Piping Technology & Products, Inc. (PT&P)
is one of the leading manufacturers of pipe supports
and other piping products in the world. This
book is the story of how the Houston-based company
grew out of a small engineering consulting firm to
take a prominent place in the piping industry.
The company's founder, Durga Agrawal, first came to
Texas in 1968. A young college student from the
small village of Lakhanpur, in central India, Agrawal
had planned to complete his graduate studies in
engineering at the University of Houston and then
return to India to establish a business.
Although he did not know it at the time, his arrival
in Houston marked the beginning of a journey that
eventually would lead him into the world of
manufacturing, not in his native India, but rather in
the go-for-broke atmosphere of the energy capital of
the world--Houston, Texas.
The
Skyline of downtown Houston is the backdrop in this
aerial photograph of Piping Technology's plant on
Holmes Road just as Houston's petrochemical economy is
the background of our story.
When Durga Agrawal
first established Pipe Technology & Products, Inc.
in the summer of 1978, he sought to create a niche for
his company in the pipe support industry by providing
fast, dependable service for his customers. He
accomplished this primarily by developing innovative
designs that improved the company's line of products
and made the firm's production methods more efficient.
This enabled Agrawal to reduce the extended lead
time--that is the amount of time required for products
such as spring hangers to be manufactured and
delivered--that had been the rule in the days before
PT&P. Agrawal's innovative approach to the
piping industry and his willingness to diversify into
new areas of manufacturing enabled his small company
to survive and prosper in a highly competitive
environment. Later during the mid-1980s, when
Houston's economy crashed with the demise of oil, gas,
real estate, and petrochemical industries, PT&P,
like other industry-dependent companies, found itself
in a struggle for survival. Yet, while many
competitors saw their business fail, PT&P not only
survived but also thrived during the economic
downturn. How then did this upstart business
out-maneuver its competitors in a way that enabled the
company to survive Houston's economic "bust"
of the 1980s and become one of the leading
manufacturers in the piping industry?
