“Really, the challenge of this business is every time we take on a project we’re creating something that’s essentially never been done,” said Ryan Lombardini, the president and part-owner of Windsor’s JT Automation.JTA automates high-tech laser welding processes for a wide variety of industries, from cosmetics through medical devices to aerospace and defense. It might […]
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“Really, the challenge of this business is every time we take on a project we’re creating something that’s essentially never been done,” said Ryan Lombardini, the president and part-owner of Windsor’s JT Automation.
JTA automates high-tech laser welding processes for a wide variety of industries, from cosmetics through medical devices to aerospace and defense. It might design and build a machine that welds a pacemaker, or a completely different assembly to weld a battery for use in a spacecraft.
“What separates us from everyone else is our expertise in process development,” Lombardini said.
The laser-welding processes that JTA develops are often done robotically within complex machine tools that safely encase the laser operation. It’s a low heat input process and can be used on very tiny parts, as well as in complex metallurgy that doesn’t lend itself to other welding processes.
“There’s a lot of advantages to laser welding,” he said. “You’re creating a true metallurgical bond as opposed to a mechanical bond.”
JTA specializes in creating customized products for client companies that need to use laser welding in unique and innovative processes. Because of the bespoke nature of what the company makes, often the jobs are highly confidential.
“It’s always challenging talking about some of our projects,” said Lombardini. “We start with the process for the customers, make sure that everything is exactly how it should be, and then we build a piece of equipment custom-tailored to that manufacturing process. Many other businesses have to modify and tailor a standard product to fit a process. You get a much superior piece of equipment when it is custom tailored.”
In many cases the company is able to replace and automate an entire manufacturing line for a client, and include in-situ monitoring to improve quality control.
And JTA’s services have been in demand, with an average annual growth rate of 22%, and a sales pipeline now approaching $100 million.
A 2022 revenue bump provided the funds for JTA to relocate its operations to a renovated former cold-storage building in Windsor in 2023. There, the company has created 33,500 square feet of custom-tailored space that includes offices, engineering labs and a manufacturing floor.
Since the move, the company has doubled down on an expansion strategy, adding several engineers over the last year, and growing its headcount to 30.
“We have many new faces in the building right now and a parking lot that’s slowly running out of parking spots,” said Lombardini.
Spin off
JTA started life more than 20 years ago as a small department inside a larger company — Joining Technologies, a laser-welding service provider based in East Granby.
Over the years, Joining Technologies developed a small automation arm that creates custom-welding machine tools for clients to use in their own manufacturing processes.
Around 2015, that department started to scale up to meet a very large order for several automation processes from an aerospace customer.
“That brought it to the point where the business model didn’t make sense to keep as a department anymore,” Lombardini said. “And that’s when they broke out of JT Automation.”
The company was spun out as a separate entity in 2016. Lombardini himself joined later that year as an intern, not long after finishing a degree at Central Connecticut State University in robotics and mechatronics.
The company started small, with five employees, but grew to meet demand, especially in the post-COVID recovery wave in aerospace.
Lombardini himself has seen his career grow just as rapidly as the company, moving into sales and quickly becoming vice president of sales and marketing. In 2021, still in his 20s, he was named president and became a part owner of the company, alongside Chief Technology Officer Scott Boynton, a Joining Technologies veteran who was one of the co-founders.
“He handles growth, and I make machines happen,” Boynton said.
One of Boynton’s challenges is to attract the right engineering talent for this highly innovative environment, where novel engineering processes have to be built from the ground up.
Boynton says the biggest thing he looks for in a new hire is “passion. People who don’t just do this for a living. People who enjoy doing engineering-type hobbies. We have people here that build quadcopter racing systems as hobbies. We have people that build mobile robots as a hobby. And they’re frequently our very best people.”
‘So much activity’
Lombardini also sees a lot of future opportunity in the after-sales service side of the business. He has service technicians who install and site test all the equipment that’s shipped out to customers.
To continue its growth, JTA is focused on hiring sales talent and project managers. It recently brought on industry veteran Bob Locker, who is now vice president of operations.
He’s been tasked with ensuring the company can handle the complexities of expansion.
“These guys are on the cusp of some real serious growth and just really needed to take a step back a little bit and look at how they do their projects and processes,” Locker said, “and get the structure in place to be able to take the next step.”
He estimates it will be a 12- to 18-month project for him to put the systems in place for the scale they want to achieve.
Lombardini says JTA is hitting its stride at a perfect time in U.S. manufacturing, when interest in automation is very high because of the reshoring trend, combined with the lack of skilled labor.
“We’re seeing just so much activity,” he said. “Our sales pipeline is touching on $100 million right now. For a company of our size that’s pretty incredible. Looking three years out, we just see continued rapid, rapid growth.”
