Enterprise Minnesota Magazine - Fall 2016

NIST’S KEVIN STINE DISCUSSES WHY MANUFACTURERS SHOULD CARE ABOUT CYBERSECURITY

Helping Manufacturing Enterprises Grow Profitably FALL 2016

Why your strategy should be a living document Don’t just leave it on a shelf

Enterprise Minnesota 310 4th Avenue S. Suite #7050 Minneapolis, MN 55415

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A whopping 95 percent of manufacturers who have a formal planning process expect increases in gross revenues and profitability in the coming year.

— 2015 State of Manufacturing® Enterprise Minnesota’s expert strategy consultants help manufacturing companies achieve operational excellence and profitable growth.

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FALL 2016

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WILL YOUR TRANSITION BENEFIT FROM A STRATEGIC PLAN? (Do we need to ask?)

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CYBERSECURITY

SOM® COMMENTARY

MORE THAN A LIFESTYLE

NIST’s expert on cybersecurity tells manufacturers why they must pay attention to their data.

Four diverse manufacturing leaders participated in the release event for Enterprise Minnesota’s 2016 version of its State of Manufacturing® survey. Here’s a recap.

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2 A Not So Little White Lie Manufacturers can no longer keep their strategic plans in their heads.

The New Face of Manufacturing?

50-ish Sara Ticknor travels a different path to solve the skills gap.

The Brainerd Lakes region may be known as a premier vacation spot, but it is also home to one of Minnesota’s most tightly knit manufacturers.

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A Klobuchar Moment

The Nexus Strategy

Von Ruden’s CEO grabs an invitation to make the case for manufacturing

A local think tank sponsors a town meeting based on an Enterprise Minnesota cover story.

Visit the Enterprise Minnesota website for more details on what’s covered in the magazine at www.enterpriseminnesota.org.

Subscribe to The Weekly Report and Enterprise Minnesota® magazine today! Get updates on the people, companies, and trends that drive Minnesota’s manufacturing community. To subscribe, please visit www.enterpriseminnesota.org/subscribe.

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bob kill

A Not So Little White Lie Manufacturers can no longer keep their strategic plans in their heads

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sk a room full of people how many floss their teeth twice a day (back when the dentists said we were supposed to). Almost everyone will wink and nod with knowing affirmation (as they look sideways at how everyone else is answering the question). We all know the kinds of questions that evoke little-white-lie responses. “Of course I remember you.”

“I’d love to have lunch.” “I have read and agree to the terms of use.”

Now ask a room full of manufacturing CEOs if they operate their businesses from a strategic plan and you’ll get a fullthroated confirmation. (More sideways glances.) Dig a little deeper and you might hear some things like, “Well, maybe not formal.” “Sure, it has served us well for the past 10 years.” “It’s all right here,” as he points a forefinger at his forehead.

I believe there’s never been a more crucial time for manufacturers to put serious effort into strategic planning. A company that plans for future profitability can’t afford a little white lie.

That’s why Mary Connor, one of our strategy gurus, put together the solid cover story on strategic planning, what it consists of, and why it needs to be communicated widely to your entire management team.

There is no downside to planning to grow your business strategically. A strategic plan compels you and your team to truly 2

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understand the details of your company at more than just an intuitive level. Planning will assess your management systems, customers, employee skills, marketplace conditions, and competitive advantages. It will ensure, first, that you have a relevant strategic vision for your company and, second, that it becomes part of your organizational culture.

Just as important, a well-crafted strategic plan drives the other pieces that are essential for a well operated, growing business.

More and more manufacturers are building an ISO management system into their strategic thinking. They are discovering how ISO 9001:2015 introduces them to essential management tools that will improve all aspects of their operations.

Strategic planning also forces companies to update their lean manufacturing principles and commit their operations to building a culture of continuous improvement. Strategic companies empower their employees at all levels to see and eliminate waste.

And I save the most urgent benefit for last. If there are any small or medium size manufacturers who aren’t a little concerned about how they’re going to find the next generation of skilled employees to replace their retiring Baby Boomers, I haven’t met them. A strategic plan will force/inspire your team to think creatively about how to attract, engage, and retain those employees and maximize a positive/productive work culture. On top of that, it will put in the steps necessary to find and train your next supervisors and managers.

Bottom line: It may be true that we no longer need to floss (until the next study says we need to floss four times each day), but you truly can’t afford not to commit your company to a thoughtful process of strategic planning.

Bob Kill is president and CEO of Enterprise Minnesota.

Helping Manufacturing Enterprises Grow Profitably Publisher Lynn K. Shelton

Custom Publishing By

Contributing Writers Mary Connor Lynn Shelton Photographers Priscilla Bauer James Kegley Chris Morse Trina Raymond Lynn Shelton

Contacts To subscribe subscribe@enterpriseminnesota.org To change an address or renew ldapra@enterpriseminnesota.org For back issues ldapra@enterpriseminnesota.org For permission to copy lynn.shelton@enterpriseminnesota.org 612-455-4215 To make event reservations events@enterpriseminnesota.org 612-455-4239 For additional magazines and reprints contact Lynet DaPra at lynet.dapra@enterpriseminnesota.org 612-455-4202 To advertise or sponsor an event chip.tangen@enterpriseminnesota.org, 651-226-6842 Enterprise Minnesota, Inc. 310 Fourth Ave. S., #7050 Minneapolis, MN 55415 612-373-2900 ©2016 Enterprise Minnesota ISSN#1060-8281.

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Ticknor’s rise symbolically checks a list of demographic and HR/training hot buttons that any creative manufacturer must consider as they contend with the ongoing challenges of recruiting and retaining a sufficient number of skilled employees.

PEOPLE TO WATCH

The New Face of Manufacturing?

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hat Sara Ticknor was quietly awarded a fulltime assembly-line position last March hardly seems the stuff that might evoke her plant manager to call the occasion the “proudest moment in my career.”

Until you consider what she represents: Ticknor’s promotion at the Parker Hannifin plant, located just across the state border in Grantsburg, Wisconsin, symbolically checks a list of demographic and HR/ training hot buttons that any creative manufacturer must consider as they contend with the ongoing challenges of recruiting and retaining a sufficient number of skilled employees.

Ticknor is not only a woman, whose

ranks need to grow in manufacturing, but she’s a 50-ish, college-educated, secondcareer woman who has never before worked in manufacturing, or even knew what opportunities the industry might offer. Beyond that, Ticknor accelerated her success as an enthusiastic early adopter in a high-tech remote education opportunity available right at Parker Hannifin. (Plus, say those around her, she’s the kind of cool role model a plant manager might cheer for.)

Ticknor was born and raised in Madison, Wisconsin. She received a BA in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but shelved law school aspirations to raise two daughters

in deference to her husband’s career in medical sales.

As her daughters grew older and her husband’s career compelled several family moves throughout the Midwest, Ticknor took on clerking or secretarial jobs … a bank, a mortgage company, an electric company. “It was fun,” she remembers.

But manufacturing was never much on her radar, she admits, until both daughters, now college-aged, snagged lucrative summer jobs at Parker Hannifin. “My antenna went up,” Ticknor says, and after a little research she used a local temp agency in February 2015 to obtain her own spot in Parker Hannifin’s assembly operation. continued on page 4

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PHOTOGRAPHS BY PRISCILLA BAUER

50-ish Sara Ticknor travels a different path to solve the skills gap

continued from page 3 She was immediately smitten with her new job. “It just blew my mind,” she says. “I didn’t know anything about the whole world of manufacturing. Here was this global worldwide company in my small town.” The 200 employees in Parker Hannifin’s Grantsburg plant represent a rural outpost of a massive $13 billion international conglomerate whose 55,000 employees manufacture motion and control technologies and systems for industrial and aerospace markets.

“It was a great opportunity,” she says.

“There is so much to learn.”

That’s where good timing and an alliance between Ross Manni, Parker Hannifin’s plant manager, and Pine Technical and Community College evolved to help Ticknor satisfy her educational curiosity.

urgent in Manni’s view, is the challenge of motivating current employees to get more training and education to further their careers and enhance their value to the company. “We need lean, we need problem-solving, we need safety—a lot of blocking and tackling,” he says. “For me, taking initiative to better your education to further your career is so important. It doesn’t matter if you’re 21 or 51.”

Manni pounced when Pine Tech reps outlined a grant, the Advanced Manufacturing Educational Alliance from the State of Minnesota, that offered partial tuition reimbursement with on-site instruction. He enthusiastically renovated a quality lab into a remote classroom.

Ticknor was one of six employees in the company’s initial student cohort.

“I didn’t realize how much there was to learn,” Ticknor says. By taking four remote classes, which she took during

Left to right: Mike Longhenry, plant supervisor; Sara Ticknor, assembly; Matt Olson, value stream manager; and Ross Manni, plant manager.

Manni had long talked with other local manufacturers about the current and future challenges of finding qualified workers to fill out their plants. Part of the problem, they all agreed, is the obvious ongoing struggle to find qualified skilled people to fill assembly, machining, maintenance or other positions. Less discussed, but just as

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or after the work day, Ticknor earned a Foundation for Manufacturing certificate.

After her first class, Manufacturing Processes and Production, Ticknor says, “I started better understanding what I was doing.” She took Quality Practices, which introduced her to lean, Six Sigma, and 5S. She then took Safety Awareness, and

Mediated Telepresence A technology that bridges distance learners with interpersonal teaching Joe Mulford, president of Pine Technical and Community College, is quick to acknowledge that distance delivery of an education curriculum is hardly new. But Ticknor and others at Parker Hannifin participated in a growing technologicallyadvanced market niche in distance learning called mediated telepresence. Mulford describes it as “a perfect marriage between interactive television and traditional online classes.”

