While CCRM initially focused on a number of areas, it understood that building an industry requires core capabilities in manufacturing around the products being developed, and Canada’s strength in innovation and science had created incredible clinical infrastructure for testing products in clinical trials.

“Before anyone ever was talking about gaps in manufacturing, CCRM made it a focus,” says Dr. Michael May, President and CEO.

So why is manufacturing important to an entity like CCRM that’s charged with helping develop technologies, and create and scale companies? “Manufacturing creates stickiness,” May says. “When manufacturing is done locally and companies are created locally, companies are apt to stay in the local ecosystem if the manufacturing is done there.”

Sticky factor
That vital sticky factor also extends to clinical infrastructure, “great” scientific communities like downtown Toronto, and access to capital.

On the manufacturing front, CCRM has employed a three-pronged strategy, with the first being to develop core technology platforms to fill gaps in manufacturing workflows for these very specialized and complex cell and gene therapies, says May. This involves hardware, bioreactors, equipment for characterizing the product and producing it at scale.

About five years ago, supported by the Canadian government, the company launched a partnership with Cytiva, formerly GE Healthcare, to build a centre of excellence for cell and manufacturing technologies where CCRM could tackle bottlenecks in cell and gene therapy workflow.

That partnership, and helping set up the Centre for Advanced Therapeutic Cell Technologies (CATCT), was one of Philip Vanek’s career highlights. Vanek, now CTO and a partner at Gamma Biosciences, was at GE Healthcare when he met with May in 2014.

“That was the brainchild of an almost chance meeting between Michael and myself, along with the opportunity and the foresight of the Canadian government to ask, what are the ingredients you need to help fulfill the mission of CCRM?” Vanek says.

“I thought if CCRM with their extreme visibility and ability could bring talent into the organization and offer CDMO types of services, and GE bring this ability to invent and commercialize new equipment for manufacturing, it felt like a win-win-win for everybody involved.”

That partnership with Cytiva drew worldwide attention for its size, scope, and vision of not only tackling gaps in technology, but also helping with the scale-up of therapeutics companies.

A lab for learning
“It really was a great place to try new technologies and work with partners to bring their technologies in,” says Vanek. “It was a great laboratory for learning about manufacturing and what it would take to manufacture cell and gene therapies.”

That technology translated to better understanding of processes for different types of cell and gene therapies, and the subsequent establishment of the CCVP (Centre for Cell and Vector Production), where new approaches are tested before they’re moved into manufacturing.

Vital support from FedDev Ontario, the Canadian government, and also Cytiva has played a huge role in the company’s ongoing success and ground-breaking discoveries.

The second prong of CCRM’s strategy was the launch of a clinical GMP-compliant manufacturing facility in 2019 in partnership with the University Health Network (UHN). This sizeable facility boasts 10 clean rooms, with two particularly designed for producing viral vectors used to modify cells.

“They represent an important kind of need and gap in the industry,” says May of the facility that employs close to 100 individuals and produces cell product for clinical trials for both academic and industry clients. “That’s important for the development of new therapeutics, but it’s also key to supporting companies being created in our ecosystems that need to take their products from development into clinical trials.”

The third pillar
The third pillar, which CCRM is working on now, involves taking manufacturing to the commercial scale via a partnership with McMaster Innovation Park in Hamilton.

While this is the final stage of support for companies that go through clinical trials and need commercial manufacturing, it’s also a place for companies from around the world to manufacture with a North American market in mind.

“After they’ve been tested in the clinical phase facility, we do plan on establishing them in the commercial facility to create a differentiated CDMO that’s seamlessly connected to the kind of manufacturing ecosystem that CCRM has created, but also to the pipeline of companies and technologies that CCRM has established to create this integrated comprehensive manufacturing strategy from front to back,” says May.

CCRM’s vision for what it’s done to date in terms of company creation is very ecosystem driven, and to that end, this industrial site in Hamilton will help create and extend its manufacturing ecosystem by setting up not just a manufacturing facility, but also supply chain and logistics partners, while training technicians to work in GMP facilities.

To solidify that strategy around training, CCRM has launched a new company with a sister organization in Montreal called CellCAN.

CATTI, the Canadian Advanced Therapy Training Institute, will work with the other non-profit, academic, and for-profit entities to launch its content and offerings in training for manufacturing over the next several years.

“We want to create companies that can be sustainable because of the manufacturing, and supported by the manufacturing capability,” says May. “Also, the companies we’re creating become clients of the manufacturing business that we do here.

“There’s this mutual feedback between creating companies that benefit from the manufacturing, while having the manufacturing building the clientele in the customer pipeline over time for the manufacturing.”

Canada’s capital
Although Canada is a small country in the scheme of things, it has great human capital and the desire to push boundaries, says Claudia Zylberberg, founder and now Executive Chair of Akron Biotech, from Boca Raton, FL. She became a CCRM board member two years ago, working with the board for advancements, understanding needs, giving advice and helping new companies looking to be part of CCRM.

