Success Stories - Med-Pac, Inc.

Rescuing and Helping People Stay Alive in the Air

Whether it's on the battle field, a hospital trauma unit, a deadly serious auto accident, or transporting organs for transplant, these are situations many would rather not think about. But one company does work in this arena and when it wanted to expand its reach into other applications and products, it knew where to turn: the Internet.

LAKE PARK, MN—Ralph Braaten, Owner and President of Med-Pac, Inc., a manufacturer of air life support units for fixed wing aircraft and helicopters, has 37 years in the aircraft business and has the certifications and experience to prove it.

"I'm a licensed pilot, a licensed airframe and power plant mechanic, IA, and a FAA-DAR inspector," Braaten says. "After I got out of the Air Force during the Vietnam era I received my airframe and power plant license. Then I became a director of maintenance and during that time we built a dedicated Med Pac unit for a King Air aircraft. After that, a lot of people wanted a quick change version, so we worked on that, and then one day my boss wrote me a rubber check. I quit and opened my own place, Med-Pac Inc. I started from scratch, and got all the FAA-STC approvals for all the aircraft."

A little about Med-Pac
Braaten says that their shop is around 4200 sq ft, which he says is fairly small. "We're in the process of adding 6000 sq ft, which will more than double our square footage. Right now we employ four full-time and several part-time employees that we can call in when we need to meet workload."

Braaten explains that many people involved in life-saving air transport would like to see an 18-wheeler full of equipment inside the aircraft and have it all fit into the size of a suitcase. The truth of the matter is that Braaten designed his unit to take up a very small footprint. The actual size is 72" long and 16" wide on the top deck and 9" tall. Inside of the unit there's a 3300-liter cylinder, an air compressor, suction and an inverter that takes DC current and charges it to 115 AC or 220 AC.

Typical materials are what you might think: aircraft grade aluminum. "We use a lot of 6061 T-6 aluminum," Braaten says. "We also use 2024 T-4. Seventy-five percent of the manufacturing and fabrication we do is aluminum and the other 25 percent is general steel. We've done stainless steel, hot rolled, cold rolled, grade 50 and pretty much any alloy of aluminum. We do several different projects per year ranging from the Med-Pac unit to custom designed projects and production."

According to Braaten the unit is designed to do several things. You never know what you're going to be transporting, so you've got to be ready for anything. The FAA has established certain structural requirements for products like the Med-Pac unit. These units must meet or exceed certain G forces—typically 12 Gs to 12.5 Gs. The Med-Pac unit has been tested to 16 Gs.

One might think that most of the Med-Pac work would be aluminum fabrication. That would only be part right, says Braaten. "Actually, each unit has roughly 15 hours of machine work—sometimes 30 hours of milling. Then, there's at least five hours of turning for each unit. We combine all of our shop resources for doing aviation-related parts. We definitely use every machine in the shop."

Branching out
With equipment sitting and not being used to capacity, Braaten felt the need to branch out into other industries. "Instead of specializing just in aviation-related fields, we've started branching out to other markets," says Braaten. "We've got the capacity for CNC milling, turning, CNC plasma cutting, Tig welding, CNC shearing and CNC pressbrake work, so we started looking around at what was out there. It didn't take long to realize that we needed a serious means to streamline our process. I'd worked with a similar company over the Internet, but they had a lot of internal problems. Then I heard about MFG.com. They gave me a test drive, and we signed on. Their site is so much easier to navigate."

He notes that if he had to narrow the services down and rank them, customer service would be right on the top. "If I have a particular problem," Braaten says, "they're on it and it's usually fixed in less that an hour."

"I don't have much time, and what time I do have I have to use wisely," says Braaten. "I need to keep things rolling out the door and at the same time bring in new work. This is where MFG.com has played a great role. I come in the morning, turn on my computer, go to MFG.com. I can pick out a half-dozen jobs that I might want to quote later, which gives me the option of marking the job for later quoting, or I can save the RFQ on my dashboard at the MFG.com site. At any time from when I mark that quote until the quote closes, I can just go right back into the quote and start where I left off, figuring time and material—it's very, very easy."

Braaten says the types of jobs they've been bidding on and winning are marine, automotive, farm implement, aircraft and heavy steel fabrication. As far as fabrication goes, MFG.com has extended the company's reach nationwide. "Since MFG.com, the word has spread nationwide about the kind of work we do here. Our customer base has doubled because of MFG.com. The requests are coming in faster and faster, whereas before MFG.com, everything was just kind of word-of-mouth."

Getting into the business:
Ralph Braaten says that once you sign up with MFG.com, "it's really a matter of how you elect to use the system. There's no one playing gatekeeper at MFG.com."

Braaten explains that none of the Med-Pac parts are standard—each is different. His parts are built to his design data and machined to his design criteria. Everything is done in-house, with the exception of powder coat painting and fabric material for stretcher cushions.

"One interesting thing that's happened recently is that I was asked by the Children's Hospital in Little Rock to design and build an ECMO (Extra Corporeal Membrane Oxygenation Machine) transporter, and it's used to pick up donors around the country and bring them to a major hospital for harvesting organs," Braaten says, "but it's also used for the recipients to be moved from one hospital to another, to the transplant hospital. It's the first one of its kind, in that it's capable of long haul missions and is able to transport the patient from the hospital to the ambulance to the aircraft without disconnecting the patient. Some others have tried their hand in this, especially in helicopters, but the range of a helicopter is 150 to 200 miles, plus you've got a lot of restraints, like size, speed and fuel. The one that we've built goes into a Lear jet, and it cruises at 500 to 525 mph. We provide the transport mechanism, and inside that mechanism the doctors will place an artificial heart machine, artificial lung, blood warmer, IVs—you name it. It's all designed to keep an individual body alive until they can harvest the organs."

"You can imagine the red tape we've got to go through to be in this business," continued Braaten, "you won't find any red tape in the MFG.com system. And that's a real plus, and reason enough for signing on."

For more information, contact:
Med-Pac, Inc., Lake Park, MN, 218/238-5100
http://www.med-pac.net
MFG.com Inc., Atlanta, GA, 770/444-9686, www.MFG.com

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