Omega TMM is the only company in the tool presetter market to offer manufacturing, assembly, sales, and support within the United States. While the competition is importing products from China, this Fairport, New York-based company is doing the opposite…
“We are an exporter to China,” explains Vice President of Business Development Chris Inzinga. “We do not import anything.” This surprising fact has brought Omega TMM national attention, particularly after being featured on Viewpoint with Dennis Quaid as an ‘American-made story.’
“You always hear about products coming from China to the U.S.,” Inzinga says. “We are a company that actually sends our presetter and our tool measuring solutions to China.”
Omega TMM employs a team in China to distribute these products throughout the Asian market. “We play that key role in taking our technology and sending it throughout the globe,” Inzinga says. He credits long-term, deep relationships for making this possible.
“The ability to even just get into China and to sustain yourself in China takes years in the making,” he explains. “We did that a long time ago, and now, we’re pretty much reaping the rewards.” He adds that this team is made up of “great people who understand the marketplace very well, understand the industry and the business very, very well.”
In addition, this team in China is committed to staying with the company long-term. The managing director has been on board for nearly twenty years, and the other employees are equally dedicated. The lack of turnover “is absolutely outstanding,” says Vice President of Global Sales and Product Development Ryan Meleg. “Most people have tenure of ten years plus. It is an unbelievably well-run organization… They are almost fifty percent of our revenue and a very, very important part of Omega TMM.”
Active throughout the globe, Omega TMM is “the number one in tool measuring and management solutions within the United States and in other parts of the world as well,” Inzinga says.
Meleg adds that this fact makes the company “not only the market leader, [but] also the market setter, and what I mean by that is we lead the market by example. We are very progressive. We do some very cutting-edge things. We use a lot of different technology in our machines.”
This sets a high standard for other companies in the industry. “We actually create the challenges for our competitors. It’s very unique being in our position, specifically in the U.S. and in China, being the one that creates the way the market will operate,” Meleg says.
So how has the team managed to accomplish all this innovation? “It is a team effort,” Meleg says. “Every single department is interconnected, and every department has a say in everything that goes on, and that’s how you get the creativity.”
Management is open to anyone’s ideas and feedback, from the janitor to the CEO “and everyone in between,” Meleg says. “We don’t silence any voices. [We listen] and select the best choices that will propel us forward. It is a true team effort from every single department at Omega TMM.”
Omega TMM is committed to its people and strives to make the workplace a positive, supportive environment. As a result, the company has been named a ‘Top Workplace’ by Democrat & Chronicle three years in a row, currently ranking eighth out of sixty companies to make the list.
This supportive culture also filters down to the customer. “We form true partnerships with our customers, and there’s a trust factor between our customers and Omega TMM that you don’t see anywhere else,” Meleg says. “They rely on us and understand that we will always do the right thing in their best interest, not necessarily our best interest.”
To ensure they are serving customers the best they can, the team has a meeting every morning to discuss the latest developments. “Everybody in the company comes up [to the office] and we talk about our customers, and we talk about how we can improve our own internal processes but also any issues that our customers may have,” Inzinga says. “We’re talking about it together as a company, and we each participate in that. [We have] a goal of really a hundred percent customer satisfaction, and that is top-of-mind.”
The customer experience has improved even more with the recent launch of the John F. Nuccitelli Center for Customer Excellence. The state-of-the-art center provides high-quality virtual demonstrations to showcase the company’s portfolio of presetters and tool inspection systems.
Its opening coincided with the fortieth anniversary of Omega TMM’s first presetter release, as well as with the pandemic. When COVID shut down the world, “We took a forward-thinking approach,” Inzinga says. “With our customers closing shops and basically moving toward a home environment during that time, we wanted to [take] a proactive stance. So, in a very short period of time, we created the John F. Nuccitelli Center for Customer Excellence.”
The center has been a runaway success, already exceeding expectations and offering more services than originally planned. “It has really become the hub of our company,” Inzinga says. “We’ve gone beyond just doing virtual demos in the center. We do virtual training with our customers… as if we were right there with them. So this center really has developed and grown. We even use it for employee events, customer meetings, and now that we’ve moved more back to in-person, we have several customers that come here—not just local [customers], they actually fly in to see our center, and they love it.”
The center is named after CEO Mike Nuccitelli’s father, John, “who was a real legend and brought innovation and growth throughout the industry over the last sixty years,” Inzinga says. “So the center has really become a tribute to him [and a] tribute to many others who have come through the industry.”
Omega TMM has managed to weather the pandemic remarkably well. “Surprisingly, we haven’t had the challenge that most companies have based on supply chain issues because we don’t source things from overseas other than certain things you have to [such as] computers,” Inzinga says. “We haven’t had an issue there.”
Careful planning was another factor that kept the company ahead when supply chain issues hit America. “We pivoted when we realized that this was going to be an issue,” Inzinga says. “A couple of years ago, we decided that we would increase inventory levels during the pandemic even though, obviously, business was down at that point in time… We did increase our inventory levels by up to 30 percent so that we have had absolutely zero supply chain issues. We are still on the exact same delivery time schedule as we were three years ago, and we don’t see any issues going forward, being that we own most of our intellectual property and can multi-source pretty much everything that we don’t manufacture in-house.”
Omega TMM already has a major presence around the globe, but the team does not plan to rest on its laurels. “We have machines and software in pretty much every country,” Meleg says. “We are all over the place but we are on an expansive growth path. Our goal is to double in two years, which is quite an aggressive path. It’s pretty exciting.” The team is busy preparing. “We’re aggressively engineering new machines and new software to make sure that we hit all the hot points for any geographical expansion,” Meleg says.
The expansion will require the same teamwork that has brought success to Omega TMM thus far. “It’s going to take a whole village to raise this child,” Meleg says. “Our team that we put together—our software engineers, our mechanical engineers—they’re going to be the real backbone to all of this to develop all these new things that are required for market penetration.”
Some of these groundbreaking products will be unveiled at this year’s International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS) in Chicago. “We are going to revolutionize the way people view the measuring and management of tools at IMTS 2022,” Meleg says. “We have multiple product releases that are going to change the landscape of this industry.” After decades of leading the presetter and tool measuring industry, it certainly will be exciting to see what market-changing technology Omega TMM brings to the market next.