“I think Canada is poised to grow because of the intellectual and human capital,” says Zylberberg. “I think that’s what CCRM is looking for, the expansion of more infrastructure for action for cell and gene therapy and manufacturing, which I think is the piece that’s maybe missing right now.”

Being close to the U.S. also provides an opportunity to grow this space and new modalities of therapies across borders, she adds, along with expanding its global footprint.

CCRM’s success building the foundation as a public-private partnership with academic and Industry partners and investors started with a team and core abilities that included manufacturing. Now, CCRM is making investments in companies and has supported 14 of them over the last several years.

In addition to the investment activity happening in this phase, CCRM has leveraged its manufacturing capabilities into a business that gives it the credibility to grow to the commercial scale in the next phase of manufacturing through partnerships with Cytiva and clients around the world.

Now, with only 10 percent of its funding coming from the government, CCRM as a public-private partnership is self-sustainable as well.

“We’re here to serve the community and build the ecosystem, so we want it to be sustainable to attract capital on the back of our investments and support,” says May. “Sustaining the CCRM model is done by establishing partnerships in different places in the world so we can create hubs that all work together under the kind of leadership banner we’ve created in Canada.”

The microscope turns
The COVID pandemic, adds May, has put a microscope on life sciences and manufacturing, creating an opportunity to leverage the learnings from this pandemic into not just vaccine support, but a broad bio-manufacturing strategy.

“We talked quite a bit at the beginning of COVID about how we’ve offshored almost all of our capacity manufacturing,” says Vanek. “It’s obviously stressed a lot of supply chains globally and showed us where some of the kinks in the armour were.”

In the long run, he adds, it does show the promise of these therapies and probably more importantly, the pace at which we can adopt and bring technologies on board.

May adds that he hasn’t yet seen investment in a strategy from the government. “It’s more investing in buildings and capacity and attracting foreign companies to come and create capacity, but there’s a big difference between capacity and capability.”

Both of these are needed to build ecosystems, and therein lies the real opportunity in bio-manufacturing in Canada, he says: By tying the ecosystem strategy to investments in bio-manufacturing, you can create a robust ecosystem for sustainability.

“We want to tie all this together in a coordinated and collaborative, very Canada-like strategy so we can continue to punch above our weight in manufacturing, like we punch above our weight in lots of other things,” says May.

An issue of talent
While CCRM’s purpose is tackling the big problems in cell and gene therapy, it also has its own issues to handle, including access to talent and capital.

In a rapidly growing industry with high demand for talent, CCRM must integrate the development of talent into its strategy, first attracting it and then retaining it in its ecosystem. “Otherwise all our good folks will be drawn away and we’ll need to attract others to come to Canada,” says May.

Ultimately, CCRM’s reason for doing the work they do is the promise and potential of cell and gene therapy, and without manufacturing in place, those therapy developers and their discoveries won’t get to the patients, he adds.

“They need us and Canada needs us because there’s nothing else like us in Canada. Without the ability to manufacture, the therapies will go offshore, and other jurisdictions will have first access to them.”

What’s just as important as the manufacturing is a stake in the ground to keep the companies they’re building here, May says, and the most important issue in all of this is the people, and keeping people in Canada.

Revolutionizing medicine
“There’s a health benefit that we’re talking about here, but there’s also an economic benefit to the strategy that’s really at the crux of our mission,” he says. “Cell and gene therapies are living therapies and incorporate living tissues which makes them very complex to manufacture.”

The advantage of such therapies, however, is they can provide cures.

For blood cancers like leukemia they can now take T-cells from a patient’s blood, genetically engineer those T-cells outside of the body to particularly target the tumour, and then infuse them back in the patient to destroy the tumour.

“The response rates from those types of therapies are 70 to 90 percent complete cures,” says May. “That’s unprecedented in medical therapy, especially for cancer. These are therapies that will revolutionize medicine, but they also require us to rethink manufacturing in significant ways. That’s why the technology development is an important part of our strategy.”

It’s also why the clinical phase is vital – ultimately leading to the commercial scale where everything comes together to generate impact.

“Why let someone else in the world develop all that knowhow?” asks May. “We should have it embedded in Canada as well as anywhere else.”

Zylberberg agrees. “I’ve been involved in government advising for different grants that were available there, and I’m understanding the Canadian government can see the value of having their own manufacturing and their own commercial scale available for their population and even for the world. It’s a great asset and a great action for the government to act upon.”

With Health Canada having approved numerous advanced therapies, the promise and potential of regenerative therapy is already making a difference.

“The future is here,” says May. “These therapies are being given to patients now and CCRM is an important player in helping those therapy developers.”

The post Promise and Potential: Filling the Gaps in Cell and Gene Therapy<p class="company">CCRM</p> appeared first on Business In Focus Magazine.