The technology enables instructors to interact with students in ways that feel like an in-person class. Rather than connecting students to a disembodied voice in a fixed room, the camera connects whoever is speaking. “It’s not just a voice in the background,” Mulford says. “It feels like a more natural conversation,” he says.

Mulford says mediated telepresence presents educators “a bigger tent” to provide access to a wider audience of potential students. “It eliminates the distance barriers that keep people from having to drive to campus every Tuesday night,” he says. At the same time, he adds, it provides a much better balance between a traditional online class and true interaction with their instructor.

followed that with Maintenance Awareness, which introduced her to simple circuits, materials, pneumatics, hydraulics, and electrical process. “It was vast,” she says.

“You have to put the work in,” she says.

“You have to put a lot of hours in at home. I really got into that.”

Ticknor says another reason for jumping into the class opportunity was to show my commitment and how much I wanted to be hired on here.” She hopes her new competencies will help her advance. “As a 50-something gal I feel like I can compete for advancement. Some people have been here five, 10, and 15 years and have so much experience. I feel like this [education] really gave me a leg up since I never worked in this field before. I’ve only been here a little over a year, but there’s an amazing scale of opportunities here.”

Her education enabled Ticknor to “demonstrate knowledge that very seasoned employees that we have in this building did not have,” according to Mike Longhenry, her supervisor.

Although the grant has run out, Manni looks forward to other opportunities to team up with Pine Tech.

“They’re great. They care about the needs of the employer,” Manni says.

“They attended every Manufacturing Alliance meeting. They will come in and see exactly what your business needs are and what it is that you do. They will take action whether it’s providing programs or equipment in their labs, different solutions.”

“I’m excited because we’ve got a good

Ticknor is not only a woman, whose ranks need to grow in manufacturing, but she’s a 50-ish, college-educated, secondcareer woman who has never before worked in manufacturing, or even knew what opportunities the industry might offer. educational partner to tap into and it’s right across the river from us.”

Manni says the lesson of his learning lab experience is to spend more time finding other Ticknors who will value the opportunity. “Getting the tool is not all that hard or all that expensive,” Manni said. “All you need is a Polycom and flat screen and an internet connection.

The toughest thing is getting through that cultural barrier to convince people that it is important to go back to school.”

In retrospect, Manni wishes he would have devoted more time to develop a really good communication plan to recruit attendees. “We were taping up pieces of paper on the bulletin board. We could have had a lot cooler things. We could have had ads in the paper. I think now we can almost reinvent the plan a little bit.”

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A Klobuchar Moment

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Von Ruden’s CEO grabs an invitation to make the case for manufacturing

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ever mind that it was a short-staffed Friday lunch hour during the July 4th holiday week. Von Ruden CEO Brandon Anderson jumped at the chance to host U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar for a tour of his Buffalo-based manufacturing plant.

Forget, too, that the time for the event was cut back as Klobuchar monitored updates related to the tragic assassination of five policemen in Dallas.

You never want to waste an opportunity to show an elected official the value of manufacturing to its community and vice versa—even one who already “gets it.”

Anderson said he wanted to showcase Von Ruden’s deep roots in Buffalo—and the value of community relationships.

Brandon’s father and predecessor as CEO is Al Anderson, who joined the company in 1980 as a division manager and bought out the division in 1989, using grants from the State of Minnesota and Wright County.

Today, Von Ruden is an $8 million

Left to right: Brandon Anderson, Von Ruden CEO; Senator Amy Klobuchar; Bob Kill, president and CEO, Enterprise Minnesota; and Brad Nauman, mayor of Buffalo.

company whose 45 employees design and manufacture mechanical power transmission and hydraulic drive components, including driven tooling for the machine tool markets.

“I wanted to show continuity,” Anderson said, “that businesses can stay and thrive long term in small communities.”

He demonstrated his close relationship with local governance by inviting the mayor and the city administrator to the tour. “We’ve been in Buffalo for 26 years.

You just don’t see that too often,” he said.

His second objective was to demonstrate how rapid technological advances in

manufacturing have transformed the industry, even in the two decades that he’s been at the company. “It’s not a dark, dirty place,” he said. “It’s very heavily capital intensive. I expressed to her that my number one cost is not labor, it’s not health insurance, and it’s not material. It’s actually the overhead and the equipment.”

Heavy investments during the tight credit days following the recession of 2008-09, he said, were enabled by R&D programs from the state and federal government, along with accelerated depreciation opportunities.

Anderson’s third point was related to labor. “We have a clock that’s ticking,” he said. “The average employee in manufacturing is approximately 58 years old. In five or ten years, there’s going to be a massive exodus of employees entering retirement.”

The traditional, four-year degree path is not what Minnesota manufacturers need to populate their plants; more students should consider a two-year

Anderson said he wanted to showcase Von Ruden’s deep roots in Buffalo—and the value of community relationships education in a technical school.

What’s more, he told Klobuchar, Von Ruden’s lowest paying job in the facility with a high school degree is still $35,000 per year, “and our average machinist is well into the $60,000 range—many of those have no education. They learned just by working.

“You can make $65,000 to $100,000 very easily with a two-year trade degree in this industry, and it’s only going to get better the next 20 years,” he added.

A side benefit of the visit, Anderson said, is how much his employees enjoyed meeting the genial senator.

“She is very down-to-earth, extremely personable, very relaxed, easy to talk to.

Without question, she understood all the things that need to happen.

“She engaged most every employee,” he added. “It was great. She definitely is a politician.”

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nyone who is intrigued but not yet persuaded by the risk management potential of the new ISO 2015 guidelines should listen to Tom Murphy, owner of CARDSource, a large Eagan-based manufacturer of plastic cards. You know the kind: credit cards, ID cards, membership cards, ID cards, loyalty cards, gift cards and health care cards. You probably have one or more of their products in your wallet right now. CARDSource does it all: manufacturing, personalization, packaging and fulfillment.

Murphy spoke at an Enterprise Minnesota event in Mankato in June called ISO 9001:2015 - From Compliance to Performance, which attracted more than 70 people who wanted to see how the new ISO guidelines can improve their companies’ operations, profitability and growth.

He related a two-year-old incident that involved a large client for which CARDSource would regularly create and manage a national program with hundreds

Murphy told an Enterprise Minnesota event in Mankato how an incident that involved a large client strengthened his resolve to minimize risk.

of thousands of plastic gift cards, three to five times per year.

But there was a blip. In one project, 600,000 cards were distributed to retailers nationwide in which mag stripe information did not match the number on the card. It would not work in their systems.

“Six hundred thousand cards delivered all over the country,” Murphy remembered. It cost his company some $60,000 to remake and redistribute the cards—only to lose the customer and never get a chance to work with it again.

The problem, Murphy said, was not because the company lacked a comprehensive internal process for checks and reviews.

“We receive the information from them that needs to be imaged on those cards

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and imaged into those mag stripes. We convert that data, again, and we send a sample for them to sign off on,” Murphy said. “But they didn’t check the cards properly. Upstream from that, our data processing person missed something in his processing that should have been caught by downstream at CARDSource.

“It was not because we didn’t have a process to check for that. Because the customers check it, no problem, right?” he added. Except the customer didn’t do its checks. Instead, it said, “Let’s go.

Make this happen. Ready to go. Produce six hundred thousand cards,” Murphy recalled.

The lesson? CARDSource should have had a process to hold the customer accountable for quality, according to Murphy. It should have said, very specifically: “You must sign off on this, and you must test this.”

That’s why ISO is now a priority at CARDSource. “We need to shore up those processes right from the start,” Murphy says. “That’s really all about the information flow one way or another.

We have a choice. We can continue to experience the pain of poor process control.

“ISO 2015 is all about risk, it’s all about reduction of risk and how you do that. I looked at this as having an

“ISO 2015 is all about risk, it’s all about reduction of risk and how you do that.” opportunity to change both our processes and our culture by implementing ISO.” Murphy said CARDSource’s ISO journey is primarily mitigating risk.

“We’ve got to give clients a real reason to believe that we are compliant,” he said. “ISO is that path to that state of compliance. We’re a little different maybe than many manufacturers. We are a configure-to-order company. We have a lot of processes. Every card is pretty much the same, but every card is personalized differently, every card is packaged and delivered differently.

There’re a bunch of reasons you’d have a card, and that varies from customer to customer, from a membership to a gift card. There are multitudes of reasons.

That’s actually a growing market.”

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Teachers Learn About Manufacturing The Winona Chamber pays local teachers to observe manufacturers up close

Governing and Growing Companies in Greater Minnesota.

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inona High School teacher Bill Braun spent two weeks this summer in a manufacturing immersion program designed to help him better counsel students about the kind of careers that might be available to them after graduation.

Braun has taught chemistry and physics at Winona High School for 25 years and has been the faculty advisor for the robotics club. His summer rotations included PlastiComp and Fastenal.

“There is a great need in hands-on mechanical fields, whether it’s machining, or woods, or electronics,” he says. “There are a lot of students who don’t have to go to a four-year school. They could get a two-year degree and really do well in manufacturing—and it’s going to be a whole lot cheaper for them than going to a four-year college.”

Braun said he was hoping to get wide exposure to what it is like to work in manufacturing. “I’d only been in education; I wanted to get first-hand experience that I could bring back to the classroom.”

The Teacher in the Workplace pilot program was designed by the Winona Area Chamber of Commerce Business Education

Operator Matt Hoepner explains the tensioning procedure for continuous glass fiber roving to Winona Senior High School science teacher Bill Braun as they pultrude long fiber reinforced thermoplastic composite pellets at PlastiComp in Winona, Minn. Fiber reinforcement provides the materials PlastiComp produces with structural properties that allow them to be used as substitutes for metal in the manufacture of products.

