BOOMING BASTIAN: Demand driving plant to nearly double its workforce

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Bastian Solutions has about 100,000 square feet of manufacturing space at 315 W. New Road in Greenfield. (Submitted photo)

GREENFIELD — Their clients are businesses that know what they need done. They just don’t quite know how to do it.

“When you can’t buy something out of a catalog, we design and build it from scratch for our customers,” said Riley Buttry, general manager of custom automation for Bastian Solutions, a Toyota Advanced Logistics company in Greenfield. “A lot of times, what they’re asking us to do has not been done before.”

Sometimes it’s miles of conveyor for a large tire manufacturer. Other times it’s a system that can move back and forth and up and down retrieving and depositing pallets weighing thousands of pounds from a grid of storage spaces.

Ultimately, they’re projects that allow the user to achieve automation.

And the demand for those outside-the-catalog answers is growing, so much so that Bastian Solutions’ Greenfield site is looking to about double its workforce.

The company has about 100,000 square feet of manufacturing space at 315 W. New Road, about double the amount it moved from last June at 2155 Fields Boulevard. (Monroe Custom Bodies moved from Mt. Comfort into that space to make way for the County Road 600W widening).

“If you come through this facility every six months, this whole space will look different every time you come through,” Buttry said of the custom assembly area. “It really is a continued churn. That’s why everyone here enjoys it, because it’s something new every day; it’s a new challenge.”

Steel is at the core of the equipment the company makes for its customers’ automation answers, both in sheet form that’s cut and tubular form that’s welded.

Bastian Solutions projects go all over the world. Some are completed quickly, Buttry said, while others can take years.

“It’s exciting, the range of what comes through this facility,” he said.

As the company’s name suggests, its objective is to solve customers’ problems, Buttry continued. Problems include handling products that are too large, too heavy or too difficult to manipulate, or handling products in challenging settings.

“We’ve done stuff in a vacuum, we’ve done stuff that’s in a radiation bunker,” he said. “About any environment you can think of, we’ve designed and built the equipment for it.”

The automatic storage and retrieval system the company makes can move heavy pallets in and out of vast storage spaces. Instead of needing to man a fork truck, the system is tied into software allowing a user to retrieve a pallet or put one away in a desired space.

Bastian Solutions has about 90 employees at its Greenfield location and runs a first and third shift. About a half-dozen work the third shift, Buttry said, and the company wants to grow it as large as the first, with the potential to add a second shift after that.

The additional workers are needed to keep up with business in two sectors that make up much of the plant’s clientele, Buttry said.

“We really have seen growth across all of e-commerce and high-end manufacturing,” he said. “They’ve all started to kind of ramp up their demand and ask for more and more. I think everybody paused a lot last year on the capital side, not knowing where COVID would go. We continue to stay staffed and ramped up and basically we’re ready to now execute.”

The Greenfield location is looking for machine operators, fabricators, material handlers, painters and welders.

Scenarios are similar at other Bastian Solutions manufacturing locations across the country, said Liz Rouech, communications specialist for the company.

“We’re looking for people because the whole industry is booming so much that the job pools are competitive from the get-go, so there’s less candidates, because everybody in our industry needs the people,” she said.