Systematix began life in 1988 as an automation company in a small facility in Waterloo, Ontario, and was originally the spinoff of an industrial fastener business. Over many years, its brand slowly grew thanks to the work it found within window and door manufacturing. From there, the company expanded its services into diverse industries like automotive and medical device consumer products, as well as into new energy solutions like solar, electric, and wind power. Today, now as Samuel Automation, the company continues its evolution as a home-grown Canadian company with a global reach.

Regional Manager Don Weber says there are many types of automation in the market today, and this can lead to some confusion among potential clients, so the company feels that specific language about automation is all-important to its identity. To that end, the company distinguishes itself by focusing on custom automation, an engineering-intensive style that involves assembling precision parts and offering a turnkey solution when it comes to automation across a variety of sectors.

“Our specialty is projects with multiple parts that need verification and testing,” says Weber.
“We do very well at that.”

In 2021, the company was acquired by Samuel, Son & Co., a Canadian metal manufacturing and supply giant with over a century to its name. As its partner, Samuel Automation now has far greater support for its operations, giving its two bases of operation in Waterloo, Ontario and Tucson, Arizona a boost while granting it additional resources to balance its workload.

The acquisition has even led to integrating more partners into the fold, and this has resulted in the creation of Samuel Automation. The group is a triumvirate consisting of Systematix itself and its partner organizations RAMP (a custom automation manufacturer based in Waterloo) and CAID Automation (a custom automation manufacturer based in Tucson). This new acquisition within Systematix, as well as the ongoing collaboration with multiple divisions of Samuel, Son & Co., has been a big factor in the company’s recent successes and overall positive momentum.

Leading the way into new endeavors has become practically inseparable from the modern Samuel Automation approach. Over the past year, the company has begun partnering with various OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) to do further energy product development.

Weber says that the clean energy market is really changing now. Instead of just offering clients in the new energy space a machine to build a product, Samuel Automation will partner with them early on to offer engineering, research and development, and product development services for a more holistic approach. This allows the client to get their product to the market faster and more economically. This step is still in a nascent phase, but the company continues to move forward, intending to implement automation and make processes around it more efficient for clients.

Reflecting on the company’s ongoing work in the green energy market, Weber notes that Samuel Automation has been working on more projects involving fuel cells, battery modules, and other clean energy initiatives. This work is meant to both promote and develop these products while building the automation to manufacture them.

Many markets want to switch to more sustainable solutions; for example, within the realm of custom automation, there is a significant appetite from customers to move to electric drives instead of pneumatics. While pneumatics is the most widely known energy solution in automation today, electric drives use considerably less energy and are preferable when moving toward greener automation.

This desire for new energy solutions gives Samuel Automation more versatility in the market, as electric drives are programmable and use less energy with more flexibility, with the ability to add more products to a line in the future or to accommodate more than one part on a machine.

Indeed, flexibility is the name of the game when it comes to programming automation based on a customer’s needs. “Everything we do is custom,” says Weber. While forming early partnerships with clients is a big part of this approach, it also involves getting into the details of what customers want and understanding the unique challenges of each.

When someone wants a product with many pieces and precision assembly and wants these at a fast rate and with data collection and storage after the fact, every job is about getting as many details as possible on the part. From there, Samuel Automation can scale a custom solution to the market that works in every way the client needs.

This process illustrates that the team operates on the adage of ‘work smarter, not harder.’ Weber points out that this attitude is much needed in the industry, as is alignment between customer needs and the services it provides. “We try to be very honest and transparent with the customer,” he says, and much attention is paid to ensuring that Samuel Automation can indeed provide the best help to achieving a customer’s goals.

For example, during the custom build/design phase of a project, the team goes to great lengths to make sure it shares its three-dimensional designs—constructed in design software SolidWorks—so the customer can review it in detail before any metal is cut. This guarantees that the customer fully understands and is comfortable with everything from the product side, which can, in turn, save a lot of work later during the review process. Indeed, the word ‘custom’ is only meaningful if the end user has as much control over automation design as possible.

Currently, Samuel Automation and the custom automation sector at large are seeing increasing levels of activity from customers. The company itself has a very broad range of industries and products being brought to market, albeit with a degree of caution as many clients need to acknowledge various factors when moving forward with projects, such as economic difficulties, current global trends, and world events. The custom automation industry is seeing many new technologies, products, and exploration within those areas and, barring any hesitancy from its clientele, the business is ever ready to move forward with the next automation solution.

Weber says that moving forward into 2024, Samuel Automation will be looking to promote the technical strength and experience of the three sister companies under the umbrella of Samuel, Son & Co. It will also push its growth in multiple new industries, like new energy, and continue to diversify as much as possible.

Samuel Automation will “grow and improve and work with our existing customers and new customers alike,” as Weber says, to continue being the premier choice in its field for custom automation solutions.

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Accelerate, put on the brakes, or make a turn, and our tires wear just a little. But all that speeding up, slowing down, and cornering adds up to more than 6 million metric tons of tire dust in the atmosphere each year. That means particles in lakes, rivers, oceans, and places as far away as the Arctic.

And that’s just the tire dust from driving. The average car owner will also replace their tires about every five years. That is a colossal amount of more than one billion tires bound for landfills each year, while an estimated four billion tires already sit there.

There are not a lot of easy solutions to this problem. Part of the issue is that most car tires are made with vulcanized rubber, which includes sulphur and other chemicals that improve the durability of rubber but also make them much harder to break down. So, one of the more appealing ways to deal with tires that are no longer on the road is through the circular economy.

Finding new and different ways to use old tires can go a long way to extending their lifecycle and reducing their impact on the environment. One company playing an especially important role here is Dinoflex.