Networks Committee and funded through a grant managed by the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce. Through it, two Winona High School teachers received a paid summer industry immersion experience with two separate Winona area manufacturing companies. During each of the one week immersions teachers are given or directly exposed to a work assignment that provides a meaningful experience based on the teacher’s area of expertise.

Braun said he spent most of his time observing various aspects of the manufacturing process, from finance to

engineering to assembly. He was most intrigued, he says, by his experience in R&D, where PlastiComp employees were setting up a new operation.

“I was more helping than just watching,” he says. “They’d never done it before, and so it was a trial and error for them as well.

It was fun to be able to throw out ideas.”

He said creative problem solving provided a useful example to take back to his classroom. “It’s not just set procedures,” he said. “You have to understand what’s happening and be able to be creative on the fly. It’s not just a matter of memorizing something, but working toward a solution by understanding it.

“I’m very aware that the majority of my students are probably not going to go become scientists. That’s the reality. To find out even though they’re not going to become scientists, what are they going to have to know and do relating to science, or the skills that they can learn in the science class?”

Winona Chamber president Della Schmidt said the program grew out of

The Teacher in the Workplace pilot program was designed by the Winona Area Chamber of Commerce Business Education Networks Committee and funded through a grant managed by the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce. an effort by the chamber to provide “familiarization tours” for all new teachers.

She said the two participating instructors will submit written reports about their experience and conduct personal debriefs with members of the sponsoring chamber committee, as will four participating manufacturers.

Schmidt said her efforts are designed to help solve manufacturing’s three challenges. “We have an image problem.

We have a skills gap problem. And we have a problem with soft skills, which affects all businesses looking to hire: do you understand how to show up on time, how to articulate your ideas, how to be part of a team, how to dress properly?

Those things are definitely a challenge.”

She said manufacturers have an

increasing need for employees with some level of training in addition to a high school diploma. “There is a need for CNC welders, and machinists, for example.

They all require something beyond high school. That is a big part of it.”

Her other objective, she said, is to help people understand and know that manufacturing is now high-tech. “It is, in a vast majority of cases, in environmental situations that are comfortable. It’s not hot.

It’s not dirty. It’s not loud. It has changed dramatically, but we’re not certain that people who are middle-aged and older, who are influencers of young people, are making young people aware of the opportunities in manufacturing because they might have an outdated sense of what manufacturing looks like.”

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FOLLOW-UP

Lean & Healthy HealthEast reaches 100,000 ideas for continuous improvement

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ealthEast, the $1 billion St. Paulbased integrated healthcare system, recently notched a milestone on its journey to lean up its operations when its continuous improvement teams contributed their 100,000th idea. Lean sensei Didier Rabino says he is proud but not satisfied with the 100,000 ideas. “We’ve been able to engage the organization faster than any other organization I know,” he says, adding “but my job is never to be satisfied.”

The pace of 3,000 ideas per month is approximately 0.6 ideas per employee per month. To make daily continuous improvement one of the habits of the organization, HealthEast will have to double that output. Rabino says, industry studies conclude that in order to reach the “habit” threshold—whereby continuous improvement is routine—HealthEast must achieve one idea per employee per month.

“We’re not there yet,” he says.

He estimates that about one-third of

Didier Rabino has been HealthEast’s lean sensei for the past three years. He oversees 287 continuous improvement teams.

HealthEast’s 287 teams are performing above the “one” level. “Other teams have not yet connected all of the dots, and we need to provide more coaching. We still need to work on that to get the whole organization above this threshold of one.”

The HealthEast system includes clinics, rehabilitation facilities, hospice, home care, and outpatient surgery centers. Its 7,300 employees and 1,400 physicians serve St. Paul and its east-side suburbs through St. John’s Hospital, St. Joseph’s Hospital and the sprawling 30-acre Woodwinds campus in Woodbury.

Enterprise Minnesota profiled the company just after then-new CEO Kathryn Correia had added Didier Rabino to serve as lean sensei at HealthEast.

Correia was a pioneer in adapting lean practices in a healthcare setting.

“Waste is inherently disrespectful, it inherently causes errors,” she told us at the time. “Lean is the only thing I’ve seen that allows the improvement to be sustained over time. … People in manufacturing know that the currency of lean is time: if you reduce time, you reduce waste.”

Rabino was a lean expert with 20 years’ experience supporting lean transformations throughout Europe and the United States. Correia recruited him away from Andersen Corporation after touring the plant he managed in Menomonie, Wisconsin. Rabino had developed and led the Andersen Manufacturing System, the company’s integrated lean enterprise system.

Rabino exudes pride in HealthEast’s remarkable leaps in overall clinical quality for the system, despite the fact that lean achievements can be difficult to measure when comparing disparate measures for a mother who just gave birth to a cancer patient or a child with an ear infection.

He surmounted those difficulties by developing a baseline that aggregates 65 different quality metrics. The system’s goal for last year was to come in with a two or

“We’ve been able to engage the organization faster than any other organization I know,” he says, adding “but my job is never to be satisfied.” three percent improvement in efficiency against those metrics. Instead, it finished with a whopping 16-percent improvement.

Rabino credits the company-wide system for these improvements, which is driven by the 287 front line teams, all focused on aligning lean targets across the whole organization. It’s also driven by a culture of leaders who are committed to lean. “Leaders transform the culture by leading by example and driving these types

of results,” he says.

Although HealthEast has been an industry pioneer in systematic efforts to lean up its operations, Rabino says the trend is necessarily catching on throughout the industry—in no small measure healthcare systems must compensate for the increasing number of Baby Boomers who are becoming Medicare patients. “We lose money right now every time that we have a Medicare patient,” Rabino said. “That is forcing us to look at our processes.”

He cited a study that found 400,000 preventable deaths in U.S. hospitals each year. “That is not an acceptable situation,” Rabino says. “People working in health care really want to see improvements made to a process that drives clinical outcomes.”

“Health care is still very well behind manufacturing,” he says. We are still in the early phases of lean; however, people are very smart in health care. They are quick learners and they have a passion for what they do—and they are not satisfied with the situation of health care, not in our country.”

Risk Prevention Employee Benefits Business Insurance

ADDING ACTUAL VALUE TO THE INSURANCE RELATIONSHIP

You should be getting more from your insurance agent than just great pricing on proper coverage. Marsh & McLennan Agency can also help you reduce injuries, stay on top of compliance (OSHA, DOT, EPA, FLSA, ACA, etc.), and find and keep the right people.

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How About a 30-to-1 ROI? Minnesota’s fully funded GAP program once again provides investments in small manufacturers

Stern’s Shawn Hunstad

M

innesota’s legislature this year re-established the popular and insanely successful Growth Acceleration Program (GAP), administered by Enterprise Minnesota, which gives small manufacturers access to cutting edge techniques and training at rates they can afford.

GAP is an eight-year old program whereby the State invests in manufacturers and manufacturers match these investments to receive consulting services that increase operational efficiencies and promote growth.

It’s easy to see why the legislature views GAP as a government investment that yields a tangible ROI. Since 2008, 245 Minnesota manufacturing companies have taken advantage of GAP. These manufacturers have: • Created and retained 2,146 Minnesota jobs.

• Boosted company sales by $148 million.

• Saved $29.9 million in business costs.

On average, GAP generated a $30-to-$1

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return-on-investment.

Insiders say many legislators became personally acquainted with their local manufacturers through one of the more than 300 manufacturing tours coordinated

by Enterprise Minnesota all across Minnesota.

Policymakers, their staffs and community leaders leave these tours with an eye-opening appreciation for what manufacturers bring to their constituencies. They see that manufacturers are an increasingly hightech local job creator, whose employees enjoy well-paid careers in challenging and rewarding environments. On top of this, they understand that manufacturers provide an economic multiplier effect that impacts the bottom lines of suppliers and contractors, as well as lawyers, bankers, accountants and insurers.

To be eligible for GAP, companies must be located in Minnesota. They must be in manufacturing or in a related industry, employ 250 or fewer full-time employees, have a business plan for improvements and demonstrate an economic need for GAP.

GAP funding is intended to help an eligible business buy down the cost of business services provided through GAP Works Enterprise Minnesota and its partners.

Stern Companies usedmust GAPbetoprovided solve a by The remaining match production problem the company in the form of cash. Third party contributions cannot be used in in lieu of the Shawn Hunstad, of Brainerdcompany’s requiredpresident cash amount.

GAP funds based Stern Companies, first used GAP are provided as reimbursement. Each invoice funding several years ago to help his submitted to the eligible company must be company work through a particularly sticky paid in full in order to process the State’s production challenge. match amount.

Stern is a global sourcing and Depending on specialist the size ofthat theproduces manufacturing manufacturing company, can get up polymer components forthey recreational to vehicles, a 50 percent rebate for services provided sporting equipment, industrial to waterworks, them. Firmsmedical interested in GAP must fill and food packaging outand andagriculture. submit to The Enterprise Minnesota a 50-employee company complete application requesting funding. was incorporated in 1995 as a spin-off of This application must Stern Rubber Co., andinclude is now documentation privately of owned the company’s overall plan for technology

by Hunstad.

A group of company employees had and business improvement, a prioritized gone through Practical Problemneeds, listjust of the company’s improvement Solving with consultants at Enterprise and the anticipated economic benefits. The Minnesotamust where they hadthe been introduced application document company’s to Toyota’s a standardized financial needA3 forprocess, GAP funding. methodology for innovating, and To apply, please fill out our planning Contact form solving. or 1-800-325-3073. or problem call 612-373-2900 Hunstad convened an A3 meeting to brainstorm possible solutions.

