Our company was born during the Christmas season of 1975 with the dream of applying electronics education and experience (radio transmitters, radar, pressurized water reactors, computers) to the production equipment of San Francisco Bay Area manufacturers. Our target area of service was the greater Bay Area, from Santa Rosa to Sacramento to Monterey.

We immediately discovered that there was a much more immediate need for a service firm to maintain and repair existing production plant electronics (the electronic nervous systems of large machines) than for a firm to install new systems.

By 1985 the company was the local service representative of more than a dozen manufacturers of industrial electronic equipment (such as variable frequency drives, automatic modular pumping stations) and was serving additional portions of Northern California with occasional jobs in Toronto, Miami, Maui, etc.

At that time, the engineering development speed of variable frequency drives began to increase rapidly, much like computers, and the installed population of VFD's increased significantly. The technology to manufacture reliable units inexpensively was coming of age. We became the local service representative of more VFD manufacturers, and began to sell what we serviced.

In 1995 the name Drives and Controls Distributors (DCD) was adopted for the sales portion of the company, retaining Ortman Electronics as the name of the engineering / service portion of the company. We are now “Ortman DCD”.

The focus of our business is still service and troubleshooting – but with sales of motor control products and related items (such as fuses) added. We specialize in variable frequency drives and offer failure analysis and repair estimate in our shop. We also provide service and support for what we sell.

We continue to have a strong belief in hiring capable people sincerely interested in electronics, physics, and “how things work”. The ongoing training we offer can be tailored to either electronic engineering or electrical sales, or both, depending on the interests of the individual.