About us

Send to friend

Morris Sallick Industrial Supplies, Inc. (MSIS) was founded in 1991 in Miami, FL., by Mr. Morris Sallick, a mechanical engineer by trade with many years experience in maintenance and management of industrial plants in the petroleum, chemical, and food/beverage industries. It is a family owned company with the office in Miami, FL., and Managua, Nicaragua.
 
During its first few years, MSIS dealt mainly in supplying engineering products to industrial companies in Central America. The company’s goal was to provide not only goods, but also engineering support in order to facilitate the purchase of the best possible solution while keeping costs at a minimum. After many years of working closely with these industries and building a solid reputation as a reliable alternative to other suppliers, these industries turned to MSIS for other needs. Customers from cement and construction companies across the region began requesting heavy equipment parts and equipment. MSIS used the opportunity to establish a Heavy Equipment Department, which in a short time was able to establish direct relationships with well known brands such as Komatsu/Dresser, Terex, Caterpillar, and Cummins.
 
The Miami office is now mostly dedicated to promoting the heavy equipment line and has expanded sales to customers all over the world, mainly in the mining, cement, quarries, and construction fields. The goal is to allow our customers to remain competitive by providing low-cost and high-quality parts with fast deliveries in order minimize machine down-time. MSIS also provides additional services such as selling / purchasing used heavy equipment as per customers needs.
 
In 1997 an office in Nicaragua was established in order to deal establish a closer relationship with our Central American clients, here we promptly became authorized distributors for Sumitomo Machinery (which is a manufacturer of gear reducers) and representatives in Central America for Goodyear-Engineered Products Division. With our expansion into the region, we were also named manufacturer’s representatives for Sumitomo Machinery in Central America. This office became specialized in the power transmission and materials handling fields.
 
This is a side story about our territory:
 
Central America consists of 7 countries which, although share a similar history, are not really economically integrated. The area is primarily agriculture oriented, has no oil reserves and no abundant mineral resources. Overall, Central America has a population roughly equivalent to that of Colombia (approx. 41 million), but lacks in natural resources which have helped that nation (Colombia) become much more industrialized than Central America. Individually, each country in Central America is relatively small. Add to this the lack of an industrialized economy and several problems become evident. First, not one specific country has a big enough economic market to allow for a supplier to become highly specialized in one specific field. Second, the lack of integration between the Central American countries creates barriers for working with even the neighboring nations. Therefore, most distributors of industrial equipment must have an expansive array of products that are marketed exclusively in their home country.
 
It is our belief that our (Central American) lack of integration coupled with our lack of mineral resources has led to a lack of industrialization to the point that when compared to Mexico this country has a much bigger market for power transmission equipment than that of Central America, it is our estimation that Central America has a market that is 10% that of Mexico even though Central America has 40% the population of Mexico. Another worthy point to mention is that traveling in Central America is no easy task, the isthmus is approx. 1600 km long x a few hundred Km. wide and most of its population is located near the pacific coast. The road infrastructure mostly consists of two lane highways and borders are encountered every few hundred kilometers and crossing borders sometimes can take hours.
 
Since the Central American power transmission and materials handling markets are relatively small we had to concentrate our sales in the whole Central American region, this involved lots of travel and we therefore could not be there when our clients needed us. We had always wanted to be able to provide a one of a kind service but we didn't know how to do that. We decided that we would stop traveling to the further edges of Central America and concentrate our efforts in Nicaragua and it's neighbor to the north, Honduras. We also started visiting a fewer amount of customers and concentrated our efforts into tending to the sugar mills and cement companies. We soon found that we were providing a better service to our clients than before but we needed more products to sell to our reduced amount of customers. We soon realized that many of the specialized components used on the cement plants did not have any representation in Central America due to the fact that the individual country markets were too small to warrant specialization and nobody had noticed that if you look at Central America as one region then this market was big enough to warrant specialization.
 
We wanted to provide a one of a kind customer experience but we could never do it, we realized that the only way to provide a one of a kind experience was if we could permanently stay at our customer's plants. We have now come to the realization that Central America is not like most regions in the world where a company specializes in one product line and if this product line is tended correctly then wealth can be created. Our realization is that the Central American region does not lend itself to specialization in one product line (for reasons why see the side story above), we realized that we needed to tend to specific customers and keep a permanent presence at their plants. If we were to keep a permanent presence at our customer's plants we needed to do other things to create a complete customer experience that was second to none, the things that we have done are as follows:
 
- Identify the manufacturing process of a specific industry, identify the key manufacturers for each step of their process and become their agent/distributor - Once this is done for most of the manufacturing chain link then we can become comprehensive suppliers to this industry.
 
- Look for an expert at a particular industry (such as cement, sugar mills, mining, food/beverage) and partner up with this person to look after a specific customer.
 
- Keep this person at a specific customer's plant on a full time basis
 
By doing these steps we become a comprehensive supplier to specific industries and we provide a personalized service provider to our clients thus we are able to offer a one of a kind service while receiving product support from top line manufacturers.
 
This new way of doing business has liberated us from having to have an infrastructure in every country where we operate and also liberated us from the expenses of having traveling sales people, we in turn place personnel where they need to be and we are free to grow in a modular way, one plant at a time. This business concept can be applied to many industries, we are already applying this concept to the cement/mining, aggregates/quarries/concrete, sugar mills and food/beverage industries, we also soon plan to start operations in our power generation division.
 
What are our plans for the future? Our expansion is limited by the time constraint that it takes to find good qualified engineers that are 1) honest, 2) hard working and 3) that have good friendly personalities. We plan to first start with Mexico, then South America and then the rest of the world.