at Mestek, and said, how do we bring this part of the operation into a digital workflow?
What we ended up doing was building a digital integration with partnership with Mestek where we can push that fabrication information into the machine, run the spiral. You can optimize nesting, nesting across packages, really optimize that fabrication workflow. and then track it digitally back through Stratus. So again, bringing any parts that aren't quite digitized yet back into a digital workflow. So the partnership with Mestek has been fantastic on that. And since we've launched that, I think we've got at least a dozen and other additional companies already looking to get into these new connected spiral machines.
A few months ago, We wanted to purchase a new spiral machine and Mestek reached out and said, hey, we know that you use Stratus, and we're looking at implementing a new product software within our systems to automate some of the spiral machine cutting workflow. And we're a full mechanical, so we leveraged that Stratus platform already for a mechanical piping shop to nest cuts and automate the cutting of the material. Running spiral duct is very similar, but we don't have any integration with the spiral machine itself.
We work with Mestek B&R Automation, flew them out to Seattle. They installed a module into the spiral machine. We did our first ever beta test connection with the software, ran our first cuts. The integration to get better was with our spiral operator saying, hey, we need to add this, this and this to the software itself. Stratus made it work. Mestek and B&R Automation made that system work as well. And now we're completely paperless using spiral machine.
SMACNA has been an awesome conduit for us to work with our partners, our contractor customers, and help share ideas to other SMACNA members. I think probably one of the best in the industry in creating a good forum for us as vendors to talk with our contractors. Yesterday, we gave a talk, for example, with Matt from Hermanson on how they're using our tool and improving their workflows for the audience, for the other SMACNA members. So the ability that SMACNA has to encourage sharing, to encourage best practices, and really lift the whole industry is second to none.
It's the partnership with SMACNA, being union, our connections within the trade, that's what made it happen. Without that central core, We may have not even known about it.
The families, the friends, the relationships, that's what it's all about. So we enjoy just speaking with everybody, being around everybody. You know, this is the best spot to do it. You know, SMACNA has this convention every year at different locations, but it's onsite. It's for 4 or 5 days. You get to meet, you know, the wives and the kids. And so it's just a great atmosphere. If you're not part of it, you're missing something.