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LMI Tech finds its new home in Burnaby

Burnaby business park provided the best option for former Delta company searching for a larger facility
lmi
Tech times: Terry Arden, CEO of LMI Technologies Inc., cuts the ribbon to officially open the company’s new Burnaby office – the old Nokia building on Glenlyon Parkway.

LMI Technologies Inc. made headlines when its CEO gave the entire staff a day off to celebrate May the Fourth (also known as Star Wars Day).

The company has been around since the late ’90s but it only recently moved to Burnaby. The firm specializes in developing and manufacturing 3-D scanners – called smart sensors – that scan items to provide clients with data needed for quality control operations. LMI Technologies sells its sensors to businesses in a variety of sectors, including automotive, consumer electronics, wood, packaging, road construction, and rubber and tire.

The company came to be in 1998, when a handful of companies specializing in laser measurement technology joined forces. Each company had expertise in one sector or another, and together they shared their innovations to create an improved system that could be used across sectors.

CEO Terry Arden was hired in 2003 as the chief technology officer to come in and “harmonize all of the technology around a common platform,” he said.

“We built the next generation LEGO-like hardware blocks so that we could build our future sensors on them,” he said.

“We learned (the companies’) various trade secrets and tips and tricks, and we brought them all together and created this next generation and then we built an R&D-team, primarily here in Vancouver, to formulate products from those LEGO blocks.”

While the company started off as mainly a European and North American business, it has since branched out to Asian markets and now has three offices in China as well.

“That’s where a lot of our major new markets are, for example consumer electronics – cellphones and tablets and PCs, they all use our products,” he said.

The move to Burnaby, meanwhile, is relatively recent.

LMI, which up until December was located on Annacis Island in Delta, had about 60 employees when Arden took over as CEO in 2009. There are now more than 100 people working for the company locally, Arden said, and he expects that number to double in the next few years.

With that in mind, he and his team set out to find a new, more suitable home that could provide enough space for the growing number of staff while providing ample room for manufacturing.

“There aren’t many large buildings where we can establish light manufacturing on the main floor,” he noted.

Most industrial areas and business parks were out of the question because of the vibrations heavy machinery creates, vibrations that would damage the sensors LMI builds.

“There were very few buildings available and, in fact, all of the available buildings were in this park – Glenlyon Parkway,” he said.

“We kind of grew and grew, and now we’re here in Burnaby.”

(LMI Technologies Inc. is located at the former Nokia building, which has sat empty since 2013.)

Burnaby makes sense for Arden, not only because he’s lived here since 1998, but because it’s the most central location for his staff, as well.

“If you map out all our staff – where they live and come from – which is all over Vancouver, we’re pretty central in this location in South Burnaby,” he said.

But running a successful tech company is not without its challenges.

“We’re only as strong our talent here – our people. So I think one of the big challenges, especially here in Vancouver, is finding talent. The talent is great when we find it, but there’s a lot of competition for it,” Arden said.

Often referred to as the Silicon Valley of the North, tech workers in the Lower Mainland are sought after by larger companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple, which makes it difficult to hold on to people, he added.

“Moving to South Burnaby in this great building, it’s great. It helps us out in attracting talent as well as increasing our visibility,” Arden noted.

Employees have access to tennis courts, a fitness centre, rooftop patio and a large lunch area and kitchen. Arden chooses to run the company in a collaborative fashion, hosting town hall meetings with staff on a regular basis.

“We’re very open about: where’s the business going? What is your role in that vision we’re all sharing together?” he said.

“That really goes a long way. The old days of keeping your employees in the dark and not really feeding them that much information and just treating them like these robotic work cells are long gone. If you want to retain people, they have to be part of the company’s mission.”