{"id":10956382,"date":"2024-12-06T07:00:41","date_gmt":"2024-12-06T12:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.baltimoresun.com\/?p=10956382"},"modified":"2024-11-20T13:38:54","modified_gmt":"2024-11-20T18:38:54","slug":"no-1-large-top-workplace-2024-intralox","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.baltimoresun.com\/2024\/12\/06\/no-1-large-top-workplace-2024-intralox\/","title":{"rendered":"No. 1 large Top Workplace 2024: Intralox counts on worker initiative to improve conveyor belt systems"},"content":{"rendered":"

Andrew Akers commutes a long way each day from Pennsylvania to Hanover not just because he enjoys his mechanical engineering job at Intralox, a conveyor belt maker, but because he appreciates the self-management culture.<\/p>\n

At the heart of that philosophy is the idea that employees thrive and reach their potential by managing themselves and that by working as a team, they serve individual interests too.<\/p>\n

The New Orleans-based firm has fostered such an environment during the 13 years Akers has worked in its Baltimore-area facilities, first as a test engineer, then as quality team manager and now as development operations manager.<\/p>\n

At Intralox, which makes conveyor belt products and equipment for automotive, food, consumer goods and industrial industries, employees are encouraged to take ownership of projects, assessing priorities, timelines and potential roadblocks and solutions.<\/p>\n

“It’s really a fresh take on the corporate workspace,” Akers said. “There’s very few people who work at Intralox\u00a0who just come in and just put their hours in.\u00a0 Everyone seems invested in the work and the outcomes because that self-managed philosophy makes it feel like you’re part of the ownership.”<\/p>\n

Akers’ team of 50 assembly technicians and engineers tests out new ideas and develops them into new products that can then be mass-produced. <\/p>\n

That team is among more than 550 Intralox workers in the Baltimore area and among nearly 3,400 globally. The company has 13 locations and assembly centers worldwide, including facilities at Tradepoint Atlantic in Sparrows Point, which opened in 2022, and near BWI Marshall Airport.\u00a0 Intralox, which had annual sales of more than $1 billion last year, started in the Baltimore region in 2007 with 40 workers.<\/p>\n

Baltimore has grown into the headquarters for conveyor belt equipment manufacturing; while the belts are made in the firm’s global headquarters New Orleans. The Maryland equipment division has more than doubled since 2020.<\/p>\n

“The biggest contributor is continued and rapid growth of the e-commerce market,” and growing demand from Amazon, Walmart and parcel carriers such as FedEx and UPS, said Derek Lester, the company’s Hanover-based business unit manager for equipment. “The sheer number of parcels that are handled in North America has gone up a tremendous amount.”<\/p>\n

The biggest challenge, he said, is anticipating and responding to customers’ changing needs in industries that handle everything from food to parts to finished products in factories, warehouses and distribution centers. That means continually coming up with new ideas.<\/p>\n

“The only enduring competitive advantage we have is to be able to continuously improve faster than our competition,” Lester said.<\/p>\n

One project that Akers’ team and others worked on resulted in new conveyance technology for small footprints in the logistics and materials handling industry, known as Smart Path.<\/p>\n

“If you think about a factory floor, there’s only so much real estate, so that layout plays into a lot of our solutions,” Akers said. “Smart Path is able to do what some older technology could do in about a tenth of the space.”<\/p>\n