Our History

In 1880, William Fisher, an engineer at the city waterworks in Marshalltown, Iowa, worked continuously for over twenty-four hours to manually maintain constant discharge pressure on a steam-driven water pump to supply water to fight a fire.

From this experience, Fisher invented the constant-pressure pump governor and founded the Fisher Controls Company to manufacture his regulator. By 1907, these governors were installed in power plants in the United States, Canada, and England.

As the province headed into the 1960’s, investment in developing the oil and gas industry was underway and there was a growing need for process control equipment with strong local support.

Recognizing this potential, founding President Bill Flegal and co-founders Nipper Guest and Steve Germaniuk opened the doors to Spartan Controls in 1963 as an agent for the Fisher Governor Company. Spartan continued to grow and added a third office in Regina the following year.

In 1962, the government of Alberta granted approval to build the first plant near Fort McMurray. In 1963, Sun Oil invested almost a quarter of a billion dollars in “The Great Canadian Oil Sands Project”. In 1967, commercial production of oil from the Athabasca oil sands began with the start up of this operation (now Suncor).

Spartan was proud to have been involved so early in providing products and services to the oil sands, and today, continues to support our Customers in this industry.

Charles Guest or ‘Nipper’ as he has been known all of his life, had an interesting career prior to his tenure at Spartan. A WWII soldier, Nipper returned to Canada after the war and was hired in the Beverly Coal Mines north of Edmonton. This work inspired him to pursue a degree in mining engineering from the University of Alberta.

In 1949, Nipper took his first engineering job at a refinery with a pipeline construction company. This career change prompted him to move to Toronto in 1952. He didn’t stay in Toronto long, and soon returned to Alberta to work for Barber Engineering and Supply Co. and later to establish Spartan Controls with Bill Flegal.

Ron Kuchinka grew up in rural Saskatchewan in the town of Macoun, located in the Weyburn-Estevan area. He attended school there before moving to Saskatoon to study Electrical Engineering at the University of Saskatchewan.

To quote Ron: “Anyone can provide leadership… It is not the sole domain of management. All Spartans have the opportunity to provide leadership as the need arises. Leadership provides the inspiration, motivation, and direction for fellow Spartans to follow.”

Today our Education Services have trained over 5000+ students from around the world. The main Edmonton training facility is equipped with three state-of-the-art classrooms and a lab area that provides approximately 4,000 sq. ft. of training space.

Spartan's first SCADA installation was in Fort McMurray, Alberta. Without remote systems, the sites would be manned or checked daily by Customer personnel. At the time, helicopters taking personnel to a remote site would rent at $1,000/hour and production downtime could add up to be very expensive.

Emerson’s Fisher Valve division introduced FIELDVUE ™ in 1994. It was a step change in technology, as not only did the digital valve positioner manage the control valve positioning more consistently and more accurately than ever before, significantly reducing process variability, but it also told you a lot about its health.

A cornerstone of Emerson’s field-based architecture, FIELDVUE ™ really did give users a unique and never before ‘view to the field.’

The DeltaV system was released in 1996 and was a key component of Emerson’s PlantWeb digital plant architecture built on open standards like FOUNDATION Fieldbus and HART.

Dow Chemical in Fort Saskatchewan was the world’s First DeltaV and FOUNDATION Fieldbus site and Spartan played an integral part in the services and commissioning of the system.

Spartan is recognized as one of Canada's Best Managed Companies for excellence in business performance for 18 consecutive years. The Best Managed program award winners are amongst the best-in-class of Canadian owned and managed companies demonstrating strategy, capability and a commitment to achieve sustainable growth.