With 50 years of installation expertise under its belt, FTI is stepping out as an original equipment manufacturer.
With the launch of Excellerate Products, the Menasha‑based company is capitalizing on high demand in two emerging markets: data centers and electric vehicle charging.
FTI debuted its Wisconsin‑made, ready‑to‑install electric vehicle charging product, the eSkid, about a year ago at the 2025 EV Charging Summit & Expo. Since then, National Sales Manager David Levine says, the eSkid has gone through a series of improvements — such as increasing its portability — and is now ready to deliver to customers.
“We adapted the prototype to what was more needed in the marketplace,” Levine says. “The great thing about the eSkid is that it’s agnostic, so it can fit any charger … and it’s configurable where everything else in the marketplace has been custom. From our experience in electrical installations of EV charging, we noticed that we were going back to the drawing board every single time. So by developing [eSkid], we have much more flexibility. It doesn’t have to start from scratch every single time.”
The eSkid is quick to install, and early on the customer feedback has been positive, Levine adds.
“It’s very exciting to see it out there,” he says. “We’re seeing lots of play in the marketplace, because it’s something that brings down cost [and speeds up] installation.”
With rising gas prices, adds FTI Product Manager Amanda Miller, there is good momentum right now for EV charging installations in the U.S., despite last year’s federal pause on funding the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program and President Donald Trump’s persistent comments opposing an “electric vehicle mandate” in U.S. manufacturing. Miller says Wisconsin’s own “WEVI” program has been up and running and going really smoothly, which is encouraging for the homegrown Excellerate Products initiative.
This spring, FTI announced the availability of a second Excellerate Product: the UL891 LV Switchboard, which was on display at Data Center World in Washington, D.C. in April. Like eSkid, the switchboard was created out of FTI’s years of knowledge and experience with electrical installations and is in high demand.
“What we were seeing as an installer was very long lead times, and we kind of took it as if we can build it in house, we can kind of control the lead times, as well as having a repeatable workflow, less labor for us, faster installations and predictable outcomes,” Miller says of Excellerate’s foray into switchgear manufacturing.
Switchgear has been difficult for contractors to find since the first supply chain disruptions of COVID six years ago, and demand has only since increased with the explosion of data center construction. Miller says future Excellerate Products will likely also be responsive to the needs of the data center construction market.
Transformers, for example, currently have lead times as long as two years, Levine points out. With Excellerate Products, FTI has removed the barriers to speed and scalability for critical power infrastructure by owning the design, build and lifecycle support and by creating a repeatable manufacturing process — keeping in mind that configurable and custom are two different things, Levine points out.
“It’s all about … configurable, not custom,” he says. “Because to make it custom, you’re always starting from scratch.”
Much of the development of Excellerate Products is a credit to FTI’s Lakeside Vision Center, which opened in Chilton in 2022 and which Levine describes as “simply amazing.”
Today, as the company begins to see the fruit of its innovation labor, Miller says the growth of FTI’s capabilities as an OEM is exciting and timely.
“We’ve set up a whole new set of engineers, project managers, product managers, as well as our marketing team to try to [create] this new business side,” she says. “We’re ramping up our manufacturing teams, our quality teams, as well as having an after‑market team.”
“We’re seeing lots of play in the marketplace, because it’s something that brings down cost [and speeds up] installation.”
