Powering Productivity with MPS

Powering productivity with MPS

December 1, 2025
By the Blue Print Editorial Team

Just like your home, data centers are powered by the grid. Unlike your home, if there’s a blackout, a flashlight and candles won’t cut it. A data center cannot lose power. Period.

Enter Modular Power Solutions (MPS). They manufacture custom electrical houses to ensure a consistent flow of energy until the site can switch to a standby generator – a lifeline to prevent data from being corrupted or lost. What makes them “modular”? The roughly trailer-sized units are custom-built in MPS’s North Texas facilities then delivered to customer sites, ready to install.

AI investment is flowing, data center construction is booming, and demand for MPS products is surging at breakneck speed. It’s a good challenge to have, but a challenge nonetheless – one that requires closely-aligned partners to keep pace with demand.

In this period of full-sprint production and expansion, Fastenal is supporting MPS at every step, ensuring their supply chain is never an obstacle to growth.

Inventory on wheels

For Fastenal District Manager Justin Shannon, the relationship started like many others. A late-afternoon phone call led to a meeting, which sparked some solutioning and business opportunities.

“And then they started growing – explosively,” said Shannon. “With that, we decided to make an investment in onsite resources for their business. As they expanded into additional facilities, we continued to invest in them, and today we have a dedicated team that services four different MPS facilities in the North Texas market.”

Home base for the program is a vendor managed inventory (VMI) cage situated within MPS’s 305,000 square-foot facility in McKinney. Led by General Manager Garth Glidewell, a team of nine Fastenal employees manages the supply chain for a vast scope of tools, safety gear, fasteners, and other materials. Every day, they build and deliver work packages for specific production areas across the four MPS sites – anywhere from 20 to 30 custom bills of material.

It’s how they do it that makes the difference.

“They’ve created some very efficient solutions for bringing product right to where the teams are working,” said Marshall Giasson, supply chain manager for MPS. “Everything is on a wheeled cart of some sort, whether it’s strut on a tree cart or other material on a caged cart.”

Giasson credits the Fastenal carts for driving improvements in an even more important product category. “Safety’s first and foremost here, so we really utilize their safety program,” he explained. “This includes Fastenal’s safety carts, which ensure our teams always have the right PPE within easy reach in each work area. It’s helped keep our facilities as safe as possible.”

Juan Soriano | MPS General Foreman
"There's no overflow of material, and it's not sitting on the floor, which reduces the risk of slips, trips, and falls. Everything is very organized, lean, and clean."

What they need, where they need it

When you step into the McKinney plant, you’re immediately struck by how bright, clean, and spacious it is. MPS is an employee-owned company. Their strong safety culture and pride of ownership shine through everywhere you look.

According to Juan Soriano, MPS’s general foreman, the mobile just-in-time inventory contributes to the overall efficiency and ergonomics of the facility.

“It’s exactly what we need, where we need it,” said Soriano. “There’s no overflow of material, and it’s not sitting on the floor, which reduces the risk of slips, trips, and falls. Everything is very organized, lean, and clean.”

If a product isn’t on a cart, chances are it’s in a Fastenal vending machine, providing 24/7 access to general purpose tools that aren’t part of the work packages.

For Marshall Giasson, it’s a simple value proposition: “You don’t have a guy waiting on a $10 drill bit holding up a $10,000 production line. It’s what he needs, when he needs it.” He explains that the consumption data captured by the devices provides accountability and traceability. The ability to track and trend usage helps MPS adapt and improve.

Taking care of 5,000 tools? It's a team effort

The way Marshall Giasson sees it, Fastenal’s role isn’t just to manage inventory and fill orders. They’re a partner in MPS’s never ending push for smarter, safer operations. “Having Fastenal inside the building really opens another set of eyes to things we may be overlooking daily – up, down, and all around.”

Fastenal’s services have become woven into daily workflows. In addition to managing the product carts, they launder and inspect MPS’s arc flash PPE. They inspect and certify lifting and rigging equipment. They custom-cut strut and threaded rod per production specs. And here’s a big one: They service the roughly 5,000 tools in MPS’s inventory.

How can nine people execute all of the above? It takes close coordination with Fastenal’s safety specialists and industrial services team.

“The tool service is a really unique piece of the partnership,” said Giasson. “When a tool goes down, Fastenal transports it to their industrial service center for repair.”

He points out that around 1,200 of those tools are precision measuring devices that require six-month calibration – a crucial part of their quality program.

“The Fastenal team manages the entire process,” he explained. “They gather them from the point of use. They get them tested and calibrated in Fastenal’s A2LA lab, and those certifications are always available through their online reporting tool. So, if we get audited by a customer, we have all the certifications on hand at any given time.”

What makes this partnership so successful?

Different stakeholders offer different perspectives. For Fastenal DM Justin Shannon, it started by building trust on a human level. “This is a story where we got the right person plugged in very early on, the customer became very comfortable with them, and we were able to build around that.”

That “right person” is Garth Glidewell, general manager of the onsite Fastenal team. His take on what makes the program tick? “Communication has 100% been the key to building this partnership to what it is today. It’s important to talk with people on the floor daily, to meet with purchasing and higher-ups at least weekly, and to also have quarterly business reviews to show them what we’re doing to help them save money.”

This brings us back to Marshall Giasson, who emphasizes Fastenal’s willingness to invest and scale to keep pace with MPS’s growth.

“They’re here for us every day – rain, sleet, snow, or shine,” said Giasson. “And we know that if we open a new location six months from now, we’ll have a Fastenal cage dedicated to our inventory with committed Fastenal personnel onsite to give us that comfort level of knowing we have the material we need at each location to service our customer.”

His final thoughts? “Partnering with Fastenal has been one of the smartest things we’ve done here at MPS. It’s really allowed us to achieve excellence in the areas we value most in our company, and that’s safety, people, and product.”