Next Generation Manufacturing Summit Keynote Speech Drew Greenblatt from Marlin Steel
Hi I’m Drew Greenblatt, Thank you for that warm introduction.
I’m excited to be here tonight because next generation manufacturing is something that I’m passionate about. It’s how I live my life and how were trying to grow things in Baltimore Maryland. I think if we can have a prosperous, thriving manufacturing base in our country we can turn around this economy. We can have our recession end a lot quicker. I think that when people think about manufacturing, they have to think about it as a way not only to improve the life for their shareholders but also for their employees. I think if that’s how its approached, good things will come to the factory and it will make it a more sustainable business and it will make it more likely for the long term that the company will be there.
Just a little bit of background about my company. The company was established in 1968. I bought it in 1998 and the company I bought was very different than what we have right now. I’d like to describe what it was like then when I bought it and now where we are. The company made bagel baskets. We were the biggest bagel basket manufacturer in the world. We made bagel baskets for Einstein bagels, Brueggers, etc. Manhattan Bagels. It was a thirty year old company all of the employees were minimum wage. We were out of Brooklyn New York, a really rough section of Brooklyn, and the employees didn’t have health insurance. There was no retirement plan . The health insurance plan was used as just go to the emergency room a couple miles away. Nobody owned a car. Nobody owned a house. There was a couple of the employees that had missing eyes, missing fingers, from safety incidents. It was a very different company than what we are today and I’m going to describe the transformation that we went through and maybe there’s some things that we went through that can help you in growing your business.
Now were six times bigger, and we’ve had five years of steady growth despite the terrible recession. This is profitable growth, cash flow increasing every year. Our focus now is precision wire baskets and wire forms, sheet metal fabrications. What happened was, when I bought the company everything was honky-dory it was going well, and soon after I bought it two things occurred that I did not expect. Issues that—it the perfect storm. The first one was the Atkins Diet. I don’t know how familiar you are with the Atkins diet, but that’s a anti carbohydrate diet, which is the bagel is the enemy. It’s the devil and I was making all the bagel baskets for all of the bagel shops. So All of a sudden all my clients started going under. Obviously if they’re going under they don’t need to buy more wire baskets. Simultaneously, China learned how to commoditize wire baskets. It was devastating, they started bringing in wire baskets into Manhattan cheaper than I could buy steel. I had no shot, we were going to go under. It was a red ocean, there is a book out called The Blue Ocean right now, this was the red ocean. Where I was in an ocean filled with sharks and all you could see was blood around you. Well I was the guy that was bleeding and I really had a choice. I could either throw in the towel, fire all my employees, and walk away from my investment. And I was too stubborn. I had to transform I had to figure out what’s the right way to go and how to get out of this. What is the blue ocean?
I was floundering around and couldn’t figure out how to do it and I got a phone call from a manufacturing engineer at Boeing. And he said to me I need a little basket that’s about this big by this, by this, and I need it quick. And I said oh this is going to be a pain. I mean when Einstein Bagel buys from me, they buy a thousand bagels baskets. When Manhattan bagels buys from me they buy two thousand baskets , this guy only wants a handful. I’m going to have to charge him rather than twelve bucks, I’m going to charge him twenty four bucks for this basket. It was mind blowing, he said yeah whatever. That was the epiphany. That was the epiphany. And that Phone call, as I’m hanging up the phone, that’s when I realized, this is how I’m going to get out of this. My problem was, I had all of these minimum wage employees sitting near me, with 1950’s equipment. How do you transform a company to focus on manufacturing engineers at Boeing? Or GlaxoSmithKline? Or at MERCK? How do you quickly migrate to a whole new world? Looking for the Boeing epiphany was critical to the transformation. What I’m going to do is I am going to relay a couple things that I have found useful in this migration; in this transformation from a commodity bagel basket guy that was toast to a company that’s profitable, consistently growing, and very optimistic about the future.
