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 design and 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, cell culture counters, automatic modular pumping stations).

At that time drives were coming of age, and the installed population of VFD's increased significantly. 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 Electronics / DCD or Ortman DCD”.

The focus of our business is still service and troubleshooting – but with sales of motor control products and related items (such as line reactors, line filters, and 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.