Founded by Alex Kuperman and his father in 1989, ABI LTD has developed high-calibre technologies and customized solutions for many stages of the commercial baking process, while preserving a reputation for reliability among bakers everywhere.

As a result of these abilities, plus the robust design and ABI’s ‘built-in” quality, growing numbers of bakeries in North America are turning to the company’s solutions to produce baked goods, from bagels to pretzels, and pizzas to sweet pastries and breads.

In recent years, as the company grew from 16 employees to 80, its reputation crossed the Atlantic to Paris where TMG (Together Means Greater), the company that in 2018 had acquired Mecatherm, the French bakery equipment industry giant, sat up and took notice. The result was that after a series of negotiations, TMG announced it had acquired a majority stake in ABI LTD, inviting the Canadian company to step onto the global stage as a sister company to Mecatherm. This partnership gives Mecatherm access to North American markets and ABI LTD to the 80 countries in which Mecatherm equipment currently operates.

In a joint press release, issued simultaneously in Paris and Toronto on January 5, 2021, ABI LTD is described as “a premier North American bakery solutions provider recognized for its bagel and pretzel production equipment, its robotic solutions, and its automation equipment. Led by co-founder and CEO Alex Kuperman, ABI LTD has sales of roughly $20M (CAD), strong growth, and deep technical expertise supported by a team of nearly 80 people.”

Declared Olivier Sergent, President of TMG and Mecatherm, “ABI’s know-how for integrating robotic solutions in production lines, its leading position in bagels in North America, and the reliability of its equipment – widely recognized by the market – convinced us.”

Recently we enjoyed a teleconference interview with Alex Kuperman, ABI’s co-founder and CEO; Carl Heinlein, President and COO; Eric Miedema, Engineering Manager; and Jadecy Kidane, who joined the company this past April as marketing and communications specialist.

Kuperman’s story begins in the former USSR, where he was born in what is now Ukraine, in the city of Odessa, before emigrating to Canada with his parents in 1977. Upon arrival his father began working for a company that was manufacturing bagel-making equipment, “and within a year I started working there as well, doing odd jobs after school. I really loved the work because I love being around machinery,” he tells us.

After graduating from Ryerson University in Toronto with a degree in mechanical engineering, he joined the company as an engineer and began designing machines. “There was a bagel boom at the time,” he recalls, and bagels had just started appearing on North American tables.

The company for which the Kupermans worked was one of the first to manufacture a fully automated bagel production plant, but after initial success, it was sold to a US conglomerate and moved to Florida.

The Kupermans were not left workless however, and their combined expertise as millwright and engineer “gave us a foot in the door,” Alex Kuperman says. “We completed some local projects and customers were happy with our work, and we continued to service customers and extend the business by selling bakery equipment and coming up with small innovations.

“But we decided we needed to start manufacturing as we didn’t want to be just a service and re-sale company. With my engineering background, we came up with the idea of providing automation to the bagel forming process. We developed and patented it and that is how ABI started in 1989.”

In addition to manufacturing bagel-making machinery in their first facility in Concord, ON, Kuperman designed a multi-belt bagel former and began automating other parts of the process, including placement of bagels onto the boards, and boiling and adding toppings to bagels, “and we slowly expanded our range of machines that would give consistent results.”

Today most of the world’s bagel-making industry is using either ABI’s equipment or equipment the company supports.

Robotics can be found in an arsenal of tools that industrial bakeries typically use to move products from point A to point B, from production line into packaging. ABI, however, has produced application-specific robotic tools which increase consistency and quality of end products – in the case of this example, bread.

Once the dough has risen and is placed in the pan, the upper surface of the dough must be scored to allow gasses created during the baking process to escape. As the temperature within the bread rises, the water content in the dough becomes steam and if the surface hasn’t been scored or cut to a precise depth, the result will be an ugly, cracked loaf.

But scoring bread on a high production line is a boring job, as Kuperman points out. “If the bakery is using unskilled labour, the quality of the bread will suffer, but on the other hand qualified bakers don’t want to do this job. So here is where robots come in, making the depth of the cut consistent throughout the entire process.”

ABI’s ultrasonic blades are stronger and more durable than conventional blades, Kuperman says. They are flexible in terms of the look they create because the vibrational amplitude, ranging from 20 to 40 kHz, can be adjusted to create bread that has an artisanal appearance, and as it’s an ultrasonic blade, it doesn’t have to be cleaned often as nothing sticks to it.

Robots are also used in packaging, as one might expect. But in addition, ABI has designed a cake decorator that can create piping designs that previously would have needed highly skilled cake artists; a robot that can brand a loaf of bread with a bakery’s name or logo; and a water jet robot that can cut through a cake to create unique designs.

ABI, however, is about more than robotics, as Carl Heinlein explains. “It’s about providing solutions to customers. Many come to us because competitors have given them a catalogue-driven range of equipment. Even though we do see the economies in having a standardized product, many of our customers appreciate our ability to customize, to address exactly the problem they have and solve that specific problem,” he says.

