Manufacturing alliance group makes debut at Illinois job shop show

By Stephanie Vaughan, Associate Editor, Practical Welding Today®

Building partnerships means more money, say fabricators and manufacturers.

This was the message many exhibitors and attendees were discussing at Rockford, Ill.'s 24th annual Job Shop and Manufacturing Show in May—and a message promoted by the Manufacturing Alliance of the Rock River Valley (MARRV), a new organization that operates with the mission of "fulfilling customer needs with cost-effective, innovative, single-source solutions through collaborative efforts of its members."

"The idea is to go after contracts too big for one manufacturer," said John Lanpher of Lanpher, Shappert & Associates Attorneys at Law and an adviser to MARRV. "Companies that could do the entire assembly come together as a one-stop shop for the purchaser.

"Manufacturing companies have to change the way they approach marketing," Lanpher said. "The big companies are looking for a one-stop shop, and manufacturers have to look to their competitors as partners in getting jobs they've never gotten before."

Many exhibitors were eager to embrace the type of partnerships MARRV is promoting to help benefit the local manufacturing community as a whole.

"We need to reinvent ourselves, find new ways to market," said Chris Johnson, sales manager for L/J Fabricators, a Rockford-based custom fabricating job shop. He said one new way to market fabricators' capabilities revolves around looking at competitors as partners. "We're all in this together," he said.

According to the organization's brochure, Winnebago County, in which Rockford is located, is one of five member counties involved.

Nearly 100 companies exhibited at the show, and hundreds of attendees walked the show floor. Services and products offered included machining, CAD/CAM and other manufacturing software, waterjet cutting, finishing, metal fabricating, material handling, metal stamping, tube fabrication, welding, grinding, and safety.

Held at Rockford's Metro Centre, the exposition was developed to facilitate partnerships among local fabricators as well as large manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Caterpillar.

Many exhibiting companies reported positive feelings about the economy and the manufacturing industry specifically. "Since the beginning of the year, business has been much better," said L/J Fabricators' Johnson.

Mike Healy, president of Industrial Air Solutions, Dixon, Ill., said that this has been a record year for them business-wise. "People who were not spending money are spending money now," Healy said.

Micro Surface Corp., Morris, Ill., also reported improvement in the number of jobs is getting, mostly from its main customer, the Department of Homeland Security. The automotive industry is the company's second-largest customer.

The tide's coming up, but it's really driven by industry, said David Williams, director of business development for the company, which specializes in industrial coatings for wear, corrosion, lubricity, and release applications. He noted that some companies aren't experiencing improvement in business yet just because the markets they serve haven't seen as much of an improvement as other markets have.