By Joanne Bailey-Boorsma
WKTV Managing Editor
joanne@wktv.org
While for some the COVID pandemic caused a stall in operations, for RoMan Manufacturing it was a time when the company discovered new opportunities in the semiconductor and data center industries that have now led to the Wyoming-manufacture adding a new 27,000-square-foot facility to its location.
On May 18, city officials and business leaders joined company officials and employees for a groundbreaking ceremony for the company’s future facility, which along with being a manufacturing facility also will house the company’s new training and development program, RoMan University, and its Department of Labor approved apprenticeship program. The new facility, which is expected to open in October, is predicted to create at least 50 new jobs in the next 18 to 20 months.
“The new facility will allow us to expand our overall capacity to serve our existing core business, which is what we grew up on, the markets of resistance welding, furnace and glass, and create space to serve these new markets,” said RoMan Manufacturing President Nelson Sanchez.
Along with that, the addition of RoMan University and the apprenticeship will help the company develop a talent pipeline, Sanchez said.
RoMan CEO Both Roth said the facility also enables RoMan to continue its focus on helping its customers to achieve their goals.
“It was always that vantage point I think that has been one of our north stars and has driven business forward is that we think about customers first and in doing that, we can help them succeed and when we help our customers succeed, it helps us succeed,” Roth said.
Growing and Evolving
Started in 1982 with an 8,000-square-foot building, RoMan — which is a combination of the founders’ names Dietrich Roth and Robert Hofman — the company in the past 40-plus years has grown to cover seven acres with two sites that has a combined square footage of 160,000. The main campus is located at 861 47th St. SW, which is where the new building will be located.
According to Executive Vice President Kurt Hofman, RoMan Manufacturing started as a niche business focused on low voltage, high current water cooler transformers.
“You can Google that today and you are not going to see a whole lot of people pop up on that Google search and I can tell you who is going to be on the top of that Google search, it is going to be us,” Hofman said.
Over time, RoMan Manufacturing expanded outside of welding and the automotive industry and moved into other industries, which led to the company building systems. This led RoMan being to be able to expand into the semiconductor and data center businesses.
“On behalf of the entire city council, I want to congratulate RoMan Manufacturing on its new production facility and say thank you for choosing the City of Wyoming and for providing additional job opportunities for our residents and the West Michigan community,” said Mayor Kent Vanderwood at the groundbreaking ceremony.
