CAP Spotlight: ECP Solutions: Our Innovation, Your Solution

NETA World StaffCorporate Alliance Corner, Fall 2022 CAP Corner

CHRIS KING

NETA’s Corporate Alliance Partners (CAPs) are a group of industry-leading companies that have joined forces with NETA to work together toward a common aim: improving quality, safety, and electrical system reliability.

Here, our continuing CAP Spotlight series highlights the individual successes of these companies with an interview with Chris King, Vice President of Sales and Business Development at ECP Solutions.

NW: Please briefly describe your company (history, business mission).

King: Electrical Controller Products (ECP), incorporated February 1, 1965, started as a distributor of industrial control equipment representing every major manufacturer at that time. That business changed over the 1970s and 1980s to become a circuit breaker parts distributor.

In the 1980s, ECP was known as the “distributor’s distributor” because since ECP was a distributor for every major manufacturer, the company supplied local distributors with products that were not on their line cards. 

Those distributors eventually needed a value-added service to repair their customers’ breakers, so ECP opened a breaker shop in the late 1980s to fill the growing demand for breaker repair.

In 2001, a service company was created in response to severe flooding in the Houston area. That company was sold to Schneider in 2009, but the original Electrical Controller Products remained and moved back to its roots of being a control distributor.

In 2014, ECP was purchased by Lane Batson, and the same year, ECP Rentals was established to meet the demand for test equipment rental. ECP and ECP Rentals ran in parallel until 2020, when we merged those two companies together to develop ECP Solutions. Because we still have access to all the major manufacturers, we are able to supply our customers not only with rental equipment, but also with repair parts. In 2021, we launched our asset management/tracking systems as well as our on-demand systems.

Our mission is to provide solutions to the challenges of our industry.

NW: What is something NETA World readers don’t know about ECP Solutions?

King: ECP is focused on providing our industry with solutions to its problems. This includes:

  • Asset management and tracking systems for customers’ equipment using RFID and GPS technology
  • Safety training, support, equipment, and supplies
  • Equipment sales, including test equipment from all major manufacturers, plus parts from relays, trip units, drives, and crane controls to current and potential transformers and more
  • Equipment rentals, including test equipment and on-demand systems such as our new On-Demand Pod (ODPOD)
  • Onsite, mobile, and in-house calibration and repair, including purchased equipment, with calibration certificates
  • ECP-specific power supplies
  • Customer assistance with information-backed ROIs

NW: What recent company achievement or milestone are you particularly proud of?

King: We strive to be the leader in providing solutions to the issues that challenge our industry. Now, we have added two new service offerings we are excited about:

  • Safety solutions offering safety training, certifications, and support
  • Mobile calibration and repair to provide service at the customer site

NW: What changes do you see on the horizon that will have a positive impact on your work?

King: With our focus on innovation, we continue to work on more new service offerings that counteract the current challenges in the marketplace:

  • On-demand equipment rental systems to limit shipping costs and delays
  • Asset management and tracking systems to provide real-time data to assist data-driven ROI for corporate decisions on what to purchase and what to rent
  • Services to increase utilization of customer-owned equipment
  • Onsite calibration to minimize equipment loss and shipping delays and decrease rental expense

NW: What challenges do you see going forward for the industry?

King: We can see that the inflation of freight, fuel, and surcharge costs is increasing the overall cost of doing business. This is exacerbated by supply chain shortages resulting in manufacturing and shipping delays — and manpower shortages only add to the challenge. We spend a lot of time and effort trying to save our customers’ time and money, and these two major factors are making our daily efforts to support our customer a bigger challenge.