But more to the point, the solution showed employees how to collaborate on creative solutions. Hunstad said he could feel unmistakable enthusiasm from the team when it presented its findings.

“It was exciting to see some of these employees, who you didn’t hardly hear a word from otherwise, get excited about the project they were working on,” he said.

To help Stern improve its work processes, Enterprise Minnesota consultants led the company’s plant floor operators through the principles of Practical Problem Solving, which include defining a problem, analyzing the issue, developing an implementation plan and taking steps to solve the problem at the source. The operators will then be expected to share their knowledge with other employees.

Four Questions

Congressman Tom Emmer

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hat is the value of a policymaker touring a manufacturing plant?

As a member of Congress, I love the experience of touring many of our state’s manufacturing facilities to meet the people who create products that support our local economies and ship to global markets and gain the hands-on experience. Incredible plants like Pentair, Coleman, Polaris, Federal Premium Ammunition, and so many more employ thousands of Minnesotans and collectively contribute billions to our economy.

Meeting these Minnesotans and seeing them do their daily work gives policymakers a better understanding of the work that goes into building the products American and global markets rely on. Further, hearing about the toll that over-burdensome regulations, taxes, and policies take on the manufacturing industry and the Minnesotans employed in it are lessons we can take back to Washington to enact laws, reforms, and policies that will help them grow based on that firsthand experience.

What’s your sense of the value of manufacturing to their communities?

To the state?

In Minnesota, manufacturing contributes more than $45 billion to our state’s economy and over 310,000 Minnesotans—more than 15 percent of our total workforce—provide for their families through jobs in manufacturing.

As we’ve seen across America, there is tremendous pride in our manufactured products. Companies like 3M, Medtronic, and Andersen Windows are synonymous with Minnesota and we should take incredible pride in them.

Communities across the state are trying to encourage manufacturing businesses and jobs to make further investments in them. Manufacturing

plants bring an experienced, educated, and well-paid workforce to drive demand in other segments of their economy. To put this into perspective, every manufacturing job has direct and indirect impact on nearly two additional jobs as it drives demand in transportation, telecommunications, payroll, financial services, and information technology.

To take that number further, according to Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development, manufacturing jobs, and jobs supported by it, account for nearly 900,000 jobs across our state – 32 percent of the entire workforce. It is absolutely clear that the jobs it creates at home, and with our increasing exports throughout the U.S. and world, the manufacturing sector is absolutely critical to our state’s past, current, and future success.

As Baby Boomers retire, manufacturers worry that there won’t be enough incoming workers with sufficient qualifications.

In nearly every meeting I have with manufacturers, and frankly every other skilled industry, I hear the same concern.

It is a little troublesome that a state with such a rich tradition would have a difficulty filling these jobs. However, not all of the vitals for manufacturing are bad. Since 2010, manufacturing jobs have increased nearly 10 percent and Minnesota’s manufacturers are the fourth most productive in the nation, and the average manufacturing wage is nearly 20 percent higher than comparable industries.

That begins with local schools increasing investments in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. As a member of STEM Caucus, I have supported these efforts at the federal level, but more can be done.

INNOVATIONS

Tom Emmer is the U.S. Representative for Minnesota’s 6th congressional district, serving since 2015. The district includes most of the northern suburbs of the Twin Cities, as well as St. Cloud, Minnesota.

Manufacturers regularly say that regulation—federal, state and local— is always among the top one or two impediments that constrain them from growing and creating more jobs. What can be done?

Regulation costs our nation more than a trillion dollars per year. Couple that with chronically low growth in GDP, since 2009 our productivity has taken an $8 trillion hit. There has to be a better way.

During the 114th Congress, we’ve worked to slash department and agency regulatory authority by passing the REINS Act, which would allow Congress to approve both major and minor regulations before enactment. Just this month, Congress passed the Separation of Powers Restoration Act, which would prevent sweeping regulatory changes such as Net Neutrality, Ambush Elections, the Clean Power Plan, and Waters of the U.S. from being implemented simply by the Executive Branch.

The two largest impediments, though, to true job creation are the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and a broken tax code.

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S P E C I A L

R E P O R T

Why your strategy should be a living document Don’t just leave it on a shelf

BY MARY CONNOR

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I

become wistful when I drive through the countryside and see a manufacturing company with the windows and doors shuttered and grass growing in the parking lot. I think, how did that happen? They seemed like such a vital company.

Many manufacturing companies, especially those headed by Baby Boomers today, should be mindful that successfully transitioning their companies can be quite painless with the appropriate strategic planning, the right attitude and a meaningful investment of time. The great news is if we prepare the company correctly, a strategic plan will bring more value to its (present and future) owners, its managers and its employees. And the benefits don’t end there. A vibrant, growing company governed by a thoughtful strategic plan will bring stable economic vitality to its customers, its vendors, communities, and to the state as a whole for a long time to come.

So it’s useful to take a 30,000-foot view of the process that leads to effective strategic planning, which is what I’ll provide here.

PREPARE TO PLAN

The process of getting ready to create or update your strategic thinking should be predicated on the clear and specific answers to the following questions.

• What has happened in the past three years in the external environment of our company that could affect our work as an organization?

• What opportunities should we prepare to take advantage of?

• What information should we share with others in the strategic planning process?

• Are we clear about our Vision, Mission and Core Values?

• What challenges have we failed to meet in the past 2-3 years and why did we fail?

• What is the most important outcome we want to derive from from the strategic planning process?

SETTING THE STRATEGY

High performance companies put a singular premium on growth. They operate from the sense that if they’re not growing, they’re eroding. And they get the value of formal

strategic planning. Strategy connects a company’s organizational competencies with its customers’ needs. It is long-term, forward-looking, committed, purposeful and clear. Look at it like this: Setting strategy is like planning a dinner party.

We all like the freedom of spontaneity, but we also know that it goes a lot better if you do some planning, especially as the event gets bigger. The same thing is true for companies. Growth oriented companies succeed through planning, not spontaneity.

A strategic plan scripts the convergence of your vision, your culture, and your

A strategic plan scripts the convergence of your vision, your culture, and your values. values. I grew up in the era of the five-year plan, but today’s business environment is too unpredictable to plan for five years, so we dial it back to three years. We stay committed to a plan that lasts three years. It analyzes your products, your pricing, and your customers. It contains the following components: • We are clear about our corporate mission, our values and committed to our principal goals. Our CEO embodies the mission and values. Our leadership team and staff at all levels understand and endorse the mission and values.

• We know our customers, their needs and preferences. We anticipate their changing requirements, and we meet them.

• We know our competitors, their strengths, and their strategies. We know our market share and how to increase it.

• We know our core competencies. We innovate to strengthen and expand our competitive advantage. New business is a meaningful component of our revenue performance.

• We are purposeful about our future. We leverage the diversity of stakeholder perspectives and experiences in planning vital initiatives. Our longrange plans are thorough, timely, and well communicated, uniting our organization.

Continuous improvement is where you think about your plant layout. Is it efficient? Have you removed waste from the system? Are your processes in order, not just your plant, but any process that you have in the organization? Consider these objectives.

• We deliver maximum value (quality for price), utilizing the most effective resources (knowledge, skills, and technologies).

• We are highly efficient (no wasted time, energy, or material). Our productivity is the best in our industry.

• Our leaders are purposeful; they set attainable performance goals, monitor effectiveness, identify and analyze challenges, and manage change.

• We prioritize and invest resources accordingly in process improvement, skills training, and technology, equipment and facility upgrades.

• All employees seek and propose improvement opportunities. Ideas are evaluated promptly, implemented quickly and recognized openly.

Management system. Continuous improvement will get the wobbles really quickly in the absence of a strong management system. Most of the manufacturers we deal with choose ISO as their management system and for good reason (see sidebar). The new ISO is not your father’s ISO. Back in the day it was a lot of paper chasing, but today it’s about the management system, key performance indicators, making sure that we’re doing the right thing, and that we’re all doing it the best way. Here are the elements of a solid management plan.

• Management sets organizational objectives, budgets resources, and plans implementation. Objectives, plans, and budgets are clearly communicated.

• Management acts openly as a team to methodically track results, study trends and determine actions to ensure success.

• Key processes are regularly and formally evaluated (audited) for effectiveness, opportunities to improve, and risk management.

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WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN A STRATEGY FACILITATOR Companies count on strong facilitation in the preparation of their strategic plans. Here are several attributes you should look for in that person.

• Experience in running strategic planning process • Strong business background • Commitment to helping you reach your desired outcomes • Logic, self-discipline, and the ability to operate systematically • Understanding of organizational issues • Insight and empathy • Authority and credibility • Confidence in handling conflict • Good reputation with previous clients • Verbal and written skills • Commitment to deadlines • Honesty and objectivity

management’s analysis.

• The root cause of challenges and risks are systematically investigated and acted on to prevent occurrence or recurrence.

• Knowledge, systems and records are well documented, easily accessed, current, and maintained to common standards. We update or build new systems to ensure clarity, maximize productivity, eliminate recurring challenges, and foster future growth.

Talent. A few years ago we called this component “workforce,” but that description is too narrow. Most manufacturers have a large number of Baby Boomers in the demographic bellshaped curve who will soon be leaving the workforce. A lot of manufacturers 18

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Continuous improvement will get the wobbles quickly in the absence of a strong management system.

are facing the challenge of recruiting the bright talent to replace them in their organizations. And after recruiting, training takes on greater and greater urgency and importance. Years ago we could gather up the riches of letting the large companies do the training. We no longer have that luxury. We have to grow our own within our manufacturing companies. And then we have to ensure we retain them. The talent component of a strategic plan will include the following elements: • Leadership skills are highly valued and developed at all levels to meet our future needs.