The first thing is employees. Your talent. That’s critical and that’s what makes a great company. We have a couple techniques that we use that I think might be helpful for you. One of them if we could zone in on this one. The camera guys, can you do that? You can see it a little bit easier over here. We have a skills matrix. That’s this right here and this is located in our lunch room. It’s very transparent, it’s very candid, there is no secret plan that only I know about. All of our employees are the columns on the excel spreadsheet. All of the rows are the different skills in our factory. What we do is, we have every single skill graded. So some skills are one point and more complex skills are two points, really complex skills are three points, extraordinary complex skills are four points, and at the bottom over here we tabulate it up.
Some of them you can see are over a hundred points, some of them are six points, but that shows the reality. Some employees are killing themselves to cross train and to learn more, other employees are content and complacent. We give people raises based on how many points they have down here. How many skills they’re learning. And we update this every 90 days. Nowhere over here does it say, had beer with owner, or played golf with plant manager. This is a very motivational way I think that you can tap into to get your employees to be excited to work at your company, so they can see the clear progression how they can go to the next level.
If we can move to this one right here please. Another thing that we do, another technique we do that might be helpful to you, is every single employee is broken into a cell, so I’m not the only entrepreneur in the building. Instead, we have everybody on the factory floor as an entrepreneur. They’re broken into very micro cells, so that each employee has a specific objective goal, a specific objective target. And if they hit their number at the end of two week period of time, then we give them a cash bonus. Large cash bonus. For guys that are making eighteen bucks a hour it can be as much as fifteen hundred bucks in two weeks of work. That’s extremely compelling and what happens is, the employees have skin in the game. Again, I’m not the only entrepreneur. It’s amazing, we don’t have to watch how many people go to the bathroom, or whether or not they’re taking a smoke break, or if they’re talking about the Ravens or the Orioles. They’re focused on pushing out baskets. Pushing out sheet metal fabrications because they know there is a tremendous check coming every two weeks, if they hit their number. And that’s these right here and every day we graph it. And this is the goal that they have to hit. And this is how much they’ve actually produced. And if they hit their number they get a check and if they don’t hit their number, they don’t get a check. And you can see all the cells have their own graph and the reason why we do that is so that everybody can see how everybody else is doing.
Again, back to transparency and candor, were showing you everybody, how everybody else is doing so there is no mystery.
One thing about quality, we talked about quality before. If anything comes back to the factory because its poor quality, it goes right back to the cell that made the mistake. And they have to fix it. It makes it very challenging for them to hit their number at the end of the two week period. So they know they never want to see this thing again. They want to do it right the first time because they know it’s going to come right back to them if there is a problem. So that’s how they keep engaged with quality and that’s why our quality is so excellent.
Every day we tabulate it, so that they can see how they’re making out. Another benefit of this that I never realized was that we made the bonus so large that peoples budgets at home changed. And rather building their budget on their eighteen dollar or their twenty four dollar an hour salary, instead their putting into their personal home budget the huge bonus check. So all of a sudden I had a series of carnivores out there. There were these blue collar carnivores and they were demanding. They were walking into our office and saying hey I finished my job for today, give me more stuff to do. It’s a truly revolutionary experience to be managing blue collar workers walking into your office saying give me more work. Okay, because I want to hit my number. By the way, if they go over their budget, if they get over this number they can get bigger bonuses for every strata over they go. So it’s not like a ceiling, there are multiple bogies they can hit to go over. This makes it very compelling and again the of employees have skin in the game.
A couple other things that we do is on time percentage. That’s this one right here, and were looking at on-time percentage here. We’re focused on how were making out and we also tie that into the bonus checks for the leadership team. We also do quality, we measure quality, and that’s also tied into how the leadership team is compensated. In February and in October, I’m sorry in February and in August we actually had two months where we had one hundred percent. We didn’t have one thing come back and one customer complaint and we ship hundreds of thousands of things every month and so were really proud of that. But that’s because these guys have cells where they knew if the stuff came back there is not shot for them to hit their numbers at the end of the week.
So these are some techniques that we use to get the employees to have skin in the game. By doing it every two weeks, it keeps you focused its not so far away, it’s not a quarterly number, it’s not an annual number, its two weeks. They can go out and buy something neat in two weeks. That keeps them very engaged in the process.
