We recently sat down with Charles Boyce, President of Boyce Technologies, Inc., to talk about his work and the company’s history in LIC. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation and check out the video below for more, plus a tour around their factory.
Long Island City Partnership: Tell us a little bit about what brought you to LIC?
Charles Boyce: About 25 years ago, I worked with a company called Petrocelli Electric up by the bridge. The mix of industry plus residential plus stores and shops was really interesting because you could have industry and then you could go to lunch and come back to work. When I started Boyce Technologies, this was the obvious choice. We had one 10,000 square foot warehouse, and I thought I’d never outgrow that. Then we got another 10,000 and I thought we’d never outgrow that, and now we’re in 100,000 and we’ve outgrown this. It keeps going.
LICP: That’s amazing. We love LIC’s mixed-use nature and the Partnership does our best to support all the different industries here. So, what do you do in the building? What’s going on here?
CB: We’re an advanced manufacturer that makes life, safety, security, and communications equipment, mainly for the MTA. If you go into the subway, just about everything that you can see that’s electronic is ours. We built the police, radio systems, public address systems, all the digital signage systems, the help points, and the access nodes. And then occasionally somebody will have something really difficult to do, and they’ll give us a call, like the mobility hub for Mayor Mamdani down in City Hall.
LICP: You were able to build the Deliveristas Hub very quickly and fill this need that the city had. the City had.
CB: This building is what we call vertically integrated. And that means that anything you need to do for a project is done under one roof. So, we have the ability to do like 10 businesses worth of work under one roof. When we made ventilators, we didn’t leave the building.
LICP: Yeah, let’s go there. Can you talk about how you were able to help the city respond to the COVID-19 pandemic?
CB: When COVID started, Andrew Cuomo was talking about his last two ventilators. And he was going to put one here and another one over there. And I said, you know, if we’re really that vertically integrated, why wouldn’t we build ventilators? I didn’t even know what a ventilator was. I had to Google it. We went into gear using our vertical integration and all of our — we were 150 people then. Working 24/7, we designed, engineered, and manufactured ventilators for the local hospitals. 30 days later, we had FDA EAU approved ventilators, and we went on to make 3,000 of them.
LICP: What makes you advanced?
CB: When you walk around this building, you’re going to see some machines that don’t exist in many places in the world. A lot of robotics, a lot of automation – not to replace people but to make more and to keep people safe. For example, if we’re making a battery pack, we don’t want a worker to be so close to the dangers of a lithium ion battery. So we’ll use a robot to do that. That makes us advanced. When you think about manufacturing, you think about milling machines and lathes and grease and dirt. This building is more like a hospital. And the machines here take intellect from the operators and turn it into product.
LICP: What does the word innovation mean to you?
CB: Innovation means we’re going to do something that nobody else has ever done before. It often starts with engineering, where we’ll analyze the problem. Then we have to write the software for it, we have to make the tooling for it, we have to write the programs for it, and then we have to manufacture it, assemble it, test it, deploy it, and service it. So, we do everything from idea to in-use.
LICP: Wow, and it sounds like you can’t just buy these software and machines.
CB: Some of these machines are so special that you don’t just walk into a store and buy them. They have to be developed and sometimes it will take a year to get a machine. And then once you get the machine, you have to make the tooling for the machine, which is the thing that the software talks to. Then you have to write the programs that actually take the software and the tooling and make the product. So, it’s quite an interesting way to manufacture. It’s not just going into the store and getting something and pushing a green button.
LICP: All done in LIC. Can you talk about Long Island City from an operations perspective and how your location here impacts your work with the MTA?
CB: Long Island City is one stop away from Manhattan and then you couple that with the amount of manufacturing that’s here. We can comfortably operate in LIC, whether getting trucks in and out or having the space that we need. And then the proximity to the MTA is really critical for what we do. I think the successes of Boyce come from the fact that we stay with the product. We’re in the MTA, and the MTA’s in all five boroughs. Long Island City is right in the middle of NYC. So that is critical for us. I liked it at first, but now I need it, because we have to deploy our teams to work on 472 stations every day.
LICP: I’m also familiar with some of the great work you do with the schools in the neighborhood. Could you tell us a little bit more about that?
CB: We love PS4. In fact, all of our robots here are named by the students right down the street, and it’s a blast to have them come here. The big thing that we do is for FIRST Robotics with the Queens Technical High School. They’re the RoboTigers Team 1796. I remember the day I saw them in a classroom with some hand tools and said, “You guys can do this here, you could do more at Boyce.” They moved in and this year they finished 20 in over 4,000 teams. I’m super proud of those kids. They come from a really diverse, disadvantaged community. And when they come into Boyce and they do so well in a worldwide program like that, it changes their lives.
LICP: What’s your newest project? What’s on your brain recently?
CB: We’re part of the Skanska EJ East River Tunnel Rehabilitation and have invented an LED handrail that goes for three miles through the tunnel. If the train ever stops in an emergency, the handrailing will point you to the right exit. We’re really proud to be part of something like that. It’s a technology that came from cruise ships, but it’s equally important in a tunnel. We wrote the software, we built the controllers, we made the handrails, we machined all the brackets for it. We’re proud to be part of a project that can help save people’s lives.