“We do that very well. We manufacture on site and do it more quickly than many of our competitors because we have a shorter cycle from order to delivery and we use our own teams for installation and commissioning the equipment. We own the whole process, from winning the design, to manufacturing it, installing it, and getting it up and running,” he explains.

“We get it done, we stand by our product, and, because our customers come first, we make the sacrifices we need to until we have a happy customer who is satisfied with our solution.”

To continuously improve the company’s manufacturing abilities, adds Eric Miedema, “We’ve focused a lot on Lean Manufacturing training, especially with regards to reduction of waste, and Lean Six Sigma Training, which is about reducing variation, and that has helped everyone be part of the change.”

Repeat business plays a leading role in ABI’s success, and Kuperman notes that he’s just come off the phone with a customer ABI has worked with for 15 years and who is now expanding. “We appreciate the quality of the product you’ve supplied, and want you to be an integral part of our growth,” the client told him.

The company’s expertise, he says, is “such that ABB (one of ABI’s choice suppliers and a leading global technology company) calls up and says, ‘we have this problem, and can you guys solve it?’”

After 25 years, Kuperman and his father came to a realization of the difficulty of doing everything that needs to be done to grow a company and that started them thinking about ABI’s future.

“We understood that a small company like ours has only two ways forward: either to remain a family-oriented operation (indeed both my mother and wife were also involved in the company’s origin); or to persevere and make growth our focus. This is when I found Carl and he joined the leadership team as COO and President, and together we began implementing changes to develop a top-tier and professional management culture.”

ABI moved from a 20,000 square-foot facility in Concord to a 40,000 square-foot manufacturing facility in Richmond Hill. The move proved useful when he and Heinlein set out to streamline and mature the company processes and fill in gaps with the necessary skilled people, which increased its workforce to 80 team members.

They believed that production was in keeping with global standards, but they hired an HR professional to organize the workforce and ensure hiring policies were inclusive. Today there are at least 15 different cultures or ethnicities employed at ABI, and the office staff and executive comprise some 50 percent women. Currently, the company is working to increase the number of women employed on the floor.

While ABI moved to professionalize its business practices, there’s been an effort to keep the family atmosphere. “I’ve gotten to know people here in a short time,” Kidane says, “and it feels like more than a team, but at the same time there is a continuous effort to improve the business processes with an understanding of what value that can bring and what that means for us as a company in a competitive market.”

“We must have done something right,” Kuperman says, “because a year ago, a large company from France came to us and said, ‘we really like what you’ve built, and we think your product line complements ours. We are not competitors; we have certain expertise and you have certain expertise, and we think that together we can achieve better results than we would with each of us going our separate paths.’ Negotiating during the pandemic presented some difficulties, but because we thought alike and we viewed the industry from the same perspective, we were able to complete this deal. TMG (Together Means Greater) acquired a majority stake in ABI and I am very optimistic about both companies’ futures together,” he says.

“I always thought Mecatherm, (founded in 1964 in Paris and acquired by TMG in 2018) was a very advanced and forward-looking company. Their equipment looked sharp, their performance was known, and we had worked on a number of projects for the same customers, so we had a firsthand opportunity to observe their professionalism and the quality of their work,” shares Kuperman.

“When they approached us, I was extremely proud that we had developed the type of company that would attract interest from a global company.”

Heinlein says the company mission now is to “double our business in the next five years, just as we doubled it in the last five, and to continue with our mission to empower every bakery to maximize its potential – so that may be through robotics, investment in R&D surrounding artificial intelligence, or just automation of existing plants. We are there for companies who want to reduce their labour costs and their inefficiencies.”

Adds Kuperman, “We firmly believe that investing in AI technologies will help us achieve our goals,” and proceeds with an example – a current project that addresses complex issues of machine vision when dealing with massive numbers of baked goods moving quickly along a conveyor belt, all jumbled together.

“It’s an ambitious project, but I’m happy to say that our research team recently reported that we were now able to identify individual pieces with 99 percent accuracy. That’s a phenomenal achievement from where we stand.” And it is one that’s set to positively affect bakeries around the globe.

The post The Future of Bakery Automation<p class="company">ABI LTD</p> appeared first on Business In Focus Magazine.

After the First World War, America’s scientific industry took off and the company flourished. Kewaunee jumped at the chance to grow and expand its dealer organization. By the 1930s, the company had broadened its product line to offer both wood and steel laboratory furniture and accessories.

Kewaunee became a government contractor for the Air Corps and a key supplier for the Manhattan Project during the Second World War. When the United States underwent a massive increase in technological advancements following the war, Kewaunee Scientific Corporation was there to meet the demand for high quality laboratory equipment. The company built a spacious new facility in Statesville, North Carolina to help keep up with orders and remains headquartered in that location to this day. Since then, the company has added direct sales offices in India and Singapore, grew the Statesville location to include three manufacturing facilities to serve domestic and international markets, and opened a manufacturing facility in Bangalore, India to serve the Asian markets.