We also have again, very micro, so it doesn’t matter if the other cell does well or doesn’t matter if that cell does poorly. It’s just their cell, so that they can really control it. Many benefits came out of it. We were all of a sudden confronted with cells approaching management saying wait a second, that employee, he’s slowing us down. It’s harder for us to hit our number. You’ve got to replace him. So you had blue collar workers self-regulating and tipping us off first if you had a slacker or if you had someone that wasn’t focused on quality, because these guys want to hit their number. It became a very productive tool to get them going. You have to make the bonus plan very objective very black and white, and you have to make it attainable. You can’t have it so high that they can never hit it, on the flipside you can’t have it so low that it’s easy-peasy for them to get. This has been a wonderful tool and technique for us to get very motivated and fired-up employees.
A couple other things that we’ve done that have been very helpful is emphasize safety. Safety is critical. Number one, I know all these people and I love these people and I want good things for these people, and it’s imperative that they come in with ten fingers and leave with their ten fingers. We have to create systems so that they are safe. I think that’s very motivational to employees when they know that management from the top is demanding a very safe environment. We’ve formed safety committees where we have the safety committees suggesting to management. Hey, these are some of the things that we should do because they know better. They’re in the trenches they know where you’re most likely to trip or your most likely to have some kind of hazard and we embrace these things.
Another thing that we do that is kind of rare is OSHA. We use OSHA as a consultant. Most people when they hear the word OSHA at their front door they will pick up their garlic, pick up their cross, and get scared to death. You know you’re in trouble here comes OSHA. We take the opposite approach we bring them in as a consultant and we ask them to go through our plant and review our plant and come up with suggestions on how we can do better because we’re not safety experts they are. They’ve seen all this stuff. They come in with, many times, very good suggestions that improve our situation. I recommend you do that and I think its key for your employees to see you talking to OSHA in that way because then they understand that you truly are vested into their wellbeing.
Another thing that we do is, that we bring in our insurance company because obviously they have skin in the game, so that we don’t have any accidents. The insurance company will come in with a couple other ideas that OSHA doesn’t bring up or your employees don’t bring up. They’re a good tool for improving the safety of your employees. Our safety is best demonstrated by our results. We’ve gone over one thousand sixty two days without a LTA (Lost time Accident). We’re very proud of that. I tell my employees that on the day I retire, in 30 years, were still going to be knocking down that record. So this is something that I think employees really get super charged—when management is buying into safety and really focused on safety.
I think another thing that’s critical for employees is that you have to demand the best. We demand A+ people. A lot of times when you’re interviewing you’ll say gee, we really need that role filled, here is a good resume, it’s pretty close. Let’s put up with it. It’s probably a C or a B minus . It’s good enough. You’ve got to get the role filled. We say no. We say no because we want to have a great person there and our mindset is, we want that person there for twenty years. And we don’t want to have the churn, the training, the explanation, the “this is what our standard operations” is. We want to bring somebody in embrace them and think like they’re going to be here for twenty years. And if you have that attitude with your hires and the only hiring A’s and A+’s, then over time the caliber of your employees really rises. Whenever somebody leaves we always say alright well that person left, it happens, the next person we hire is always going to be better. I think that makes for a better team. We also have the principle of hiring fast and firing fast. If there is a need in our system so that we can exploit a marketing opportunity, we hire quickly. However, if somebody is not doing their role, whether it’s some ethical issue, or a productivity issue, or something that is unsatisfactory, we fire quickly. We have very demanding standards but I think we get a great caliber of people that way.
Another thing that we do is that we pay very well. We pay well over the average, we benchmark against other wire fabricators, other sheet metal fabricators, we look at our benchmarking and we try to pay much more than our competition. Because it’s the classic case; you get what you pay for. If you pay low wages then you’re going to get bad quality. If you pay high wages you’re going to get people that are fired up and they’re engaged at making your company better.
Other things we do is, we have a very aggressive/ good benefit plan. For example in Maryland we use Blue Cross Blue Shield. We have the top of the line plan. My kids have the same plan as my employees and I think that also is motivational. One thing that were actually looking for in interviews is if they ask for benefits. If they’re not interested in benefits they’re not a good hire. If you don’t care about health insurance and you don’t care about benefits, you’re probably not our kind of guy. So that’s something that were listening for during the interview process. If they don’t inquire about benefits they’re probably not a good fit. Back to compensation.
