Roger Beman founded TriAm Industries in Tucson, Arizona in 1988, supplying industrial equipment to mines, smelters and water plants. Over the years more and more of that equipment was being built in China. Buying it from ten time zones away worked until it didn’t — a substituted material here, a misread specification there, a delivery date that moved twice before anyone mentioned it.

So in 2006 he got on a plane. He has been back more than 150 times since, about ten trips a year, and the Shijiazhuang office grew out of those visits. Not to place orders — anybody can place an order — but to stand on the shop floor while the work was being done, and to say no when it was not right.

Twenty years on, that is still what the company is. The difference is that customers with no connection to the American side of the business now buy directly from SBCCO-China, across nine product lines, and some of them buy nothing but our inspection and expediting service for orders they place themselves.

What has not changed

We still tell customers which factory is building their equipment. We still welcome them, and their own inspectors, into it. And we still refuse to ship until the specification is met, which is the only reason a delivery date ever moves here.