A tour through the tool rooms, presses, and finishing lines.
Bob Eccher [position title needed] was kind enough to walk me through New England Precision’s Beanville Road facility. I'd like to share what I gleaned during my 90-minute tour.
The plant occupies a full 75,000 square feet of production, storage, and shop space — an industrial campus that turns coils of metal into tens of millions of stamped components each year. He walked me through the process that takes parts from coil to boxed shipment and explained how small decisions in the tool room protect large production runs.
The stamped components include sprinkler nozzles and fans, threaded sprinkler fittings, keys and lockbox parts, electrical contacts, and other high-volume precision stampings that serve fire-protection manufacturers, medical assemblies, and everyday hardware makers across the country.
“As the parts wear out, these are the dies,” Bob said in the tool room, pointing to punches and anvils and describing how edges are reground, oils adjusted, and dies rebuilt to keep tolerances tight. At the wire EDM machine (Electrical Discharge Machining), he watched the electrified wire carve precise contours and noted the finish it leaves: “It’s constantly moving,” he said, admiring a surface quality EDM produces that conventional milling can’t.
How parts move through the plant
NEP runs a precise, efficient production flow across its 75,000 square feet: coil straightening and payoffs feed press lines; progressive dies draw, punch and form parts station by station; finished pieces tumble, rinse, dry and are packed. Key stations include:
- Tool room and die work: Machinists shape, repair, and tune dies that determine part geometry and life. Small adjustments here prevent big downstream rejects.
- Wire EDM and plunge/form machines: Wire EDM cuts complex contours with an electrified wire; plunge/form machines create concave or convex features directly into die steel.
Presses and progressive dies: Stationed presses incrementally form components used in sprinklers, valves and other safety systems.- Finishing and tumbling: Ball-shot, burnishing and chemical rinses deburr and brighten parts; anti-oxidizing rinses prevent boxed inventory from looking aged.
- Sorting, packing and inventory: NEP stores customer consignment and buffer stock so clients can call in rush orders. Bob explained the company’s practice of maintained reserves to meet urgent needs.
- Wastewater and compliance: Sand filtration, reverse osmosis (RO) — a membrane filtration process that removes dissolved solids — and an ARPA-funded evaporator (soon to arrive) and filter press manage effluent and reduce discharge volumes.
The big ARPA project
It was actually during my first week of employment with the town, over three years ago, when we moved on this—an urgent deal that had to be closed quickly. Working with GMEDC, we helped New England Precision secure roughly $330,000 in ARPA funding to reduce the metal load entering Randolph’s wastewater system. Back then, the town was in a tight spot: NEP’s process discharges were pushing municipal influent toward the upper allowable limits for copper and lead, which restricted our ability to accept new industrial customers and risked regulatory headaches. The grant paid for engineered pretreatment, testing, and installation support to drive NEP’s metals discharge down by nearly 90 percent. The town worked hard to get it done, and it was worth the effort: safer wastewater, preserved capacity for growth at NEP, and a clearer path for other manufacturers to consider Randolph as a place to locate and expand.
Rewarding careers at NEP
What stood out on the tour was how consistently satisfied and grateful employees sounded. Every person I interviewed — operators, finishers, press hands and packers — spoke about steady work, predictable schedules and a supportive workplace culture.
- Family-friendly scheduling and steady shifts: Elizabeth Carpenter described a split shift that lets her drop her son at school; other staffers praised schedules that make childcare and commuting manageable.
- Long tenures and institutional knowledge: Carl White has been at NEP for 27 years and Wes for 23 years; Bill Cameron brings several decades of trade experience. That tenure explains how vintage presses stay productive and why setup and troubleshooting are done quickly and well.
- Benefits and local investment: Bob outlined NEP’s commitment to employee health coverage and payroll stability, pointing to the company’s significant annual investment in staff well-being.
- Leadership that rewards character and effort: Bob emphasized owner Bruce Uryase’s people-first approach. “Bruce loves to reward hard workers with raises when he sees solid potential and good character,” Bob said. Employees repeatedly noted that Bruce’s hands-on attention and willingness to promote from within motivate loyalty and morale.
Across departments, the refrain was the same: people like their jobs, appreciate the company’s support, and value working for a leader who notices effort and character. “What’s your favorite part of the job? The people,” one longtime operator replied.
Small technical details, bigger economic stories
Bob’s tour revealed small technical details that tell bigger stories about Randolph’s industrial resilience. In the tool room, a tucked-away chart shows die lifespans measured in production runs rather than years — a reminder that institutional knowledge is a replaceable asset only if we invest to keep it. When a seasoned machinist can regrind a worn punch and ship a job the same day, that nimbleness becomes a selling point for customers who need predictable lead times and high uptime.
The human rhythm of the plant is as important as the machines. Shift handoffs are choreographed to minimize downtime: operators leave handwritten notes on die setups, finishers flag color shifts on packing lists, and maintenance logs track oil changes with the same care many businesses would give to payroll. That informal documentation — the way knowledge moves from one worker to the next — is why NEP can run vintage presses alongside modern EDM equipment without missing a beat.
NEP’s role in the local supply chain matters beyond direct payroll. Local contractors, tool vendors, and parts suppliers rely on steady procurement from the shop; when NEP moves a larger order, it ripples into service contracts, freight activity and even Main Street lunch counts. Those secondary effects are often the quiet proof that manufacturing anchors more than just jobs — it sustains an ecosystem of small businesses and services that keep a town functioning.
Quality, safety and disciplined production
Many NEP parts are life-safety components, so discipline is woven into every step. Progressive die outputs are checked with go/no?go gauges and sampled frequently. “QC checks them every two hours,” a press operator said. “We hope they never have to get used, but if they do, it’s usually an emergency,” another added, underscoring why tolerances and inspection regimes are nonnegotiable.
That rigor supports NEP’s vendor relationships with major OEMs in fire protection and other sectors: when lives or equipment depend on a part, consistency and traceability matter.
Markets, tariffs and expansion
Bruce explained the big pressures that shape NEP’s business: changes in trade policy, rising raw-material costs and a tight labor market. Much of the work uses a copper-heavy alloy called 510 phosphor bronze — essentially a special kind of copper — so when metal prices or import duties rise, NEP’s costs climb quickly. About six in ten of the company’s jobs are for fire-protection makers like Reliable, Johnson Controls, and Viking, so swings in material prices or shipping rules have an outsized impact.
Those ups and downs make it harder to pin down a planned 25,000-square-foot addition. Contractors’ bids shift as material and labor costs move, and some customers delay buying new tooling until trade and tariff questions settle. Still, NEP has deep tooling know-how, spare-parts inventory and experienced staff, so when demand firms up the shop can scale up quickly.
That kind of resilience — the ability to weather market swings, hold onto skilled staff, and stay ready to scale — is exactly what makes NEP such a vital part of Randolph’s economy. Through all the ups and downs, Bruce Uryase and his team have kept the presses running, the jobs steady, and the company rooted right here. We’re lucky to have them, and proud to call NEP one of our own. Thanks, Bruce!