We are also very aggressive with our 401k. We like people that are engaged in their 401k. People who squirrel away money are our kind of people. That’s a very good leading indicator that will be a successful rock star at your facility. In our company were salting away so much money on their behalf on terms of matching were going to have many blue collar millionaires and I’m really proud of that. Except for the safety, that’s probably number two of what I’m most proud of. When you have people that are in your factory that are going to be millionaires and they know they’re going to be millionaires not tomorrow but it’s going to take some time in the 401k’s got to work out, the economy’s got to cooperate, it’s very motivational.
Other things that we do is training. We’re very good about retaining talent because we train like crazy on our employees. What do I mean by that? Five percent of our direct labor budget is training because we want our employees to get better and better and really feel appreciated and add productivity and add ideas and that can only happen if they are trained better than any other wire fabricator out there. Back to this document here, where we’re insisting on the cross-training, where we’re telling people is this is our Achilles heel, these are the things we need for you to train in.
Other things we do for training, is that we fly our employees to clients so that they can see their processes, so they can see how they make things so they can understand their fit, their form, their function. So that we can get engaged with what their heart burns are, so we can come back and engineer it right internally. We also want to go visit disgruntled prospects, disgruntled employees, because those will teach you the most. However, I’m not sitting here telling you I’m perfect we have our mistakes, but when we do we fly people out there to truly internalize what are the things, where did we stumble? What processes do we have to change so that we never get another client that’s disappointed with us. By the way, this blows away people when you fly out to A. apologize, and B to truly understand where you tripped up.
Another very important factor with employees is we’re very transparent. We’re very candid. There is a style where you kind of dodge the truth, where you have lies of omission. Where you don’t go and be straightforward and tell people between the eyes exactly what our plans are or exactly what our goals are. And people are mealy mouth because it’s easier/more gentle to be that way. Were very transparent sometimes it’s a little bit painful. Were also like this with our clients. If we’re not going to hit a date, stuff happens, a machine breaks, whatever, were very straightforward with our clients and we tell them as soon as we know rather than waiting until the last second. People don’t like to hear that kind of stuff but they prefer to hear it; early bad news rather than late bad news.
Did anybody have any questions by the way? I didn’t mean to go on too long about the employees. Did anyone have any questions about anything? Anything that I didn’t explain or anything that I glossed over too quickly?
(Q) Do you have apprenticeship program within your training or not?
(A) I’m sorry. Say it one more time
(Q) A apprenticeship program in your training where you train an apprentice for 6 months to a year and then you promise full employment. Do you have that kind of program?
(A) Yes, I mean were constantly recruiting from within so when we have somebody that gets promoted we assign somebody that will be their apprentice that will be their junior manager who is going to be learning the ropes because we’re constantly moving one person up, and that person fills them. So were aggressively pursuing that. As you rise up levels you get pay increases and that’s very motivational to our people. Great question.
(Q) I was just going to ask that—you brought up a point when you were speaking about how people are interesting in health care and benefits and stuff like that. In the interview process are there any set of things that you look for, or any questions that you ask to prompt certain responses that indicate in the beginning stages of an interview if the person is going to be right for you? Are there certain things that you’re doing every time and if you are what questions are you asking and what response are you looking for?
(A) Our number one way of getting people is employee references. We give a very big bonus check if an employee refers a friend and if they stay 60 days, they get the check. And then if the person stays, the new applicant (the new employee stays), a hundred twenty days they get another check. So the first check is a hundred bucks the second check is two hundred fifty bucks, and if they stay six months, we pay five hundred bucks (check). So, I have the best HR team in the world, it’s all my employees. They’re constantly recruiting. Everybody’s got a buddy that’s fun to party with on Saturday, but you wouldn’t want your boss to be working with this guy. But you do have another buddy that is a hard worker, that’s very diligent. Those people are getting referred into us because of this aggressive bonus campaign, and people like working with their buddies too. So we use that. We look very closely at whether or not the prospective employee is on time for the appointment. We do drug testing. We do credit checks on them, we’re really trying to find the “A” people. In many cases we’ll also put them through a temp agency for ninety days to double check. Because again, the talent is the most important thing, because that’s what makes or breaks a company I think. It really makes you thrive if you can have great talent.