Today, with decades of experience under its belt, Kewaunee is a worldwide leader in the design, manufacture, and installation of technical, laboratory, and healthcare furniture products. These products range widely, and include everything from fume hoods, moveable workstations, and biological safety cabinets to laminate casework, adaptable modular systems, epoxy resin work surfaces and sinks, and standalone benches.

The company’s clientele has grown along with its product line. Kewaunee supplies industry leaders across multiple fields, including government agencies, research centers, universities, and the healthcare industry. The company offers a full suite of solutions for all of these clients, from design and layouts to complete installations.

In July 2020, Kewaunee Scientific Corporation launched a Technical Service Organization within Saudi Arabia. Established in the capital city of Riyadh, the organization will enable access to diverse local talent and support, and will grow the company’s presence in the Middle East and throughout Africa.

“We expect the Middle East and Africa to be growth markets for Kewaunee over the long term as investments continue to be made in these regions to modernize their respective economies,” Thomas D. Hull III, President and CEO of Kewaunee Scientific Corporation, said in a company press release. “We have invested in building relationships with key customers in the Middle East over the past decade and have delivered some of the largest and most complex laboratory projects in the region.”

B. Sathyamurthy, Vice President of Kewaunee Scientific Corporation Singapore and Managing Director of International Operations, added in the same press release, “Having delivered many prestigious projects in the Middle East, our next logical step was to be closer to our customers so we can better serve them, bringing them Kewaunee’s full range of products and services. Thanks to our enhanced presence in Saudi Arabia, we expect to be more successful in building lasting, recurring relationships with our customers in the region. This regional presence will also help our team offer more tailored solutions for the market.”

The company’s success was showcased in December 2020, when the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) honored Kewaunee International Group for its “Customer Centricity” at the National Conference on Consumer Awareness & Protection in Digital Era.

“Kewaunee International was again recognized by CII as an industry leader in customer excellence, recognizing our team’s unwavering focus on serving our customers,” Sathyamurthy said of the award in a company press release. “As the market leader in laboratory furniture and technical products, we recognize the importance of delighting our customers in all aspects of their dealings with Kewaunee. Earning this award during the coronavirus pandemic makes the award even more special and reflects the resilience of the Kewaunee International team during an unprecedented year.”

Hull added in the same press release, “Everything we do begins and ends with our customers and our desire to repeatedly earn their trust as they invest in projects that require the specialized laboratory furniture and technical products in which Kewaunee specializes.”

In July 2021, Kewaunee’s International division announced a strategic alliance with Schneider Electric that will provide key international markets, primarily in Asia and the Middle East, with integrated, turnkey solutions for market-leading laboratories. “We are proud to enter into this alliance just as the pandemic accelerates the needs of the life sciences and healthcare sectors to reimagine and redesign the operation and functioning of smart laboratories,” Manish Kumar, Senior Vice President, Digital Buildings at Schneider Electric said in a Kewaunee press release. “We envision a future where our technical expertise and Kewaunee International’s prowess in manufacturing and infrastructure will render all-encompassing smart labs to create more sustainable ecosystems for our customers.”

B. Sathyamurthy added in the same press release, “The future of laboratory infrastructure is changing and Kewaunee is investing and building capabilities to lead the laboratory 4.0 solution transformations for our customers. We are excited to partner with Schneider to provide these cutting-edge capabilities to our customers and grow together as future-ready companies.”

In August 2021, Kewaunee Scientific announced a new partnership with NuAire Exchange. NuAire has been manufacturing and distributing a wide array of laboratory and pharmacy products since 1971, making the companies a natural fit for one another. NuAire is known for its market-leading equipment designed for extreme conditions, including ultra-low-temperature freezers, animal transfer stations, animal refuse workstations, restricted access barrier systems, general purpose centrifuges, biosafety cabinets, containment ventilated enclosures, polypropylene casework, laminar airflow workstations, polypropylene fume hoods, CO₂ incubators, and more. The partnership will give NuAire access to Kewaunee’s global distribution channels while simultaneously expanding Kewaunee’s product range to include NuAire’s offerings, giving customers more options for superior solutions.

“The global market for products that Kewaunee and NuAire offer continues to grow,” Hull said in the company press release regarding the partnership. “The biosafety cabinet market is growing rapidly due to increased investment in research and development activities requiring the safety and performance of these products. Providing Kewaunee’s customers access to NuAire’s portfolio enhances our value proposition as customers are looking for partners with the capability to provide turnkey solutions when building a new laboratory or modernizing an existing facility. The partnership is a win-win for both organizations, leveraging the strengths of two market leaders.”

In July of this year, Kewaunee launched the EVERHUTCH healthcare brand. The goal is to provide products to healthcare professionals that will organize their workspaces better and increase efficiency. Developed by a team of expert product designers and tested by local healthcare professionals, EVERHUTCH is now available nationally through a dedicated distribution network. Ideal for both healthcare facilities and clinical laboratories, products include specially designed procedure carts, procedure cabinets, utility carts, and tables.

