Structure, a nearly year-old company that plans to design, assemble and market a new system for utilities and businesses to remotely monitor their operations, is buying Ottesen’s former warehouse on Front Street and could start putting together and delivering its equipment next year.
The company, established by a trio of Juneau friends and their business partners, has hung its signs on the building.
The floor plan is mostly open, with offices on a smaller mezzanine level, which will work well for Structure’s assembly operation to put together its controllers, called “comms vault,” or communications vault, said Jake Haas, one of the founders.
The company is in the business of designing and building a new SCADA (Skay-dah) system, which stands for supervisory control and data acquisition. Older systems have been used since the 1970s to monitor sewage pumps and water lines, including Wrangell’s own utilities, and multiple other production operations.
Sensors on pipelines, power lines, pumps and other components transmit data back to a controller unit, allowing workers to remotely monitor operations.
Structure sees a strong market for its new system, particularly in rural Alaska communities with critical infrastructure spread out, requiring a dependable monitoring system using radio signals, fiber-optic lines, phone lines or wireless signals.
The Wrangell plant will assemble routers, switches, radio gear and circuit boards into the comms vault, a box the size of a stereo speaker, Haas said. Off-the-shelf components will be shipped into town for installation in the box, along with some custom-made pieces.
Kyle Farley-Robinson, another one of the three founding partners, said a rough estimate would be assembling the first units in the building sometime next year.
The initial number of jobs would depend on the number of orders to build the units, Farley-Robinson said last week, but could range from half a dozen to 20 workers on the assembly and testing crews.
