Explore the 40-year journey of Alpha Controls—from a basement startup to a trusted name in instrumentation. See how customer obsession shaped our legacy of precision and innovation.
Customer obsessed: These two simple yet powerful words have fueled Alpha Controls & Instrumentation for more than 40 years and counting.
From our origins operating out of a basement in southern Ontario to becoming a leading supplier of measuring, sensing and controlling instruments, our secret to success hasn’t been much a secret after all. It’s all been about finding working solutions for our customers.
Founded by Jerry Sand in 1979 and run today by son David Sand, our second-generation business based in Markham, Ont., has remained faithful to the Day One mandate of providing the right technology solutions and support to our customers, regardless of whether they were making beer or producing vaccines.
Those early days when we represented a few European product lines has evolved with purpose and precision to match industries’ changing needs. We’ve maintained a meticulousness approach to the products brought under the Alpha umbrella, which today includes many of today’s top brands in instrumentation for pressure, temperature, humidity, gas, level and flow.
Yet we’ve maintained what we feel is best-in-class diversity in the industries we service, whether that be pharmaceutical, chemical, life sciences, HVAC, aerospace, food and beverage, water and wastewater, power or cannabis.
Simultaneously, we’ve recognized the need to also be a trusted service partner that supports these solutions. Our in-house calibration lab and onsite services are now pacing our company’s growth over the past several decades. Today, we are accredited to ISO/IEC 17025 by A2LA.
More recently, we added validation services to our suite of solutions, with our team of technicians using FDA 21CFR Part 11 validated software to execute IQ/OQ protocols and equipment from industry leaders such as Fluke Calibration and Kaye Instruments.
And in what’s becoming increasingly unique in our industry, Alpha has remained committed to having “feet on the street.” Our highly qualified team of technically trained experts has grown over the years, with our team of “road warriors”, meeting face to face or virtually with customers and understanding their unique challenges.
The yellow brick road for Alpha has had plenty of turns, peaks and valleys. Our commitment to service – or what we live to refer to as “service beyond service” – has remained steadfast. In turn, it now differentiates Alpha from the pack.
As much as possible, we try our best to develop relationships, not offer catalogues. Many of our customers have been with us for decades simply because we don’t take the easy road. We dig into the challenges and learn more about our customers’ applications to ensure we’re providing the right product or service – and, more importantly, they get what they need as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible.
From the simplest calibration to the most complex instrument, we at Alpha pride ourselves on our reputation as a customer-first organization. As our CEO likes to say, “It’s rare that we can’t find a solution for you.”