“We have spent the past year developing a portfolio of products and the distribution network necessary to bring this exciting new brand quickly to market,” Hull said in a company press release. “EVERHUTCH leverages more than a century of experience by Kewaunee, producing high quality products which are utilized in demanding environments. The healthcare furniture and storage markets are projected to grow significantly over the balance of the decade as investment is made in facilities requiring these products. I am confident that there is opportunity for Kewaunee to quickly grow market share.”

To be sure, the past two years have been packed with exciting endeavors for Kewaunee, from new partnerships to new product lines. After 115 years of ongoing growth and success, one can only wonder what will come next for this long-lived, market-leading company.

The post New Products, New Partnerships<p class="company">Kewaunee Scientific Corporation</p> appeared first on Business In Focus Magazine.

Belmont County Port Authority invited two of the region’s up-and-coming business leaders, Ohio Gig and MPR Transloading, to tell us more about how they are helping to propel the county forward with their game-changing contributions to this fast-growing local economy.

Belmont County’s position in the Wheeling, WV-OH Metropolitan Statistical Area of West Virginia, near Pittsburgh, Columbus, and Cleveland, makes it a transportation hub with easy access to Interstate 70, Interstate 470, and Ohio Route 7. The region offers commercial and private landing strips, Class I and Class II rail with access to the Norfolk Southern Railway, the Wheeling & Lake Erie Railway Company, and the Ohio River, which have been transformed into valuable assets by MPR Transloading. As the gig economy continues to expand, high-speed fiber optics service is being introduced by Ohio Gig, bringing all businesses and students the opportunity to experience modern connectivity.

Larry Merry, Executive Director, is full of praise for the recently founded firm. “Ohio Gig is making tremendous investment in our community. We are so excited that we were able to get connected with the company last fall. We worked with them in getting an agreement put together. To have someone come in and provide an infrastructure that is so necessary in today’s world,” he says.

Merry points out that, while there are communities in the county with sufficient internet supply, the infrastructure installed by Ohio Gig will elevate the entire county’s economy to a new level. For people and new business “to be able to come to Eastern Ohio and be able to get great, unbelievable fiber internet service makes us very excited. It’s important for development, quality of life, and people being able to enjoy a rural area from where they can connect with the rest of the world,” Merry adds.

The fiber optics company began with Little Miami Gig in 2020, with the mandate to create opportunities in local communities. Ohio Gig broke ground on the first phase of the $132 million Belmont County project in July this year. Belmont County will see the start of the second, third, and fourth phases in 2022, each of which will reportedly take around three to five years to complete.

“When businesses are looking at an area, communication is their number one concern. If they are going to compete globally and communicate with the world, they have to have great internet connectivity. What Ohio Gig provides is far superior to what is available in most of Eastern Ohio,” says Merry.

It all started around 2016 when the Hunter family started looking at ways to supply their fabrication company and their 1792 Revolution-era farm in Warren County, with high-speed internet. Prices were prohibitive, and the search led to Hunter’s commitment to finding a solution in the form of Fiber Capital Partners, which now acts as a funding partner for the Ohio Gig business group. Tim Berelsman, Chief Executive Officer of Ohio Gig, recalls being introduced by a colleague to the Hunter family in 2016 when he was running a consortium of independent broadband providers.

Nicholas Hunter proceeded to garner as much investor support from the local area and across Ohio Appalachia as he could, charting the way for the people of Belmont County to meet the future of business head-on. Hunter proposed going into business with Berelsman, who finally agreed in 2019. “We started up a company to bring fiber into the home in Hunter’s rural area just outside of Mason, Ohio and called that company Little Miami Gig. We turned up our first customers in May 2020,” says Berelsman.

Then came a fortuitous meeting with Larry Merry and the Belmont County Port Authority. In December 2020, Jarrod Pantier joined the Ohio Gig team as Chief Operating Officer. Pantier, from Fujitsu Network Communications, brought extensive expertise in project and construction management when he came to settle in Belmont County. Feasibility studies concluded in May 2021, and the starting date was agreed on for July this year.

“Our intention is to lay fiber past every business and every residence in Belmont County and to provide world-class, high-speed, high reliability, fiber internet services with low latency. We are installing infrastructure that will serve the needs of the Belmont County businesses and residents today, but also well into the future,” says Berelsman. He hopes that the service will strengthen the oil, gas, transportation, and other industries that contribute to the local gross domestic product, which will allow the county to become a global leader.

Ohio Gig is also fast becoming part of local communities. Together with Fiber Capital Partners, it committed Chromebooks and $35,000 to a Belmont County Backpack Program in partnership with Union Local High School and the local Farm Bureau. At the beginning of COVID-19, Ohio Gig’s work was deemed an essential service. As school students in many places were hard-pressed to find internet access to complete their school work off-premises and with no restaurants and libraries offering free wifi, the company had its work cut out.