• We strive to build organizational capacity and capability with individual development plans addressing essentials skills as well as technical skills. Development and training are major commitments with appropriate budget and schedule.

• Compensation is linked to modeling organizational values as well as achieving company and individual performance. Employees consider income and benefits meaningful. We regularly and formally communicate individual performance. We actively recognize both strong values and good work.

• All new employees receive comprehensive onboarding and job specific training, ensuring a strong start and solid cultural fit.

• We actively plan for the succession of positions.

THERE ARE HURDLES

The day-to-day life of running a company sometimes gets in the way. Here are some comments (a bit paraphrased) that manufacturing executives have recently made to me regarding staying on the strategic track.

“I think about the vision, mission and core beliefs that we set out 10-plus years ago. They’ve all evolved since we first started talking about them. We don’t have coherence around them like we used to.

We’ve evolved. We’ve changed as an organization. Our statements have stayed the same for the last ten years, but the world has changed. They need work.”

“Our strategy is clear on our leadership team, but maybe we haven’t communicated it. … No, it’s not that we haven’t communicated.

It’s that somehow we don’t have that engagement we were hoping to get.”

“We’re more reactive than proactive. We get lost in the day-to-day—emails and phone calls, and all that. The vision is there, but not the focus. Vision creates that proactivity.”

“There is a lot of turnover in companies these days. If our vision and core values were communicated well over a year ago, we probably have two or three new employees who don’t know it. So we’re constantly re-educating new people who are coming in and getting them on board with the vision.”

ISO: AN ESSENTIAL TOOL FOR STRATEGIC MANAGERS

“The larger you get, the less flexible your company can be to new ideas. I used to come into work and say, ‘I’ve got this great idea. Can we do it?’

Some days the answer would be ‘no,’ some days ‘yes,’ and then we’d just go do it. Now we have more than 200 employees. We can’t do that anymore.”

I’ll bet many manufacturing executives can hear their own thoughts in one or more of those comments. They’re pervasive. And there are other challenges that can get in the way of preparing an effective strategic plan.

Commitment to ownership. If employees have a stake in and responsibility for the plan, there will be leaps forward. I believe it is better to involve more people than fewer because early authorship equates to long-term buy-in. I’ve been on the other side of the table, where a senior manager comes in and says, here’s my plan, make it yours. Well, that can be inspiring, but not always effective. The fact is, those who get to participate from the beginning will be advocates until the end.

Overt, intentional communication.

Effective communication leads to engagement. Again, an effective strategic plan includes a thoughtful engagement process. If it’s too overwhelming—if you introduce 26 comprehensive and complicated initiatives all at once— you’re probably not going to find sufficient engagement.

Our clients are motivated to pursue ISO by some combination of three reasons. One is that a large customer requires it as a term of doing business. It’s a form of ransom, really—they can’t keep doing business if they don’t comply. Another reason, related to the first, is to use ISO as a tool for business development. They think that an ISO designation will confer a prestigious market credibility on their company that will open doors to a better class of customers. These folks tend to look at ISO as an expense more than an opportunity.

The third, and best, reason to pursue ISO is because it creates a management system that makes your company better. It supports processes that make your company more effective, more efficient and more productive.

If you play a sport for real, you want to keep score, and you want outside referees to watch you play the game and manage the rules. Companies that seriously deploy ISO show the world that they play the game seriously, that they’re very proud of being able to sit across from any auditor and demonstrate that they develop services, manage documents, maintain client information and track key measurements.

They’re proud of this accomplishment because it validates that they strive to be the best business they can be.

—John Connelly

Stepping up from the day-to-day. It is easy to lose sight of long-term goals if daily operations are all-consuming.

Staying mired in the day-to-day is working in the business rather than on the business. I encourage leadership teams to make strategy the first part of their regular meeting agendas. If your leadership team’s meetings are about firefighting, you’ve got the wrong people.

You hire really good people to fight fires.

The first part of that agenda should be to check the progress of the strategy initiatives. Are we in green mode? Good.

Are we in red mode? Then what do we need to get moving forward? It should always be forward facing rather than looking back.

Relevance and meaning. A plan that is mostly fluff not supported by actions will not achieve employee buy-in. If they think you derived your strategy from a “Strategy for Dummies” book, they won’t give it a second look.

Periodic strategy. Market conditions can change significantly during the three-year duration of a strategic plan. That means strategy can’t be discussed only at yearly golf retreats. It must be an ongoing, organic part of every meeting.

Report progress. If there is no method for tracking progress, no employee will feel forward momentum. Numbers motivate behavior.

Accountability. Each measure, objective, data source, and strategic initiative must have an “owner” or “champion.” And there must be consequences when those people come in and admit, “I didn’t get to it,” especially week after week or month after month.

Empowerment. Champions must have authority, responsibility, and the tools necessary to impact measures. Hire great people and let them move their initiatives forward.

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Q&A

KEVINSTINE K

evin Stine, a nationally recognized expert on cybersecurity, is chief of the Applied Cybersecurity Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency within the U.S. Department of Commerce. NIST’s mission is to promote U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science, standards, and technology in ways that enhance economic security and improve quality of life.

In your 10 years at NIST, has cybersecurity evolved as a more important or urgent priority at NIST? NIST has a long history in the cybersecurity space, starting in the early ‘70s with the development of the data encryption standard. It began when the financial sector developed a market need for cryptography to protect financial transactions, including in ATMs, which were becoming more prevalent at that time.

Since then we’ve seen a significant increase in the proliferation of data, an explosion in the number of connected devices, and a rapidly changing threat environment. Our role and our portfolio in the cybersecurity field over the last 40 years has grown along with this very rapidly changing technology and threat landscape.

Through our open and collaborative approach, we engage as many experts 20

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as we can—to benefit from the diversity of thought and expertise—to inform the production of our standards and guidelines. We partner very actively with industry, with academia, and with other government agencies, not just federal, but also state, local, and territorial—as well as international partners.

We also have a very strong convening function. We try to pull together the experts in a particular discipline or domain to understand different mission and cybersecurity needs, technologies, and approaches, and to then produce standards and guidelines and other resources that will be usable, applicable and meaningful to those different environments. We have deep technical expertise at NIST, but cybersecurity is a complex space. When you look at it through the lens of all the different missions and business objectives of organizations and sectors you’ll find that there are differences among each and every organization and each and every sector, including manufacturing.

How does that sense of collaboration manifest itself in a practical way— through meetings, speeches, documents, convenings? Or is it something else?

We host a lot of workshops and conferences, sometimes on very specific technical topics such as privacy engineering

practices, or the specific challenges around securing or protecting healthcare information, or the next generation cryptographic technologies. We also frequently attend events that are hosted by others. I think there’s always somebody at NIST speaking at an event or a conference on any given day anywhere in the country, or even around the world. The “S” in NIST is standards, so a lot of our collaborations also happen through standards bodies, both in the U.S. as well as through international standards organizations.

Another significant way we collaborate with folks is through the public comment process on all of our standards and guidelines. Everything we do is done in a very open and transparent manner. Every resource we put out—whether a standard, a guideline, or other tool or methodology— goes through at least one and sometimes many rounds of public comment. We think the best way to inform and improve the development of our standards and guidelines is through an inclusive, big tent approach that brings in many diverse thoughts and stakeholders. We’ll put a document out in draft form, and improve it by sharing it through as many channels as we can. We actively solicit comments and tap into the deep technical expertise of experts all around the world. I think that’s one of the most significant ways that we

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JAMES KEGLEY

NIST’s expert on cybersecurity tells manufacturers why they must pay attention to their data

We try to pull together the experts in a particular discipline or domain to understand different mission and cybersecurity needs, technologies, and approaches, and to then produce standards and guidelines and other resources that will be usable, applicable and meaningful to those different environments.

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engage with a tremendously diverse set of stakeholders.

In that context, what does your work week look like?

It’s an exciting time to be in the cybersecurity field because of the tremendous opportunity for innovation.

One of the best things about my job is that every day is a little bit different.

There’s certainly a lot of public speaking,

Folks frequently imply that a small organization means a less secure organization. That’s not always the case. meetings, and engagements with many of our government agency partners, and with industry and academia. I’m talking about the work that NIST is doing and trying to help other organizations understand our role and the applicability of our standards and guidelines. But I’m also in listening mode, to understand when folks come to us and say, “Hey we have this challenge, can you help us understand some of the standards, tools, and capabilities or approaches that may be out there today on the market to help us address it?”

Let’s talk about manufacturers. Describe the urgency that manufacturing executives get involved in cybersecurity.

Is that growing or changing from where it was, say, five years ago?

It’s definitely growing. I think the national dialogue around cybersecurity has increased significantly over the last five to 10 years, in government and across the broader digital economy. I think there’s recognition in the manufacturing sector that cybersecurity can have a potential impact—positive or negative—on a manufacturer’s ability to accomplish their mission and the business objectives. I’m no manufacturing expert, but I would say when you look at typical manufacturing business objectives—maintaining personal safety, environmental safety, product quality, achieving production goals, and protecting trade secrets—there’s an everincreasing awareness of the importance of cybersecurity.

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I think that we’re seeing similar trends across other sectors as well. There’s a heightened awareness of the importance of cybersecurity and the interdependent roles of individuals and organizations in a supply chain. Your organization can take steps to protect your information and your business processes, but there’s also an increased recognition that your actions will have an impact on others in this very interconnected, interdependent ecosystem of cybersecurity across the nation and certainly around the world.

Is there a fundamental difference between how a small manufacturer would look at cybersecurity, compared to, say, an OEM? Folks frequently imply that a small organization means a less secure organization. That’s not always the case. A large organization may have greater resources, they may have a more informed and highly trained workforce, but frequently their environments are more complex and more bureaucratic.

