Driven to Design High-Quality, Elite Equipment
Ranco’s Engineering Team Puts Customers First in Quest to Design High-Quality, Elite Equipment
Ranco Fertiservice has been innovating and manufacturing durable, high-quality dry fertilizer blending and material handling equipment for more than 60 years. But the Sioux Rapids, Iowa-based company wouldn’t have lasted this long without an elite engineering team.
Jesse Peterson, Ranco’s Engineering Resource Manager, is the leader of that team and the project manager. Peterson, who’s in his eighth year at Ranco, oversees 13 people, including engineers and drafters. He began his career as a mechanical engineer at Boeing, and has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and a master’s degree in systems engineering from Iowa State University.
“I’m proud of the department and the work we do,” Peterson says. “Our goal is to continue to serve our customers and push the limits of what we can do in the engineering department to advance Ranco.”
One of the department’s key members is David Christensen, Ranco’s Engineering Technical Manager. Christensen says growing up on his family’s farm in Iowa (about 20 miles from Ranco) piqued his interest in agricultural engineering, which is why he attended Iowa State to earn a bachelor’s degree in the subject. He’s in his 11th year at Ranco.
“We aim to meet our customers’ unique custom needs, while providing unparalleled customer service from start to finish,” he says.
Christensen emphasizes “unique custom needs,” which is where he believes Ranco shines.
“We have customers who have very unique needs, and as engineers we make sure that we meet their requirements, whether that’s on the structural side or the mechanical side,” he says.
Peterson reiterates Christensen’s customer-first approach. “We’re not just selling widgets out of a catalogue,” Peterson says. “We don’t tell our customers, ‘This is what we have — take it or leave it.’ We want to provide them a system that is going to work the best it can for them.”
While most projects feature 80% standardized equipment, the remaining 20% includes custom-engineered equipment. But that 20% takes plenty of effort, especially to get transitions between equipment pieces correct and to ensure the overall system performs to the customer’s requirements, Peterson adds.
The engineering department also must adapt to changes, whether they are handed down from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) or another entity.
“A few years ago, OSHA began updating regulations on ladders to need more safety gear,” Peterson says. “So, many of our customers now want structures with towers and stairs, and that has increased the scope of our engineering department because most of the structures we manufacture are custom designed to that facility, which are in accordance with the requirements of those areas of the country.”
That’s when Ranco added Jeremy Zindel, who is the company’s Structural Engineer and a P.E. (Professional Engineer), to help Ranco provide the best solutions for its customers in that realm.
A Day in the Life
What’s a day like for a Ranco engineer? It depends on where a project is in its development. At the beginning of a project, a Ranco salesperson and a drafter get together to devise a general arrangement drawing to explain the concept to the customer, Christensen says. Then, individual pieces of the system’s equipment are distributed to design engineers and drafters.
“Manufacturing engineering comes in afterward to generate shop drawings based on models created in computer-aided design software provided by AutoCAD,” Christensen explains. “My role in this is overseeing overall standardizations. We take the components we know that work and put them into applications. From there we can optimize and customize them based on the customer’s needs.”
Peterson focuses on the team’s day-to-day interactions as well as scheduling and coordinating project due dates. “A big part for me is removing roadblocks for the team,” he says.
When asked about some of his biggest accomplishments at Ranco, Christensen cites his work to expand offerings in existing product groups. Christensen also helped design one of the most capable blend systems in the world for a customer in Florida, which features 25 main product hoppers — five with in-bin product conditioners.
Peterson says some of his biggest accomplishments include keeping team morale at a consistently high level. Since he started, only one person has left his department and that person, who worked at Ranco for several years after an internship, wanted to relocate to a bigger city.
“We want to bring good people in and keep them,” he says.
Meeting Increased Demand
Peterson says Ranco’s business is growing. “The interface between all the equipment has stayed the same, but all the structures being requested now have increased over the last few years, and it doesn’t look like that’s going to slow down anytime soon,” he adds.
Peterson says everything is “is getting bigger, faster, and stronger” in the dry fertilizer handling equipment segment.
“As our plants grow, it puts more demand on us to make larger, higher-capacity equipment with more structures and with a focus on safety,” he says. “But we also focus on efficiency and how we can continue to customize systems for customers and increase our turnaround so there is less wait between when they place the order and when they receive it.”
Christensen says Ranco’s customer focus and quality of work are at the heart of the company’s core values. “We want to ensure that the overall design is achieving what the customer wants. We look at each individual component to create a system to be as optimal as possible,” he says.
Peterson and Christensen want Ranco to stand out for its efforts to the point where the company is differentiating itself from the competition.
“Our willingness to offer custom solutions is probably one of the big things that sets us apart along with our service,” Peterson says. “If we do design something and it gets to the site and it doesn’t work quite right or the customer is not happy with it, we’re going to make it right no matter what we must do.”
Peterson says the best part of the job is the people at Ranco, and the small-company atmosphere and culture.
“Everybody works together, and we help each other,” he says. “We’re dedicated to our customers. At the end of the day, everything we do is about serving them.”