Dennis Fritz will tell you there was never a time when he wasn’t an engineer. From his childhood, growing up in Roseburg, Oregon, Fritz began tinkering with door hinges and grabbing screwdrivers to discover how things work. He has always loved working with his hands, and becoming an engineer seemed to be his destiny. He says the College of Engineering at Oregon State University was “the obvious only option” for his education.
“Engineering at Oregon State is no small matter,” Fritz said. “You have to take it seriously, and I did.” The road to his degree wasn’t easy. Fritz had the determination and inquisitive spirit the college expects from students. What he didn’t always have was time. “I was consistently driving back and forth from Corvallis to Roseburg,” Fritz said, recalling the time when he was attending classes at Oregon State while dating his high school sweetheart long distance. Eventually, the two decided to get married. Fritz’s career path became clearer, with better grades and support from his wife, Susan. He not only completed his bachelor’s degree at Oregon State, but went on to earn a master’s degree three years later. With his degrees and his lifelong curiosity for machinery, Fritz founded DWFritz Automation in 1973. The business charted a course within the lumber industry but soon pivoted into precision manufacturing, working with some of the most innovative and advanced technology companies of the time, such as Oregon Saw Chain, Hewlett-Packard, and Boeing. When Fritz started out in the engineering world, just about everything was mechanical “with some electrical mixed in,” he says. But technology moves fast, and part of his job as head of the company was to keep up. “We had to invent these machines as we went. It felt like we were doing something really significant,” Fritz said. “We were enabling manufacturers to make their products and stay competitive. We felt like we were all part of a larger team.” While DWFritz and its employees thrived as engineers, Fritz noticed a gap on the business side of the operation. His wife, Susan, stepped up to take a leadership role.
“She was a big part of the company and did a lot to keep us out of trouble,” Fritz said of his late wife. “She had a no-nonsense business brain.” Fritz praised Susan for her ability to keep the company afloat in even the hardest of times, making sure everyone got paid and was properly taken care of as employees. In 1999, Fritz brought his son into the company. Mike Fritz also went to Oregon State University, where he earned a degree in business. When he started working for his dad’s company, his goal was to elevate creative strategy and marketing. With the talents of Dennis, Susan, and Mike Fritz all firmly in place, DWFritz was steadily growing into the powerhouse of highly precise automated systems it is known as today. Over the years, DWFritz has broken into a wide variety of industries, including aerospace, energy, medical devices, and semiconductors. “One of our core values within our company is to build machines that we can be proud of. We build machines that our whole staff can get behind,” Fritz said. Fritz says it’s satisfying to work on a machine — for six months or maybe longer, depending on the complexity of the project — and end up producing something the client is really happy with. “The machines are all kind of like children. They grow up and you send them off to have their own lifetime,” he added. Fritz started his work in a small room with a drafting board, a hollow-core door on two sawhorses for a reference table, and a never-ending curiosity. He is immensely proud of what his passion has grown into. “The people that have contributed — my wife, my son, all of our engineers and employees we had along the way — they put their hearts into these projects, and I am pretty proud of that,” Fritz said. At Oregon State, students interact to solve engineering problems in class, in teams, in projects, and with each other. Fritz emphasizes that this collaboration skill combined with the rigor of fundamentals builds great engineers.
Fritz retired in 2018, remaining the company’s founder and chairman while son Mike took over day-to-day operations as CEO until they sold the company to Sandvik in 2021. These days, you can find Fritz working on personal projects and relaxing with former colleagues and friends – including an annual ‘DW Fritz Oldtimers’ dinner.