Denville’s Tri-Power Design feels automation is key to keeping companies here

Listen to this article

That’s right, manufacturing products made in Jersey for Jersey.

The Denville company helps Garden State businesses launch new products, automate their production lines and reduce their costs — so they can remain price-competitive enough to continue making things in state.

“The only way you can compete against cheap labor is with automation,” La Rosa said.

La Rosa calls it “reshoring” — and he feels the idea is gaining traction.

“(U.S. producers) can’t match the labor rates they see in Asia, but the automation is the equalizer: It reshores manufacturing, it brings it back here,” he said.

La Rosa said he is fighting a notion that automation takes away jobs. He said it’s just the opposite. By reducing the amount of U.S. labor a product requires, automation “keeps jobs here,” he said.

Tri-Power was founded in 1996 by three NJIT graduates who launched the company in the new-venture incubator on the school’s campus in Newark.

La Rosa is joined by Edward Laganis, director of engineering, and partner Robert Mastice, who runs the Tri-Power division that provides staffing services to the utility industry. The company employs more than 20 people and has annual revenues of about $3 million.

Tri-Power has worked for about 100 New Jersey manufacturers, including aerospace and electronics firms and medical device makers such as Stryker Orthopedics, Becton-Dickinson and Johnson & Johnson. And Tri-Power and its engineers are named on several of their clients’ patents.

Its success, however, has not come easily.