(Q) I’m not a real heavy finance guy but I hear all the cash outlay in terms of bonuses and benefits and fifteen hundred dollars here for achieving your goals and things like that. And then up front earlier you mentioned a general figure of eighteen dollars an hour. Can you talk about your transformational process and balancing all of this cash outlay to achieve these extraordinary benefits which are amazing with the revenue that you got from bringing in new clients and how that transformational process has occurred, because to me it sounds like there must have been some kind of balance somewhere. You’ve had to have taken another 15 dollars an hour from somewhere to balance out the revenue and costs, outlays, and things like that. Definitely extraordinary achievements here that we all want to know about, but tell me about the transformational process to get from where you were to where you are today, please.
(A) Part of this is because of productivity. For example, were up forty something percent this year; year-to-date. However our direct labor has only gone up five percent . Okay, so, and we’ve given out raises this year. So what’s happening is that each one of my employees is getting more widgets out per hour and were having less quality issues come back. So I’m saving money by scrap. I’m saving money by not having to bring more direct labor onto the factory floor, because these guys get more stuff out.
Were also doing a tremendous investment into robots and technology, so each employee is really empowered to make many more parts for hour and they’re watching more machines than they used to watch. For that reason you know—when I first bought the company we would have one guy hand-bending literally, every single bend, and he would make three hundred hand-bends in a hour. Some of them were plus or minus a quarter inch, some of them were plus or minus an eighth of an inch, but its holding a bagel, who cares, right? It works. But now we have robots, so you can have one guy rather being paid six bucks an hour and another guy getting paid 24 bucks a hour, but he’s watching four quarter million dollar machines, and they’re doing 5,000 bends an hour and each ones perfect. So this is how I’m getting; this is how I can be over the top with the health insurance. This is how I can be over the top because you have one guy that is extremely productive making twenty thousand bends an hour that are precise because he’s watching four robots as opposed to the old days when he was making them with muscle he was doing three hundred bends an hour. Did I answer your question?
(Q) Did you have to lay off people to increase the productivity for the robots? You know with the relatively additional expenditure for the robots and all the other benefits you’re talking about?
(A) We went from going from with guys that were all brawn that could sit there and do this for hours and hours. To guys that could enter in the software, use a tape measure, or calipers, put it into a check fixture and compare it to a blue print. It’s a different skill set. So, some of those guys were able to make that migration, not all. And some of the guys weren’t a good fit. You might be a good fit for doing this ten hours a day, but you might not be a good fit for setting up the robot. There are some IQ point issues here. We had an earlier meeting today where we talked about the skills of the employees and knowing geometry and knowing how to read a blue print and knowing how, these are things that I need. We pay more for it but you’re making twenty thousand bends in an hour, not three hundred and they’re all right. So the answer to your question is some of the guys made the evolution, made the transformation, but we don’t have a hundred percent. We had a lot of guys not make the cut. We have marginally more guys, but we have each guy making a lot more parts, a lot better.
(Q) Hi, I’m looking at your skills matrix, and I guess the initial impression of it, is its pretty spotty at the moment. So if you look at your skills on one side and your employees across I’m looking at the chart behind you, there is not a lot of people yet that have got a broad range of skills. So my question is, as you’re trying to keep these people for twenty years, how do you maintain the investment you’re making in that skills matrix. Are you getting the value back for those skills these people are getting? So how do you ensure that one they’re keeping the skill base and using it, because you’re paying for it.