Suddenly providing access to high-speed internet to everyone instead of only higher education institutions became imperative to the county’s education. In some rural areas, the need for internet access became so dire that school districts provided busses with hotspot boosters where students could come when they needed to complete projects and communicate with teachers online. “That was the short-term fix. Now we’re working on the long-term fix,” says Berelsman.

As the county grows, this long-term solution will continue to expand. “We accelerated our work where we knew people didn’t have any internet. While starting up Little Miami Gig, “we made sure that every time we went into somebody’s home, we wore masks. We did everything we could while still delivering that essential service where people need it the most,” he adds.

People in even the most remote areas in the Union Local School District will begin to see the arrival of excellent internet services thanks to this dynamic collaboration. It started with an area west of Saint Clairsville, Ohio, where the regional data center is located. A total of fourteen hundred miles of fiber is planned with estimated growth, according to Berelsman, at twenty to twenty-five percent over the next two to four decades.

The fiber optic project is financed by both public and grant funds and will rely on subscribers later. More funding means that the estimated five-year completion time per region can be minimized to three years, bringing the overall project timeframe down to seven years. Responsible for around half of the construction work, Ohio Gig is confident of its future in the county. In addition, its technology is ready for the next wave of home entertainment appliances that will replace copper connections with fiber soon, according to Berelsman.

“We expect the next generation of electronics to come out sometime around the second quarter of next year or so. We’re getting ready for the next platform as soon as chipset manufacturing catches up,” Berelsman says.

Since the first settlers began pushing west, the economic lifeblood of Eastern Ohio has been the Ohio River, and it’s on those shores that another significant economic contributor to Belmont County’s success has begun to leave its mark on the region as well as its industry.

MPR Transloading & Energy Services is a multi-mode transportation facility that moves freight and bulk materials from the Ohio River onto the trucks and railcars that carry them through on the last leg to their destination.

Natalie Brown, President of MPR, is proud to be part of a family business that provides quality employment opportunities to the region while passing along significant cost savings to customers. By utilizing MPR’s facility to transload a variety of commodities, companies avoid some of the transportation costs associated with moving freight further north where the river narrows and hooks east. Once offloaded at MPR, materials are within one day’s drive for more than sixty percent of the U.S. and Canadian populations.

“As a community and as the port authority, we are excited about the fact that a local company has such a valuable location, not only as a job provider for the community – because they have been a great employer with their operation – but I also look at it as infrastructure,” says Merry. Highlighting concerns such as the ever-increasing price of energy and other looming challenges, he praises MPR for its proven capabilities, cost-effectiveness, and efficiency in the face of adversity.

MPR is strategically nestled in the Bellaire Industrial Park, less than a mile from major North-South and East-West transportation routes with easy access to industry centers in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Columbus, and others along the East Coast. According to Brown, there is a growing interest in using the waterways to transport materials due to the limited capacity and rising costs associated with trucking. Moving seventy truckloads to a single barge eliminates approximately 1,700 tons moving across the roadways.

In 2015, the company expanded its capabilities to include a dedicated terminal where frac sand, used in the hydraulic fracturing of rock, is delivered to MPR via barge and transferred to MPR Sand Terminal’s automated frac sand facility, which boasts the largest ground storage in the region. Trucks are received 24/7/365 to be live loaded on scales with impressive six-to-nine-minute load times.

“What is exceptional about MPR is our operational capabilities coupled with state-of-the-art equipment and the ability to unload or load barges around the clock. Our expanded dock is over 850’ long, allowing continuous feed to our storage facilities,” Brown states.

The company revealed a new fifty-acre riverfront expansion earlier this year that forms part of a greater collaboration with assistance from JobsOhio, OhioSE, the Belmont County Port Authority, and others, for a total investment of $9.5 million. The expansion is also in the Bellaire Industrial Park, only one-half mile south of MPR’s current location – a stone’s throw from interstates I-470 and I-70 – and possesses two large warehouses with room for additional development.

The projected development of this property, with help from JobsOhio; OMEGA; Appalachian Growth Capital; the Ohio Rail Development Commission; and WesBanco, comprises the addition of rail facilities with the capability to hold a unit train. Brown stresses that the property is unique because it not only has river access, but frontage on both the Wheeling & Lake Erie (Class II) and Norfolk Southern (Class I) railways that converge on the site. The expansion will allow MPR to facilitate transloading from river to rail and from rail to river.

“This expansion is not only going to provide additional jobs and renewed development along the river, but it’s absolutely going to move us closer to our region once again being seen as a nexus of industry in this latest push toward updating our nation’s infrastructure,” says Brown, who also noted that this is, “… inviting to new customers coming to the area,” as well as opening the possibility of joint ventures with MPR.

