December 17, 2020 – BBB Recognizes Control Station’s Successful Transformation with Award

Phoenix Award Celebrates Innovation and Responsiveness to Changing Market Conditions

Control Station was recognized by the Better Business Bureau with the organization’s 2020 Phoenix Award. The annual award celebrates a company that successfully transformed its business to respond to customer needs and to fuel growth. Control Station recast itself as the leading platform-independent provider of process analytics and embraced remote delivery of all engineering services.

“Our panel of judges selected Control Station as the inaugural winner of the Phoenix Award as they creatively responded to challenges in the automation industry by restructuring their business model and redesigning how they interacted with customers,” noted Paulette Scarpetti, President and CEO of BBB Serving Connecticut. “Those changes not only allowed Control Station to sustain their business, but to thrive during this difficult pandemic.”

Control Station first introduced PlantESP™ in 2011 to monitor the performance of a facility’s numerous PID control loops. Utilizing a production facility’s existing process data, PlantESP proactively identifies negative performance trends and facilitates the isolation of root-causes. Such insights enable production staff to work more efficiently and enable increases to production throughput and quality as well as decreases in energy consumption and production-related waste.

Revenue growth has been steady since PlantESP’s initial introduction and particularly among multi-site and multi-national manufacturers. In 2018 Control Station was recognized by the Small Business Administration as the State of Connecticut’s Exporter of the Year largely due to the success of the product outside of the US. Even COVID-19 has not slowed the manufacturing market’s interest. Through September of this year Revenue from software licensing was up 39.5% over the same nine-month period during 2019.

“For years we’ve enjoyed regular recognition given to our products. This award is special as it highlights the foresight and savvy of our team,” stated Dennis Nash, Control Station’s president.

In addition to emphasizing process analytics, the company retooled its portfolio of engineering services to accommodate virtual delivery. Whereas countless system integration firms that rely on onsite delivery struggled to the point of failure, Control Station’s adoption of new delivery processes enabled the company to thrive. According to a June 2020 survey conducted by the Association for Advancing Automation, only 25% of such companies experienced little to no change in their day-to-day operations whereas 75% were forced to implement wage reductions, furloughs, and even layoffs. In the face of such widespread decline, Control Station posted a 30.9% increase in services Revenue through the first nine months of 2020. A backlog of service orders equal to an additional 28.1% was also accrued for a total increase of 59%.