(A) That’s a great question. We do give them raises when they learn a new robot, or new machine. And this is part of the reasons why were able to be more efficient because we have so many employees that are cross trained. Where they can run robot A, robot B, because every week its completely different I’m either buried on Robot A or buried on Robot B. So I need people moving around being nimble and agile. What we do is we train people and once they learn the skill they get the raise and we put them on the skill periodically to confirm that they know it. If over time, they lose it, or they’re not fresh with it, we literally will give them a deduction, and take away if they don’t know it. So we have let’s say robotic welders and if a guy kind of works in another cell for a while and kind of loses it and gets told to go change over to another robotic welder and he doesn’t have the skill set to do it anymore, he loses it.
(Q) Have you had to do that yet?
(A) Yes.
(Q) The basis of my question is I actually did similar, I applied a skills base matrix, and that was our problem, that over like after 15 years, we had people with skills that we weren’t necessarily utilizing and then obviously we had to do exactly what did and had to start taking the money away. That created a very different environment.
(A) To fight that, I really leaned hard on my management team to rotate the guys so we don’t get into this pickle. But that’s unpleasant and its bad, it’s bad for karma, so what we’re doing is we’re rotating people through much quicker. Great question.
(Q) I have a question, I agree with everything you’re saying about the people, but I’m curious about going from bagels to Boeing, that seemed to be a very important key. Can you talk more about that shift?
(A) It was not immediate. It took time, because I had all the wrong people, I had all the wrong machines, I had all the wrong infrastructure, policies, procedures, vendors. And it was wrenching, it took years, this is not a snap of fingers. Over years we migrated to being in a much better place.
Our attitude is we’re going to try to improve one percent a day. We’re not going to just overnight go one hundred percent over. One of my biggest problems was, I had to find; how do you meet the guy from Glaxo? How do you meet the guy from Honeywell? How do you meet the guy from Eaton? How do you get in front of them when for thirty years we were selling bagel baskets, where I was well known in that world but nobody from Eaton knew me. How do I migrate? That was another challenge I had. But we, over the years, have completely moved away and now we do no work in the bagel basket business. Did I answer your question? I mean it was step by step, first we trained, the management team, we started bringing on engineers. One thing we have not talked about, right now twenty percent of my employees are mechanical engineers. So we started off first with the draftsmen, then we elevated up over time, to now we have twenty percent of my employees base are mechanical engineers. So, everything takes time. We slowly migrated to getting to the right place. We’re not perfect but it’s step-by-step.
(Q) Building on top of that same question, did you use any brand of strategy? Did you have any differentiator to just appeal to your potential new clients? To leverage to that nice manufacturing scale? How did you do that?
(A) We met many of our clients through the Internet. A big factor is reorders. When you get the job at a Parker Hannifin or at Eaton, you do a really good job and the client reorders. What will happen is, a lot of times, our process engineers, our mechanical engineers are in a bull-pen with 200 hundred other mechanical engineers, or a hundred other mechanical engineers sitting near them, and they talk and word gets around. Literally they tell each other from cubicle to cubicle and this is how word spreads and this is how we grew. It was blocking and tackling one at a time. It was challenging.
A couple of other things I want to bring to your attention. Now-days, we talked a little about the green before. I think that’s an important way to get your employees engaged with your company. Near us in Baltimore, there’s a General Motors plant that’s one hundred percent landfill-free. I think it is possible to be one hundred percent green. We’re not there but were approaching it. We use all 100% recycled steel, all the incoming raw material, and we recycle one hundred percent of our scrap. I think a lot of our employees appreciate that, particularly, the younger generations. They are more committed to that kind of approach. We’re also analyzing our scrap by cell, so we measure; each cell is measured by how much scrap they use every day, so we can figure out how we can reduce waste and reduce scrap. This has proven to be a very good tool, to not only be good for the environment, but also improve your karma with the younger employees. I think that’s proven to be a good thing for us.
A couple of the other things we’ve done to help our company and this kind of gets back to some of the other questions, is that we’ve pursued a very innovative culture where we give cash rewards for really slick ideas. As I mentioned before we visit clients so we can understand their fit, form, and function, we can understand how they’re making things so we can come up with clever ways so we can be involved in what they’re doing. We can understand ways that we can improve their processes. We also look at ways to improve internal procedures, and we give cash bonuses for improving internal procedures so that they have again, skin in the game, to come up with innovative ideas. When you’re in these work cells you have a lot of latitude to improve your own cells so that you can get more baskets out per week, per day.