Small organizations may not be as wellresourced, but being small might allow them to be more agile, responsive, and flexible in their approach to cybersecurity.

We’ve seen small organizations across a variety of sectors that actually have more robust cybersecurity capabilities because they’re able to be more agile in their approach.

In manufacturing, there is also the notion of how small manufacturers are partnering with OEMs through the supply chain.

Smaller manufacturers have to recognize their role with respect to partners and suppliers in the supply chain. They have to understand how they can help one another to improve the cybersecurity approaches and practices within the space.

What are some small, practical, common sense steps that smaller organizations might be looking at with regard to cybersecurity?

We typically recommend that any organization, especially small organizations, understand the key data and processes that enable their mission and business operations, and the impact to their missions and operations if the data and processes were compromised or disrupted in any way. This foundational

Small organizations may not be as well resourced, but being small might allow them to be more agile, responsive, and flexible in their approach to cybersecurity. understanding, coupled with an understanding of the risks, will help them to make informed decisions on the safeguards necessary to most effectively manage risk to their operations, brands, and customers.

It’s very unlikely, isn’t it, that smaller manufacturers would have inside

which is even more pronounced in the context of a particular infrastructure or sector such as manufacturing. We need to identify tools or programs or capabilities to identify those cybersecurity workforce needs for now and in the future.

Every employee is going to have a role in the organization, from the CEO down to the bits and bytes folks that are on a manufacturing floor—they’re the ones also employing the processes and technologies in the organization as well.

Everybody has a role in cybersecurity. It’s a matter of articulating that role in a way that’s going to be understood by those individuals, so that they understand what their responsibility is with respect to the organization, then providing the right tools, awareness, and training to help them meet their responsibilities.

resources to deal with cybersecurity.

Who should they look to for help?

There are a number of different places.

First, they can look to associations and others in their sector. There are many national associations in the manufacturing space that are taking a very hard look at cybersecurity, including some that have worked with NIST to develop a framework profile that is customized for the manufacturing community.

There are also government agencies.

The Department of Homeland Security has a suite of programs and resources that can help organizations identify and assess the threats and risks to their environment, and then propose programs and capabilities to address them. Certainly the Small Business Administration, some of the small business development centers would have some capabilities. Organizations like the Better

Business Bureau, for example, are getting much more involved in this space as well.

And NIST has a variety of resources in our standards and guidelines, including some that will be released soon, that are more specific to the manufacturing sector. I mentioned before that we led the development of the cybersecurity framework a couple of years ago, and we’ve been working to produce a framework profile that’s specific to manufacturing operations.

What resources inside their companies might manufacturers deploy?

People certainly have a critical role.

That’s why we spend so much time looking at workforce development. I’d say there’s a general recognition that there’s a significant shortage of cybersecurity professionals across the country right now,

What about the role of the CEO? Do you have a sense that CEOs have an appropriate sense of urgency regarding cybersecurity?

The CEO sets the tone for the organization: they set the strategic direction, and I think establishing cybersecurity as a priority for the organization most effectively comes from the top. I think we’re seeing a significant increase in CEO- and boardlevel engagement in cybersecurity. Part of that focus and attention could be driven by external oversight and interests from outside bodies.

Regardless of the sector, for something like cybersecurity to become embedded in the culture of the organization—much like safety has been— it’s got to be embraced and driven at the top.

Kevin Stine will be the keynote speaker at the 2016 Statewide Manufacturing Peer Council, 9 AM-4PM, Monday, October 10 at the Minneapolis Marriott Northwest.

Attendance to this exclusive event is limited to manufacturers. Manufacturers interested in attending should contact Karen.jeal@enterpriseminnesota.org, or call 612-455-4207.

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SOM Commentary ®

Four diverse manufacturing leaders participated in the release event for Enterprise Minnesota’s 2016 version of its State of Manufacturing® survey.

Here’s a recap of their contributions.

TWYLA FLAWS

Twyla Flaws is Personnel Manager, Clow Stamping Company, Merrifield Skills gap. (The Brainerd Lakes area) is a community that’s very dedicated to our students. It’s all about the students.

It’s all about teaching kids about careers.

We have a career fair there that has about 3,000 kids travel through each year from a multiple school district area. We have a Bridges Career Academy. It’s a workplace connection. You can access that online if you’d like—www.bridgescareeracademies.

It’s a partnership between the schools and the businesses. It’s a way to get kids to come out and see, to tour, to know what we do in business. If you want to hire kids from your community, they need to know you exist and they need to come out and see you. That’s the best way to home grow your workforce.

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/ ENTERPRISE MINNESOTA FALL 2016

I don’t know if you remember the old School-to-Work school programs where you put kids on the line, got them into your buildings, into your offices. We’re talking real world 101: teaching the soft skills, how to show up on time every day, how to play well together and all that stuff. So when the School-to-Work funding went away we employers in our area decided we’re not going to let it go away, so we started Bridges Academy. It continues to grow every year. … The kids know you and you know them. They get excited about the local careers. … They need to stay active in the community and connect with business in order to know exactly what it is we need, what the new thoughts and ideas are out there. I can’t stress enough that you need to step forward politically and in your community to make those things happen.

Volatility in the economy. In manufacturing you are always concerned

about the economy. If the economy takes a dip one way or the other, we’re either scrambling to keep up or we’re trying to figure out how to not lay off good people and maintain. I think we’re very optimistic about our economy and about being able to meet the needs. Flexibility and being lean have become very important to us since the last recession. You can’t afford to be lazy; you can’t afford to sit back and relax. We’re always looking for new and innovative ideas, looking for the best that you can get for employees and for equipment. And that just seems to be what we take a stand on, and we’re very confident going forward that it will be another good year.

Home-shoring. We’re not losing work overseas like we saw for a brief time.

We’re getting overseas work back again.

We perhaps lost quite a bit to China at one point, but (practical considerations ultimately worked our way). Things like

Bob Kill leads a group of manufacturers in a discussion of the State of Manufacturing results at the Minneapolis Convention Center.

ANNE HED

Anne Hed is CEO, HED Cycling Products, Roseville Next Gen employees. Bicycle wheels are pretty intriguing to high school kids. I brought a bicycle and I think I brought a wheel that I had made 25 years ago and then showed them how it evolved into fat bike wheels and all kinds of other accessories.

They thought cycling was awesome. I’m really proud to say that the last five hires have been from White Bear Lake High

“The trouble we have with the (student) pipeline is that in two weeks we’ll graduate 30 machinists—29 of them are already employed. For that matter, 29 of them have already had jobs for over a year.”

—E.J. Daigle, dean of robotics and manufacturing, Dunwoody College of Technology School. We must have really intrigued them. Part of it is word of mouth. They saw that manufacturing is cool and we are an innovative company.

It’s very interesting for them to see a piece of carbon fiber and how we mold it, heat it, and build it (into bike wheels).

And then they can turn the TV on to see somebody using them in a triathlon or the Olympics. It’s a great way to get them engaged. I’m looking at interning some more kids from high schools. I think just going there and meeting them, showing

them your inventions and your creations, and letting them know that if you stay innovative and you make this cool product they can come and help you and then be proud, like I am, to see it being raced all over the world.

The future. We make an innovative product. I just can’t really explain how important that is. Without my key employees thinking, “What’s next? What’s next?,” we wouldn’t be where we are right now. We have several products that are still

FALL 2016 ENTERPRISE MINNESOTA /

25

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHRIS MORSE

actually speaking the language, working the hours that they’re open as opposed to when we’re open, the cost of freight and the cost of shipping their parts, the quick response team, and the fact that our sales reps can quickly be at a customer’s door to solve problems all have helped bring that work back to us.

SOM® Commentary in their infancy and what we’ve figured out what to do ahead is to tool up and be first to market. I will continue to do that.

I have spent a lot of energy and time bringing everything in-house we used to make overseas. Over the last couple of years, I’ve spent resources on CNC machines, water jet cutting machines, and automated tools. The only way to continue to grow and innovate is to have it right in my hands. It’s been really amazing to see the company grow.

Innovation. Even though you have these pitfalls in your life, I align myself with a core group of people who are excited to come to work every day, to build and create.

We’re growing this itty-bitty niche - I mean how many times can you change a wheel, but you can! We just have found a way to tool and get it to market first. Over the last couple of years we’ve received two patents and we’re enforcing those patents. If I find other competitors overseas that are bringing those products into the States, we’re on them. I think that’s what I’m trying to say here, is that you have to keep innovating and growing.

Managing growth. We’ve realized over the last couple of years that I can’t do everything. When there’re just a couple of you, you sometimes think, “it’s so much easier if I just do it instead of teaching someone to do it.” You get in your bubble in your own business, you don’t think you need help, you don’t think you need all these other resources. What I’ve changed over the last couple of years is one of my employees, bless her heart, Julie, signed me up for (a program in which) I was able to meet with peers, that, gosh, had the same problems as I have.

You’re going to have problems, it doesn’t matter what size your company is. … I realized I needed to bring in someone to help me figure out how to put the right people in the right seats. Even though I’d been in business for almost 30 years … but until you have the right person in the right seat you maybe have to make hard decisions.

I had to say “no.” I had to lose a couple

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/ ENTERPRISE MINNESOTA FALL 2016

Senator Amy Klobuchar, an annual favorite at the event, welcomed attendees.

employees when I decided that I had to structure the company … and make them accountable. Now they say that I sleep better at night. They know they can’t come to me until Anne gets the right amount of sleep.

(Employees know) don’t bring it to Annie unless you put it through risk management.

