From the Web: Manufacturing Day and comebacks

The third annual Manufacturing Day takes place, Friday, Oct. 3, and the national event has drawn attention in high places. President Obama is scheduled to participate by visiting minority-owned Millennium Steel Service LLC, located adjacent to the Toyota plant south of Princeton, Ind.

Millennium Steel was founded in 2001, and the company’s website says revenue grew from $37 million in 2001 to $250 million in 2011. Black Enterprise Magazine rates the company one of the 100 Top Black Owned Businesses. The company started with 10 employees, and now, reportedly has 58.

The Millennium Steel event is just one of more than 1,500 being held across the country to address common misperceptions about manufacturing and introduce manufacturing careers to the next generation of workers.

New for Manufacturing Day 2014 is a video contest to share how companies celebrate the day and why others should. The grand prize winner of this inaugural contest is Sussex, Wis.-based Waukesha Metal Products.

The company said it chose to submit the video to show the importance of manufacturing, provide ideas to others on what they can do for National Manufacturing Day, explain why celebrating the day is important, and to encourage others to participate.

In the video, Jeffrey Clark, president and CEO of WMP, says that “National Manufacturing Day is our opportunity to show the community that making things is cool; that we have career opportunities; that we contribute to the economic engine in the area; and, mostly, we want to get people educated in the fact that what we do is important—it’s important for our children to think about from a career opportunity perspective, and it’s important for our community leaders to look at what we provide from a tax base and from a contribution to the overall economy in the area.”

You can view the grand prize-winning video and regional winners’ videos here.

Another manufacturing happening in Wisconsin is the Heavy Metal Bus Tour that takes place October 8. Carrying about 3,200 eighth-grade students, buses will be making stops at various manufacturing facilities to introduce them to the types of jobs and careers available in the world of manufacturing.

Among the 46 manufacturing facilities on the tour is Jarp Industries, Schofield, Wis., a maker of hydraulic cylinders and other products for equipment manufacturers. There they’ll see “cool, modern technology,” said Jarp CEO Kevin Kraft. “What it really takes to make stuff today.”

Kraft said the visit will change kids’ perception that manufacturing is “dumb, dirty, and dangerous. (They’ll) be able to see clean facilities—facilities that are not dumb. It’s very high-tech equipment; it requires people who can think on the job. It’s not just this mundane labor …where you’re paying for people’s backs. Today you’re paying for people’s brains, and that’s what manufacturing’s about today.”

You see them in all industrial cities these days—areas that once housed booming manufacturing plants that provided good jobs and made for good places to live now lie abandoned and neglected as companies have moved to the suburbs or offshore. Crumbling structures, a weed garden, and wildlife refuge.

As reported in The Buffalo News, the city of Buffalo, N.Y., has plans to revive one such ghost town, a stretch of abandoned factories and warehouses on Northland Avenue.

The cumulative empty space in these long-empty factories — from the old Houde Engineering plant to Clearing-Niagara Metal Fabricating — dwarfs the downtown Trico complex. They once made everything here from metal parts to chemical solvents. Goods were loaded out the back door onto railroad cars on the Belt Line. Simple.

State officials – in a long-overdue blast of common sense – said last week they will tap $6.7 million of the Buffalo Billion to reclaim 50 industrial acres along Northland Avenue. At least one manufacturing company is coming, along with a job training center.

Some, including residents of the area, believe the revival has been too long in coming. How long? Long enough for an industrial complex to become, well, a prairie.

Also making a comeback, albeit it at a more rapid rate, is Rockford, Ill.’s Roper Whitney.

The 104-year-old maker of sheet-metal fabricating tools once employed about 200 workers and posted annual sales of $25 million. Then came the Great Recession and a change in ownership caused by the bank seizing the firm and selling it at auction to Tennsmith Inc. of McMinnville, Tenn. By 2011, the workforce had shrunk to less than 30.

Today, the company is making a comeback, fueled by its massive metal-cutting machines. Tennsmith has invested more than $500,000 in new machinery and building upgrades at the plant since 2011. The workforce has grown to about 75 and a small second shift was added in August. Sales have increased 260 percent in 2½ years.

Perhaps most important, the company has secured contracts to manufacture new products, including a line of precision sheet metal folding machines and a huge, “long folder” machine that will allow the company to reach new customers.

The long-folding machine is a particularly strategic addition because it will be the only machine of its kind manufactured in the U.S., said Jason Smoak, Roper Whitney’s vice president of product development.

As it expands production, the company must hire more skilled machinists, assemblers, welders, and CNC operators, and finding them is a problem, one that’s shared with manufacturers nationwide.