Another thing that I think is important is investment in the plant. I touched on that briefly. When I first bought the company, our fixed assets were depreciated down to $35,000. We had virtually all old equipment, really outdated stuff. Today we have over three million dollars-worth of equipment. This has been a very aggressive plan. I’ve never taken a dividend and I’ve constantly reinvested back into the plant, so our guys have state-of-the-art equipment. We’re very big into robotics and automation, and that has really empowered our employees to be more productive and get those reorders and make a better quality part the first time.
We do things like stress software. All of our mechanical engineers have stress software so they can analyze for the client; ok, this is probably where it’s going to fail. We could charge you this price; this is the price you’re were targeting but if I make the wires a little bit thicker it might last twenty times longer, and we will give them simulations to show them to demonstrate to the client this is the kind of extra effort were going to try to internalize what your needs are. So basically we’ve transformed from this commodity bagel basket company to a company focused on QEQ; Quality-Engineered, Quick. And that was critical to saving our company. The client wants great quality, they want some engineering help, and they want it really quick. That’s our niche and that’s what we focused on and that’s how we’ve invested our dollars. Every investment dollar-wise and people-wise has been to try to improve the QEQ experience for all of our prospective clients. This is the reason why we’re growing and this is the reason why we’re getting these reorders. Thank you very much and if you have any questions, I’d be happy to take them. Thank you.
Next Generation Manufacturing Summit features Drew Greenblatt, President of Marlin Steel November 15, 2011
Drew Greenblatt discusses Advanced Manufacturing at Marlin Steel during the Next Generation Manufacturing Summit in Austin Texas.
11/17/11
Press Release Nov. 17, 2011, 11:10 a.m. EST
GDS International's Next Generation Manufacturing US Summit 2011 Takes Place in Austin, Texas, Today
BRISTOL, England, November 17, 2011 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Next Generation Manufacturing US will take place today at Barton Creek Resort & Spa in Austin, Texas. The two day event will gather together leading executives from the manufacturing industry across North America in a relaxed, intimate, and vibrant environment to discuss pressing issues for the industry.
"With President Obama detailing at his State of the Union policy last year that the US "can't just stand still" for a better future - and with the services industry unable to take sole charge and push things forward - it's clear that the revival of North America's economy will lie in its capacity to manufacture." Said GDS International, the global business event company behind NG Manufacturing US. "It is vital that today's C-level manufacturing executives not only know how to adapt and innovate within an evolving market, but can take charge of their processes and lead an entire workforce towards a more secure future."
As well as comprehensive workshops, the summit involves panel discussions offering executives moderated, peer-led discussions on major industry issues. One-to-one meetings gives delegates the chance to meet with business analysts and analyst partners to discuss strategy and demands for a rapidly evolving industry.
A total of 16 workshops cover a range of exciting and pressing topics for the manufacturing industry. Topics include management techniques, lean manufacturing, disaster recovery, productivity, disruptive technology, sustainability, security, supply chain, mobility, and more.
Speakers include leading industry professionals such as Drew Greenblatt, President, Marlin Steel Wire Products; George Nickel, Director, Global Process Architecture, Johnson & Johnson; and Patrick McGivern, SVP Global Supply Chain Operations, Verifone.
Joe Aglio, Summit Director at GDS International, says, "We have always been proud of the quality of our summits, and we are very much looking forward to this years' Next Generation Manufacturing US summit. With such a great speaker lineup it will be one of our best events yet. Our events provide the environment for executives to meet and build valuable relationships that will lead to many exciting new ventures and innovations."
About GDS International:
GDS International is one of the most innovative events and media companies worldwide and a globally renowned producer of business-to-business summits, conferences, online information and advisory group gatherings.
Founded in 1993, GDS International specialises in meeting the B2B marketing needs of our clients. Having a strong presence in mature industrial sectors but a finger on the pulse of emerging markets - as well as up-and-coming B2B business verticals - means we are perfectly placed to capitalise on the exciting developments brought about by the advent of a globalised economy.
www.marketwatch.com
