Ederer: An International Player -- Newest Business Involves Cranes Built For Nasa

SOUTH SEATTLE

Don Miller steers his Lincoln Continental onto Utah Street, south of the Kingdome, and pulls up alongside a row of antiquated factory buildings.

Put Miller in a horse-drawn buggy and the scene would have been vintage turn-of-the-century Seattle. Everything around him looks, smells and sounds pretty much as it did in 1901, when Alfred Ederer brought a milling machine to Seattle and started manufacturing cranes for lumber mills.

Judged by outward appearances, Ederer Inc. hasn't changed much in 90 years. Looks can be deceiving.

Since Miller joined the company in the mid-1970s, Ederer has blossomed from a quiet maker of "bridge cranes" for Pacific Northwest lumber mills and power plants, to a nimble international player, with a diversified product line and some very sophisticated customers.

The company recently won a pair of contracts from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to manufacture six huge bridge cranes worth $20 million.

A bridge crane is a lifting device mounted on elevated rails, typically found in the rafters of factories or mounted on a vertical support, called a gantry.

NASA will use the cranes to build Space Shuttle rocket engines and to assemble the space craft.

Ederer was in a position to land the contract partly because Miller led an aggressive and successful pursuit of nuclear-power-plant customers in the '70s and early '80s.

During that time, the company learned how to deal with fussy government document processors. It also invented a pioneering fail-safe system, dubbed X-SAM, for extra safety and monitoring. X-SAM satisfied the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's desire for an ultra-safe crane for crucial tasks, such as moving drums of nuclear waste.

The system, patented and licensed through Ederer, has become an industry standard, particularly in the aerospace industry. Ederer's client list is a who's who of space-program contractors.

In fact, Ederer was a shoo-in for the NASA contract; in the past few years, most of its competition in the sophisticated, custom-made end of the market has all but disappeared.

"Don Miller has led the effort to make sure Ederer continues to be on top of an evolving market," said George Reynolds, assistant vice president at Seafirst Bank, the company's bank for more than six decades. "The companies that have fallen by the wayside haven't had that vision."

Perhaps the best measure of Miller's success is the fact that Ederer has made a profit every year through the '70s and '80s. That covers several upheavals in the crane-building business, not to mention a couple of major recessions.

Miller was recruited from a marketing job with a giant New York-based crane maker by a holding company that bought Ederer Inc. from the Ederer family in the early 1970s.

He was promoted to president in short order and oversaw the acquisition of Seattle-based Washington Cranes, which makes swivel cranes used in ship loading and on barges, and Tacoma-based Star Cranes, which designs and licenses cranes used to load and unload container ships.

Ederer's bridge cranes consistently account for about half the company's business. Annual sales range from $10 million to $20 million. Employment currently stands at 100.

In 1984, Miller and a partner, Jim Finch, bought the company in a friendly leveraged buyout. Shortly after, Miller landed a $10 million contract for a dam-construction crane for a project in China, culminating years of wooing the Chinese.

That led to a work-sharing arrangement with the Chinese that has allowed Ederer to branch into the lower-end market for smaller industrial cranes. Ederer is now able to bid competitively against manufacturers of smaller cranes by having sub-assembly work done in China, where labor rates are a fraction of Western standards.

Miller, who has made more than 30 trips to China, is open-minded about job-sharing arrangements with other developing countries, as well. He has clients and contacts in Taiwan, Mexico and Korea.

"If you have somebody you can trust, it's a very favorable relationship for both parties," he said. "We're very happy with what we've done."