E.J. DAIGLE

E,J. Daigle is Dean of Robotics and Manufacturing, Dunwoody College of Technology, Minneapolis The student pipeline. We’ve been teaching manufacturing programs at Dunwoody for over a hundred years now. We’ve seen a lot of the changes. I’ve been at Dunwoody for 15 years now and I’ve seen changes in the types of students coming in. A lot of folks are graduating from the fouryear universities, not because they had job that they were really interested in or something that they were really passionate about. They’re graduating from four-year universities because a high school counselor told them, “You need to get a four-year degree.” A parent told them that, “You need to get a four-year degree.”

We’re trying to change that stigma. Right

now I have about 50 students in the machine tool program in the day program. We’ve got another 20 at night. I know for sure four of them already had four-year degrees. They’re coming back to school to get an education that gives them employability.

The trouble we have with the pipeline is that in two weeks we’ll graduate 30 machinists—29 of them are already employed. For that matter, 29 of them have already had jobs for over a year. The only one who’s not employed is my student worker. He’s employed by Dunwoody. I can understand, when we I see six or seven out of 10 companies raiding the pipeline, that finding skilled workers is a problem.

It’s been 25 years since I graduated from high school, but when I graduated from high school … you had to take a shop class.

That was really my first experience with the shop-type environment. Come to find out, I loved it! I think a lot of kids find that out, if they are really pushed in that direction. It starts out much sooner than college or even high school for that matter.

The two-year degree program is different.

It’s hands-on and it’s a lot of hours in the day. We essentially open up a fire hose and try to get them to drink out of that fire hose.

It’s hard to do with all the cool technology

out there, with all the cool overlaps. It makes for a tough teaching environment because we have to figure out, what do the welders need? They need to learn quality, they need to learn print reading, they need to learn a little bit about robotics. So the number of hours we spend to go over all these technologies, it really, really takes a lot of time. I think that’s why these folks are ready when they get out to you in the industry.

Automation. We’ve actually started to cross-train our students. We’ve started taking our automation students over to the weld shop doing welding and at the same time we bring our automation students over to the weld shop and bring the welders over to the robotics lab. And we teach them about machine vision systems so they can inspect parts using vision systems. One of the coolest things I’ve seen is with the additive manufacturing side—3D printing. We’ve got a great partnership with Stratasys.

This is a great opportunity to show high school kids how cool manufacturing really is. Using 3D printers to make metal parts.

I’m not talking about metal printing. I’m talking about maybe you 3D print a pattern and then you bring that pattern to the foundry and you do a sandcasting around that pattern and now we’ve gone from CAD to pattern to a rough casting of a part, you know, in a day.

STEVE CREMER

Steve Cremer is President, Harmony Enterprises, Harmony Recruiting. We are in a community of a thousand people and about twelve hundred Amish people surrounding us, who don’t come to work for us. We have been very innovative in trying to find ways to attract new employees. We’re a family-owned business and we have been there for 55 years, so we do have a lot of history with the community.

I think we’ve been very good at taking the young people right out of high school with no training. Over the years we bring an an 18-year-old and say, “Soon you’re going

Congressman Tom Emmer attending his first State of Manufacturing release event.

to grow into something that we can really use, so we’re going to give you a chance to work for us today. We’ll put up with you being a little slow in the morning. In a couple years from now, you will be a great employee for us.”

Our chief engineer started working for us as a janitor in 1975 right out of our local high school. Over the years we got him into welding. We looked at him and thought, “You have this engineering inside of you.

With a little help and a little training, we will make you an engineer.” Today he is running our engineering department. He does 3D AutoCAD drawings. We’ve been able to grow many of our internal young people over the years into great employees.

Creative employee relations. A lot of younger employees are married and having children. Their biggest concern is day care. Some have actually had to move out of Harmony to go to bigger cities to find a job and find day care. So we converted an underutilized building into a daycare center, first for our employees and then for our community and the surrounding community. We give our employees a 35 percent discount. They are so happy to know that they don’t have to drive 25 miles out of their way to drop off a child.

Now they can bring them to work and all they have to do is walk across the parking lot. They can have lunch with their little children. We’re opening, hopefully in a couple weeks, if the state stays out of our way and helps us get our license.

We have room for a hundred kids. We have 55 signed up already. Our employees are thrilled and it actually affected some of the older generation like me, the grandparents.

They were the ones who were having to

leave work because their children could not leave their jobs when their grandchildren were sick, so they would leave work and have to take care of the kids. We also have a wellness center so if the children are sick, unless they are very sick, they can keep them there in the daycare center. It’s been a great way for us to attract young people and retain them. That’s been our latest attempt to keep employees.

ISO. We went through a strategic planning about three years ago, involving most of our employees. We all agreed that we make good quality products. But we realized, when talking to the production employees, that we had terrible procedures. … We saw ISO as a way to improve that, to really look at our processes and improve communication. A way to allow the employees to not feel intimidated to make a change or point out something that the engineers have done on a print.

So the whole process was a huge learning event for all of us. It’s been about three years now. It has really helped us grow. It was nice that it wasn’t forced upon us from customers, although we found that an added benefit is that a lot of national accounts ask the question “Are you ISO?” We also found out that when you do vendor evaluations, they ask a lot less questions when you’re ISO certified.

Our sales team and purchasing people are really happy about that too. We’re being recertified at the end of this year and we’re going to be recertified in both the 2008 and the new 2015 certification for ISO. I really like that the new 2015 ISO is not based on so many quality checks. It’s based on risk.

I think that whole philosophy for us as a company is really important.

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Great Places to Make Stuff

T

o get a sense of the tight camaraderie among manufacturers and the business community in Minnesota’s Brainerd Lakes region, you don’t have to go much beyond visiting The Bridges Career Exploration Day every spring at Central Lakes College.

The career expo annually attracts more than 2,500 students who bus in from 29 high schools in a 45-mile radius of Brainerd to spend a full day of handson exposure to the kind of employment options they might have after graduation.

Planners and area manufacturers closely collaborate to ensure that the Brainerd career expo is not a typical take-yourkid-to-work event with a lot of three-panel brochures and printed ballpoint-pen souvenirs arrayed

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The Chamber’s Mary Gottsch manages the Workplace Connection. The Career Academy is headed by Judy Richer, a retired dean of students at Central Lakes College.

/ ENTERPRISE MINNESOTA FALL 2016

over draped convention tables.

Students receive substantive, roll-up-your-sleeves exposure to real world career options, including what goes into a typical workday, what they can expect to earn, and what kind of training they need to prepare.

Manufacturers bring in tools and machinery that students can put their hands on; last year they were experimenting with drones, with a link to NASA. The event—and its sponsor, the Bridges Career Academies and Workplace Connection— put Brainerd in the elite forefront of cities nationwide that have launched homegrown initiatives to combat the expected shortage of employees to fill vacancies created by Baby Boomer retirements in the near future.

“Three-quarters of those

PHOTOS BY TRINA RAYMOND

The Brainerd Lakes region may be known as a premier vacation spot, but it is also home to one of Minnesota’s most tightly knit group of manufacturers

students don’t really know what they want to do in the future,” says Twyla Flaws, a founder of Bridges and personnel manager at Clow Stamping, the area’s largest manufacturer. “Experiential learning helps them figure that out, and maybe save some money on education when they do their post-secondary.”

The Bridges program consists of two highly coordinated activities.

The Workplace Connection is overseen

by Mary Gottsch of the Brainerd Lakes Chamber. It connects schools and businesses through work-based learning activities. They include two-day skills camps and immersion camps, career tours, a speakers’ bureau for classroom visits, career videos, a job depot and the Career Exploration Day. The Career Academies are headed by Judy Richer, a retired dean of students at Central Lakes College. The Academies represent a sequence of hands-on courses that combine technical, academic and work-skills that focus on specific career paths. Students have practical learning opportunities throughout the courses that transfer to activities beyond the school day.

Since its inception, Bridges has involved more than 15,000 students at Career Exploration Day and 1,000 students in career tours; engaged more than a 1,000 students through the speakers’ bureau; and 2,000 students in job shadows and 400 students in immersion camps.

During 2014-15, 340 students completed a Bridges Career Academy. There are a total of 97 Academies in 17 high schools.

Approximately 89 percent of the students completing an Academy have gone on to post-secondary education.

“It’s a partnership between the schools and the businesses,” Flaws says. “It’s a way to get kids to come out and see, to tour, to know what we do in business. If you want to hire kids from your community, they need to know you exist and they need to come out and see you. That’s the best way to home-grow your workforce.

This is one in an occasional series of articles that profile communities that have extraordinarily strong relationships with their manufacturers

Twyla Flaws, personnel manager at Clow Stamping, is a founder of Bridges.

“They need to stay active in the community and connect with business in order to know exactly what it is we need,” she adds. “I can’t stress enough that you need to step forward politically and in your community to make those things happen.”

Flaws characterizes one objective of the Academies is to teach “Real World 101— teaching the soft skills, how to show up on time every day, how to play well together and all that stuff.”

Bridges was created 10 years ago, after the State of Minnesota pulled the plug on

funding for the School-to-Work program, a student-school-workplace interface that Brainerd had deployed quite successfully.

To ensure that manufacturers didn’t lose that momentum, local manufacturers, the chamber and other business advocates joined a group that included Central Lakes College staff, K-12 educators, and other manufacturers to structure a new one. They tapped Gottsch, a long-time employee at the chamber to head an eight-person transition committee that would ultimately lead to the Bridges program.

FALL 2016 ENTERPRISE MINNESOTA /

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Great Places to Make Stuff shadow, a tour, or to hear one of the Academy’s speakers’ bureaus.

• Job shadows enable high school students to spend part of a day with a group or an individual at a company, observe workplace activities, discuss required education and disciplines, and find out what qualities are desired in potential employees.

