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Manufacturing Innovation Blog

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Manufacturing has a Home for Everyone

By: Roger Kilmer

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“The way manufacturing is set-up, it welcomes so many people and can put so many people to work that, to me, it’s the place we want to invest and be strong in as a community and a country.” These words resonate with me.  It’s what we believe here at NIST MEP and what our 1,300 field agents all across the country work tirelessly towards every day.  Including the folks at the Michigan Manufacturing Technology Center (MMTC).  This quote is part of a video capturing the great story of their client, Omega Plastics.  President Jeff Kaczperski speaks so genuinely about his business, serving others, and the opportunities in manufacturing.  As he says: manufacturing has a home for almost everyone.

Take a look at the Heroes of American Manufacturing video, featuring this family-owned, tooling and injection molding manufacturer in Macomb County Michigan.  What started as one toolmaker in his garage, has grown into a 45 person company with a 70,000 square foot facility making prototype and low-volume production products for clients in medical, consumer packaging, automotive, and safety markets throughout the world.  Omega Plastics not only survived the recession—they innovated into new markets with the help of MMTC.

Jeff and another senior leader at Omega inspired us to pull out the last couple of minutes from thevideo as a standalone clip: Manufacturing is Cool.  Manufacturing is cool – we know that and we need to raise our voices and tell others.  Embed this video clip on your websites, into presentations, and use it in whatever ways you can think of to help us change the perception of manufacturing and celebrate all that the industry has to offer local communities, the workforce, and our nation’s economy.  Toward that end, there’s one more thing we can do for US manufacturing and that’s save the date for the second annual Manufacturing Day on October 4, 2013.  Stay tuned for more details but in the meantime you can find out more here.

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Hutch Hutchison on February 22, 2013 12:38 PM

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I hope this goes viral! Great tribute to growing manufacturing!

Anjela Mangrum on March 3, 2013 3:07 PM

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The manufacturing industry is continual evolving due to globalization, technological changes, desire for more profitability, and efficiency in competition. These changes have created the need to review how manufacturing companies manage their employees. The traditional approach was concerned with only three aspects with linear relationships: Acquire, Engage, and Retain. The current generation of workers and the evolving manufacturing industry trend has made the tradition approach of talent management become less effective. For example, many manufacturing companies have downsized their workforce through voluntary exits, but at the same time they continue the difficult task of hiring very skilled labor. As technology improves and the manufacturing process becomes more complex, more and more highly skill workers are needed. Since they are in high demand, the good ones will tend to possess certain qualifications that will enable them excel in their career. These workers are usually well trained, highly skilled, capable of complex trouble shooting, flexible and able to solving problems under minimal supervision. After the competitive task of acquiring these people is complete, many manufacturing companies are faced with the dilemma of how to manage them. Many graduates who possess the above qualities belong to Generation Y. These are people born in early 1980s to early 1990s. They tend to be technologically savvy, versatile and would work in a company for only a few years before moving on to another. This is due to their life experiences and aspirations in life e.g. rise to senior level within a short time.

Fiberglass Rod on March 7, 2013 11:54 PM

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Nice post, Grateful to manufacturing industry for development of facilities for mankind.

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