Also celebrates 35th year anniversary VESTAL — Engineering-services firm D&R Technical Solutions, Inc. is celebrating more than three decades in business with a changing of the guard. John Mulligan has stepped down from the role of company president, and is letting new leaders take the helm and guide the company going forward. Mulligan, the company […]
Also celebrates 35th year anniversary
VESTAL — Engineering-services firm D&R Technical Solutions, Inc. is celebrating more than three decades in business with a changing of the guard.
John Mulligan has stepped down from the role of company president, and is letting new leaders take the helm and guide the company going forward.
Mulligan, the company owner who now has the title of CEO, has been with D&R for 34 of the 35 years the company has been in business. “I’ve seen a lot,” he tells CNYBJ. He first joined D&R as a technical writer before becoming a project manager, then a senior project manager. In 2001, when one of the four founding partners retired, Mulligan had the opportunity to take on an ownership and leadership role.
During his tenure, Mulligan helped the company navigate the pandemic, which shifted its workforce fully remote. During that time, D&R downsized its offices from more than 11,000 square feet in Endicott to its current 5,500 square feet at 320 North Jensen Road in Vestal.
“For 30 years, the business was all under one roof,” Mulligan says. When COVID hit and everyone had to work remotely, he was concerned. “We’ve kind of had to reimagine the company, reengineer it,” he says. It worked out so well, in fact, that the company has continued with a hybrid model since then.
Mulligan is proud of where D&R Technical Solutions is today, “as vibrant and talented as we’ve ever been.”
Knowing there is a lot of new energy and great ideas, he knew it was the right time to take a step back.
Andy Canzler, who served as VP under Mulligan since 2020, now leads D&R day to day as president.
“Since the two of us have been running it, we’ve really expanded it,” he says of the company and its growth in recent years.
While D&R Technical Solutions, which provides technical manuals and training materials, originally got its start working with the Department of Defense (DoD), for the past 25 years, the transit industry has been its biggest revenue source.
However, during the pandemic, when people were working from home and not commuting as much, those transit customers, including the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York City, scaled back on contracts. That forced D&R to pivot and look in new directions for growth, Canzler says.
Today, the company’s revenue base is about equally split between the DoD and the transit industry, and D&R is finding more growth by providing new types of technical manuals and training materials.
Those new areas include augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), artificial intelligence (AI), and a trend toward the “gamification” of training, the company’s new VP Chester Callahan says.
D&R Technical Solutions is both incorporating those technologies into products for clients it already serves and looking for those technologies to bring new clients to the firm, he adds.
“We’ve dedicated some space in our office, and we’re calling it our 3D lab,” Mulligan says. There, some of the company’s more than 30 employees are creating content for AR and VR training as demos that can be shown to potential customers.
The goal is to set D&R up for another 35 years of growth as it celebrates the first 35 years throughout this calendar year, Mulligan says.
To kick off the celebrations, the company held an employee luncheon commemorating the anniversary, complete with a scrapbook detailing the company’s history.