• More than 70 local professionals belong to Bridges’ speakers’ bureau, through which they make classroom presentations about their work and their industries.

• Teachers in the Workplace enables educators to spend time in a manufacturing business to understand the application of areas they teach, discuss workplace realities, and the skills students need for success.

Matt Kilian, president, Brainerd Lakes Chamber of Commerce and Sheila Haverkamp, executive director, Brainerd Lakes Area Economic Development Corporation.

The group met with “probably a hundred organizations and school boards” up to and including a personal meeting with Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, according to Gottsch.

They drove to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to meet with leaders at Kirkwood Community College, a campus with renowned relationships between manufacturers, students, and high schools.

The first outcome of their work was a program called “Ready or Not, Here They Come,” which eventually evolved into Bridges’ attempts to coordinate curriculum among local high schools.

Richer, a retired dean of students at Central Lakes College, says she was originally recruited to coordinate the academic rigor of the Academies.

“They had made all of the courses 30

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designed as high level college courses and they were not effective for several reasons,” she says today. One reason, she says, is that high schools lack the credentialed people to work with those programs.

Richer redesigned the Academies so that they could be functional in the schools, retrofitting curriculum to emphasize the strengths of participating high schools.

Brainerd, for example, excelled at welding courses and building. Little Falls is strong in natural resources, while Hibbing is strong in manufacturing.

She says that each course within the Academies must “purposefully” teach employability skills, which includes teaching students to work as a team, manage your tools, and meet deadlines.

Students must also be exposed to actual workplace conditions through a job

Has the Bridges solved the skills gap in Brainerd? “No,” says Steve Lackner, HR director at locally based Avantech.

“But does it help? Absolutely.” Lackner is another original founder of Bridges.

He is also president of Lakes Area Manufacturers Alliance, a group supported by the chamber that meets monthly to discuss common issues.

“We’re not in great big industrial parks.

We’re just all a number on a street. We know each other pretty well, especially on the HR side. I’ve been doing this for pushing 20 years up here in the Brainerd area and met a lot of people. I think it’s the small town atmosphere. We actually share ideas with each other. We don’t look at ourselves as competitors, really. I guess it’s the small town community that really makes us thrive.”

Lackner, who moved from the Twin Cities 30 years ago, adds that another local attraction is that Brainerd is “a place that people want to be. What could be better than living in a place where people want to come to vacation. People like it up here.

We’ve got a vibrant school system. The college is here to bring kids in for school.

It’s hunting. It’s fishing. It’s the quality of life. It’s everything.”

Chamber President Matt Kilian agrees wholeheartedly. He says the local community understands and appreciates the value that manufacturers bring to

CROW WING COUNTY

SNAPSHOT 2013

Current Local Population

63,208

Median Age

42

Number of Households

26,916

High School Graduation Rate

92.1%

Source: U.S. Census, 2013 Quick Facts

Growing for the future With a population of nearly 65,000, Crow Wing County is one of the fastest growing counties in the state and attracts young workers due to the low cost of living and numerous recreational opportunities.

Exceeding state education standards their area. “Manufacturing brings dollars and talent into the community. We pay lots of attention to make sure that they are well served.”

Part of Brainerd’s success, he says, is built on the notion that “you do business where you want to live and where you can attract and recruit qualified workers.”

Kilian three years ago moved over from the Initiative Foundation in Little Falls to take the helm at the Brainerd Lakes Chamber of Commerce. “If you ask Minnesotans where they would like to live,” he adds, “I think the Brainerd Lakes area would be in the top three. A lot of communities tout their quality of life, but we’re second to none.”

It starts with the natural resources, but there’s more. “We’re a community that cares. We’re a community of joiners,” Kilian says.

Sheila Haverkamp, executive director of the Brainerd Lakes Economic Development Corporation, says her area “is like anywhere else. The whole country is going through a shift in labor and demographics and population. We definitely have people who desire the quality of life we have here.

If they can find career opportunities, they’re very interested.”

On top of that, Haverkamp says, area manufacturers tend to want to support each other. “They don’t look at themselves as competitive, she says. “There might be situations where they might compete for

the same worker, but they have more in common; we have limited resources so as a result we frequently want to join forces and create those relationships and build upon them.”

Just as important as the people, Haverkamp points to other built-in advantages of the Brainerd Lakes region.

Student achievement levels in the Brainerd Lakes area are consistently above state and national averages.

Minnesota leads the nation in ACT scores, and the Brainerd Public School District scores higher than the state, posting nearly a full point higher on average than the statewide average.

MANUFACTURING-FRIENDLY INFRASTRUCTURE, LOCATION The Brainerd Lakes area is an excellent location for manufacturing companies because of available land and properties, the existing infrastructure, and its access to major transportation corridors, including rail, highways, and air.

Industrial parks in the Brainerd Lakes area have affordable land on which to build or expand, and one of them has shovelready sites. A number of existing properties are also available, some of which are configured for manufacturing.

Major east-west and north-south highways cut right through the Brainerd Lakes area, making transportation very favorable. Interstate 94 is 50 miles south, and the Twin Cities and Duluth are only two to three hour drives. The BNSF Railwayhas a hub in Brainerd, providing local companies with freight service, and the Brainerd Lakes Regional Airport offers commercial service daily to the Twin Cities.

Land values holding Land and property values in this area rose to unpredicted levels and are still holding their value relative to the rest of the country, despite the recent real estate crash that sent most property values plummeting.

Work where you play With 465 lakes within 30 minutes of Brainerd, this area continues to draw visitors who enjoy outdoor and recreational activities. Cultural offerings, top-notch healthcare, and available housing are what turn vacationers into residents.

A patchwork of communities The region is really a sampling of many unique communities that cluster together around the Crow Wing County seat. Each has a unique history and distinctive flavor that weave together to create a region worth calling home.

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Final Word

The Nexus Strategy A local think tank sponsors a town meeting based on an Enterprise Minnesota cover story

W

e published a very popular edition of this magazine last September when our cover featured a story, The Students Are Coming, that showed how manufacturers, educators and civic leaders in Fergus Falls teamed up last year to outfit a state-of-the-art manufacturing lab in the local high school funded entirely by private donations. That cover story prompted the folks at Center of the American Experiment, a Minneapolisbased think tank, to join longtime Fergus Falls legislator Bud Nornes in July for a town meeting to essentially reexamine how supporters raised almost $320,000 for high tech improvements to the lab in less than six months.

We’re thrilled when our magazine can be used to help focus more attention on the challenges facing Minnesota’s manufacturers. We call it our “nexus” strategy. It is part of our mission to be the voice of Minnesota manufacturing, to be the center of a diverse community of interests – state and federal public policymakers, economic developers, granting agencies, media, colleges and universities, manufacturing and other business “thought leaders” who support manufacturing. We try to use it in virtually everything we produce, from our leading edge consulting services, our statewide business events, our annual State of Manufacturing® survey, our magazine, and The Weekly Report, our digital newsletter.

More than 60 people turned out for the Fergus Falls event, held in the Roosevelt meeting room in Fergus Falls’ secondary school. A panel of educators, manufacturers and community leaders, some of the same folks we quoted earlier in our article, echoed how the idea was conceived at the local Rotary when a handful of local business leaders formed a working group to address how to fill a pipeline of young employees to replace the retiring Baby Boomers. A good first step, they thought, was to upgrade the large, dimly-lit “shop” facility in the high school that had been

32

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Lynn Shelton is director of marketing and communications at Enterprise Minnesota.

accumulating dirt and grime since it was first acquired in the 1960s.

Fellow Rotarian Kim Embretson, then a development specialist at the Fergus Fallsbased West Central Initiative, suggested that the shop needed more than a paint job. “We needed something that would inspire students to say, “Whoa, this is really interesting.” He volunteered to lead the fundraising effort.

New equipment, they reasoned, would show students the new face of modern, computer-based manufacturing. Two high school technology instructors provided a wish list of improvements that included an array of CNC welding equipment in addition to plans to clean and repaint the facility, to install epoxy flooring, a new exhaust system, and new lighting. The price tag: close to $350,000.

Within six months the group had commitments for $240,000. In addition, local manufacturers volunteered to loan

their tech people to set up the machines, and help show the students how they work.

The teachers are still testing the curriculum, which includes fabrications, physical science, principles of engineering, math, and a language arts class which is be tailored to technical reading and writing. But the bigger accomplishment, the teachers agree, is that they can now show students and parents the possibilities in manufacturing.

Minneapolis-based venture capitalist Ron Eibensteiner is the chairman of Center of the American Experiment. He co-authored a chapter on business issues in an American Experiment book last year called The Minnesota Blueprint. He says “by far and away” the biggest reaction came in response to the skills gap.

He echoed some statistics that we all know and appreciate hearing from someone outside the industry. “Manufacturers form the bedrock of many Minnesota communities. They offer high-wage, highskill jobs that create economic opportunity and stability,” he said. Eibensteiner, who grew up on a farm in Elrosa, not far from Fergus, said he also knows first-hand the value of manufacturing to the well-being of smaller communities.

Minnesota’s 7,400 manufacturers represent the largest private sector component of the state’s GDP, Eibensteiner told the audience. Half of them operate in Greater Minnesota.

State data demonstrate that they pay 21.6 percent higher than the average wage for all industries, he added.

But manufacturing’s impact on jobs goes deeper than that,” Eibensteiner said. “Each manufacturing job supports 1.9 jobs in other sectors of the economy. That means that 33 percent of all Minnesota jobs are directly or indirectly supported by manufacturing.”

All said, we all agree that manufacturers can never have too many friends who understand what they bring to our state and their local economies. Our nexus strategy represents our effort to make that happen.

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