Quality floors
Founded in 1989 in Salmon Arm, British Columbia, Dinoflex has been manufacturing high-quality, sustainable rubber flooring from recycled tires for 35 years.

All the rubber comes from within 500 miles of its factory and that means the company is scooping up rubber that would otherwise end up in landfills. The importance of this work has become ever more obvious as the impact of climate change is seen in the company’s own backyard, with the traditionally damp Pacific Northwest experiencing drought and wildfires as a result.

“Being in business for 35 years in any industry isn’t easy. But there are some core values that Dinoflex has held to throughout its history,” says Mark Bunz, CEO of Dinoflex. “It takes a winning culture centred around a group of people with a desire to be better every day.”

One of those core values is innovation that extends from process to product to customer activities. “This helps us introduce unique products and strengthens our partnership with customers,” says Bunz.

It certainly doesn’t hurt that this rubber flooring is also beautiful—from dark interlocking mats for home and commercial gyms to vibrant colours and textures for inspired living and workspaces, retail showrooms, and many more such applications.

The Dinoflex difference
The process of turning tires into flooring is called vulcanization. Remember how tires are made from vulcanized rubber to make them last longer? When recovering the tires and converting them into flooring, a combination of solvents and ground-up rubber is used to bring the rubber back to its natural state. From there, the material is converted into flooring, which opens up new options for material that would otherwise be landfill. Additionally, Dinoflex’s manufacturing approach sets it apart from other companies.

While most companies manufacture rubber in cylinders, Dinoflex flooring is moulded in block format. This makes a big difference because rubber that is formed using cylinders tends to want to snap back to its original form. But because the rubber that Dinoflex produces is made flat to begin with, the flooring stays flat—exactly what you want from a floor.

The company has doubled down on this process with its “Made Flat, Stays Flat™” guarantee that ensures rapid installation and a product that will never curl for the life of the installation.

A great example of Dinoflex’s creative solutions in action is Flyover in Chicago, Illinois. This interactive virtual reality tour allows people to experience the city in a 360-degree theatre at Navy Pier. To help bring this to life, Dinoflex delivered 13,000 square feet of rubber flooring that included 94 circles, which contained numbers displayed throughout as part of the immersion.

Then there is the company’s delightful work at the Phoenix Children’s Hospital. When you walk into the main lobby of the hospital, you will see a floor covered by bright, kid-friendly colours displayed in overlapping circles. Because it is made from the durable rubber of converted car tires, the flooring will stand up to the thousands of big and little feet that pass through the facility every day.

Cutting-edge cutting
What makes these complex designs possible is water jet cutting. As the technique suggests, the technique uses water pressurized up to 392 MPa (MPa stands for megapascal). A pascal is a single unit of pressure, and a megapascal is one million pascals. And yes, 392 of them can accurately cut through just about anything.

When this technique is used in rubber flooring, it can create almost any unique design. Dinoflex offers multi-coloured logos and geometric patterns that can be developed for a guaranteed fit with a client’s existing flooring with minimal variation. While a lot of these projects are for commercial purposes in collaboration with architects and designers, Dinoflex can also provide custom solutions for spaces as small as 300 square feet, in colours of the client’s choice.

Beyond the processes used to guarantee the quality and durability of Dinoflex’s flooring, the company’s innovation has led to more by-products—which would otherwise have been relegated to landfill—used in flooring production.

“We have added our post-industrial by-product to the backing of our Stride Fitness Tile, which helps to increase the impact insulation class level,” Melanie Haskell, Vice President of Sales at Dinoflex, explains. (Impact Insulation Class, or IIC, is a measure of how much sound a floor can absorb as people walk on it.) These gym tiles are engineered with an impact-absorbing grid to reduce sound and vibration.

“Another program we have launched is our Armor X, which is a unique, dual-layer flooring solution. Its polyurethane wear layer and fitness backing contains post-industrial by-product and is incredibly durable, impact-resistant, and self-healing, so there’s no need for costly repairs from indentations,” Haskell adds. “It’s the perfect choice for any fitness application.”

The ultimate goal is to achieve zero waste, something Dinoflex is on track to accomplish. The team is regrinding the manufacturing waste and incorporating it into its products like outdoor tiles for landscape and rooftop spaces, as well as the backing material for its Armor X flooring.

All this innovation and effort have continued to pay off for the manufacturer. The company recently announced a $10 million expansion to its Salmon Arm facility, which is Dinoflex’s third notable investment since 2018. It includes new equipment and automation that significantly increases the company’s capacity to meet the fast-growing demand within the commercial space as well as retail verticals.

This investment is not only a sign of growth; it’s also a commitment to even more innovation, says Bunz. “We’re an industry leader because of our world-class products and focus on innovation,” he says.

In-house innovation
Research and development takes place in-house, a differentiator in the industry and a win for business partners who can review various iterations quickly. “We can do our own testing and launch products much faster. This is a huge advantage and can shave months off timelines for clients.”

The expansion comes at an important time, as applications for recycled rubber surfacing are quickly expanding beyond the typical applications of sport and fitness. Customers are looking for more vibrant and pastel colour concepts for high-traffic spaces like restaurants, event spaces, and retail showrooms. With this growth, Dinoflex can now offer designers more options to include recycled rubber in projects for new builds and renovations. Ultimately, that’s also good news for the environment as green construction innovations come to the forefront.

“What manufacturers do now will reach far into the future and ensure the safety and protection of the Earth, as well as their customers and their employees,” says Bunz, happy to mark the company’s impressive 35 years while looking ahead. “By emphasizing products and creating sustainable processes, we’re also attracting new customers. It’s the direction our world is heading. Environmental responsibility is the future of business right now.”

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