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Boris Pusin and his partners at Statistics & Control Inc. (S&C) rack up a lot of frequent-flyer miles through their work, but “time off” doesn’t seem to be part of their vocabulary.

One of Pusin’s three partners is currently in Indonesia, overseeing installation of the company’s process-optimization software at a massive oil production facility. Projects have also taken them to destinations as far-flung as Uzbekistan and The Netherlands.

The West Des Moines-based control engineering company’s biggest project to date is in Kazakhstan, where the company is beginning a second phase of a power-plant optimization at the Tengiz Field, one of the world’s largest oilfield complexes.

Global projects, particularly those in the former Soviet republics, are a natural fit for the company, whose four partners were each born and educated in Russia or Ukraine.

S&C’s engineers have used their professional connections to secure contracts with some well-known multinational corporations, among them Chevron Corp. and Rolls-Royce North America Inc. The company also works with multinationals whose monikers are more familiar on the other side of the globe, such as Yokogawa Electric Corp. and Bolashak.

The company’s software product, OptiRamp, enables its engineers to model various types of continuously operating processes, such as power generation, oil refining and steam generation, to predict how the systems will perform under various scenarios.

Another of its specialties is dynamic studies, in which it uses its software to evaluate the operating efficiency of complex compressor systems.

Despite the global recession, S&C has added five employees in its initial two years in business, and plans to hire two software development engineers by the end of this year.

“We’re showing a little bit of profit now,” said Pusin, the company’s vice president. “The growth is not only in the profit, but in the resources and projects coming out of the company. Sometimes we are in the situation where we have the projects, but not the (human) resources.”

The company received a three-year, $100,000 Entrepreneurial Ventures Assistance (EVA) loan from the Iowa Department of Economic Development (IDED) in December 2007, which “made our financial situation a little bit easier; it helped us with working capital,” he said.

Working with the IDED and the Greater Des Moines Partnership, S&C wrote a three-year business plan in which it plans to grow to 15 employees by the end of 2010.

Though it’s a little behind in hiring, “when you consider what happened in the global economy, we are doing fairly OK,” Pusin said.

“(The) oil-and-gas industry is the biggest market for us, but power generation is also one of the good markets where we can deliver our product,” he said.

Pusin, with S&C President Vadim Shapiro and partners Ilya Markvich and Alex Komm, left Compressor Controls Corp., a Des Moines-based manufacturing and export company, in 2005 to start their own systems integration business. However, they soon changed course to the software development and consulting side.

“At some point we decided it made more sense to change the business model; instead of being an integrator, to be a solution provider for the biggest players in the industry,” Pusin said.

“That worked out pretty good for us, because we didn’t have to deal with the procurement and shipping of equipment; we just do our piece of the software, install it and make sure it works correctly.”

Pusin, a Russian-born engineer, began his career working for Russia’s largest power-plant design company. Like each of his three partners, he was educated in the former Soviet Union, and in the early 1990s obtained a visa to emigrate to the United States.

Recently awarded a U.S. trademark for its OptiRamp product name, one of S&C’s goals is to acquire more contracts for U.S.-based installations. Its first significant domestic customer has been control system modernizations for natural gas pipelines for Omaha-based Northern Natural Gas, a subsidiary of MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co.

Midwestern ethanol plants are good candidates for S&C’s optimization software, Pusin said. “There are several points where the projects can be optimized because they have those big dryers that use natural gas to dry the corn after the ethanol has been produced,” he said. Currently, however, “the (ethanol) industry, as far as I can see, is not in very good shape to invest in something new.”

For the next year, S&C’s projects will likely remain primarily with overseas installations, he said. “But we have a couple of projects in the initial stages where we would target customers here in the United States for power generation facilities or gas transportation.”

Iowa State University’s engineering school is S&C’s top resource for finding talent in an extremely competitive field, Pusin said.

Last year the company hired an ISU doctoral student as an intern and then brought him on board full-time, an approach it hopes to take more often to grab good prospects before they graduate.

“It’s not that easy to find the proper (human) resources,” he said. “Sometimes we say, ‘We’d like to have this person,’ but they’re already taken.”