By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
The website of SAi (Systems Associates, Inc.) features images of big city glamour and economic power from around the world. These projects illustrate the global reach of a company whose headquarters are in a modest building on Lehman Street in Bowling Green.
“We’re very well known in the industry, and not known in Bowling Green,” said David Codding, the president and founder.
SAi serves the hospitality industry and large corporate centers.
The company’s two product lines, SynergyMMS and ControlIQ, though separate are interrelated, Codding said in an interview a few weeks back. And the company’s newest venture, into co-generation energy plants, is another extension of their work in the facility control industry.
ControlIQ, the company’s original product, controls the heating, cooling, and lighting systems within a building.
“The real key is integration,” Codding said. “What we do is tie all kinds of disparate systems together.”
The company’s software connects to the scheduling software for a hotel thousands of miles away. If an event is being held in the hotel’s ballroom at 7 p.m., the software can bring up the lights and air conditioning gradually so the room is ready when the event begins.
These controls save the customer money, as well as being more energy efficient.
The controls are dynamic, Codding said. “It’s based on the schedule. Any time the schedule changes, our systems picks it up and changes.”
When a storm hits, the software can go in when workers cannot, to make sure the systems are adjusting to the demands.
About 10 years after the company was started, customers in hospitality approached SAi officials with a request.
“The hospitality market presented to us that this is great but we need something to keep track of what our employees are doing and work flows,” Codding said. That was not in SAi’s wheelhouse. Then, he recalls, “they said the magic words: ‘We need that in every one of our properties.’”
Codding continued: “So then we decided we needed to figure out what that was.”
It’s a maintenance management system, MMS, and they developed the software to meet that need.
“So we do the control side and the maintenance management side,” he said. “Every bit of it has to do with workflows and sustainability.”
Any deficiencies in the building get reported. Maybe it’s a TV not working or a burned out light. That gets logged into the SynergyMMS system. Through the software the company can track how long it took for someone to respond and get the problem fixed.
Codding did not intend to start a company. The self-described “townie” graduated from Bowling Green High School in 1974 and went on to major in design technology in Bowling Green State University’s College of Technology, graduating in 1978.
He was employed at Owens-Illinois, as an automation engineer working on energy management projects. The division he was assigned to was sold in 1981. Though he was technically in that division, most of his work was with corporate staff. He did not want to go with the division that was sold, but the parent company had a hiring freeze, so he was in limbo.
“I had to go independent for two years, and then the plan was to go back to Owens-Illinois. I just never went back “
“I had all kinds of projects within Owens-Illinois,” he said. Some were early in the proposal stage; others were ready to put out to bid. “When we started, we were instantly busy because we had all these different projects for Owens-Illinois,” he said. “All of those were in their manufacturing plants … and so that’s how we really got our foot in the door with large boiler plants, large chilled water plants. That’s kind of been our forte” as well as “very large air handlers.”
Other companies heard about what SAi was doing and sought them out.
Now the company has projects in 80 countries. The closest are Defiance College and Domino Farms in Ann Arbor. The largest is the 3,500-room Hilton Hawaiian Village. They also serve the 2,000-room Hiltons in New York City and San Francisco.
The company is now working with Hilton to design systems for properties as small as 60 rooms.
The pandemic didn’t have much of an effect on the company, though it did on some of its customers. The bottom dropped out for the hospitality industry, he said, and hotels drastically reduced their work forces. Instead of eight engineers at a large hotel, they may have two. SAi personnel took up the slack with monitoring.
Now as the economy is opening up, some problems persist, Codding said. “The lack of workers has not hit us directly here in Bowling Green, but we see that as being difficult for our customers.”
And it poses a dilemma for them.
“They don’t want to spend money on capital expenditure projects now,” Codding said, “but they’re seeing that now is the time that it’s really rewarding for them if they can spend that kind of money to put in some of these projects because we’re eliminating some of their workforce.”
Now SAi is venturing into cogeneration projects with companies located in large metro areas. These companies often have their own generators to provide power. Those generators, he said, produce a lot of hot water. This hot water can be used for necessary functions. In a hotel that would be in the kitchen and for showers in guest rooms.
Those generators now rely on natural gas, but using renewal energy in the future is an option, he said. That’s something SAi would be very interested in working on.
Bowling Green remains the right place from which to do business. The company did try having satellite offices on the East and West coasts, Codding said. But even then employees weren’t necessarily where the project was, so they consolidated on Lehman Avenue in BG.
“Bowling Green is a great town,” he said. “It’s a great place to raise a family. The cost of living is cheap here. And the Midwest work ethic has a good reputation. We hear that a lot coming from different places.”