While Belmont County was historically known for its agricultural and industrial economy, recessions and factors like changing global supply chains caused their share of misfortune. The county watched its traditional high earners like steel mills, power plants, and the bulk of its coal mines being driven to extinction over three decades and turned its sights toward energy, oil, and gas for economic survival. Gargantuan investments in these sectors as well as in river transportation and fiber optics are returning jobs to its people and, as a result, prosperity to this fast-growing, rural gem.

The post Prosperity through Connectivity<p class="company">Belmont County Port Authority</p> appeared first on Business In Focus Magazine.

Located just thirty miles from Manhattan, Stamford is an ideal choice for young adults who want to remain close to the lifestyle that only New York City can provide. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an enormous influx of new residents from the New York area.

The country’s most populous city has undergone a mass exodus, and many of these people have chosen Stamford for its proximity to New York, as well as its recreational opportunities, and its high safety ranking within the state. For these reasons, the city has seen its median age drop down quite a bit as roughly 25,000 people moved into the Fairfield County region.

“We’ve continued our apartment growth, and that’s really what led to the large population growth that we had here in Stamford,” explains Stamford Director of Economic Development Thomas Madden. In addition to its population growth, large companies have decided to set up here recently as well. “We’re finding now that companies are starting to chase the workforce, and the workforce has moved up to Stamford, so we’ve got companies following that workforce, which is kind of neat.”

To support the developing workforce, the city has programs specifically designed for the needs of local businesses. A new program called TechFWD was launched by the Ferguson Library and the Stamford Partnership to provide free courses to improve digital skills. Offering quality training and certifications, its two courses, ‘Content Marketing’ and ‘Grow With Google,’ offer people the opportunity to start a new career pathway in the growing digital sector. The program has piqued the interest of a few companies that are now hoping to sponsor it because it provides a sustainable workforce pipeline.

An exciting new program at the high school level has opened new possibilities for students. “We just got approval from the state to allow high school course credits for non-traditional internships. These are kids that may not choose the college or university route, but we will get them high school credits and get them into an internship leading to either an apprenticeship or a job right out of high school as well,” says Madden.

Besides the residential growth and workforce development, another reason businesses are choosing Stamford to start or relocate is the concierge service package offered by the city. The service is designed to make adjusting as easy as possible for any new company. From the building permit process and the zoning board to setting up meeting spaces and bringing in state services when necessary, the city provides resources and support every step of the way.

Businesses are also choosing Stamford for the same reason as residents, simply because it is a great place to live. Its location provides all the facilities and services of larger cities, combined with much more space and safety. “We are one of the safest cities within the New England region, and that’s really attributed to the great neighborhoods we have,” says Madden. “We have very proactive policing, and they are very much community-minded, which does a great job in making sure that we have a very low crime rate here.”

An abundance of recreational options are found across its parks and beaches because it is situated along the Long Island Sound, a tidal estuary between Connecticut and Long Island, New York, and the water plays a big part in the choice to move here for many people. The restaurant scene is also a bonus, as there are options for every kind of food.

A few of its restaurants have even garnered some fame on Instagram. Elm Street Diner’s great food is incredibly photo-worthy. Stillwater Sandwich Shoppe recently received attention when the woman with the largest mouth, according to the Guinness World Records, was able to put one of their enormous sandwiches in her mouth.

A large part of the economy in Stamford relies on tourism, and clearly, this was an industry heavily impacted by the pandemic. The city has recently seen tourism pick back up and its hotels are beginning to return to a normal state. Next year, it hopes to receive some tourism grant money to add more promotions that demonstrate all there is to be enjoyed in the area.

The city invested a lot of its money from the CARES Act into its infrastructure to support the continued expansion of the city, and fortunately, its infrastructure is keeping pace with its population and business growth. “The mayor has been really instrumental with making sure that we’re spending the right money, especially on our roadway systems. It’s been the right road at the right time and the right cost. His fiduciary responsibility is to make sure that the city continues on its path and keeps its AAA bond rating,” says Madden, referring to the previous mayor, David R. Martin. Stamford’s new mayor, Caroline Simmons, was just sworn in on December 1.

With all of the growth and relocation, there are many exciting developments to discuss. One new project is the Data Science Institute, a partnership between the University of Connecticut, entrepreneurial support network CTNext, and the city’s non-profit business collaborative StamfordNext to lead the way for Stamford to become the next big hub for technology and innovation. It will feature a technology incubator focused on data science and a startup studio for undergraduates to serve as a collaborative educational experience.

“We’ve had some great companies move in here to help solidify everything. Tomo Networks just set up here; the online mortgage company, Digital Currency Group just located here. They moved two of their locations out of NYC,” Madden says. “We have point pickup, which is a third-party delivery service, and we’ve got Amazon that’s looking to locate here.”

Although somewhat slowed by the pandemic, the city is continuing to work on its autonomous vehicle zone since it was chosen by the state as one of the test spaces. It is also following through with plans to develop one of the first interstate drone highways from Connecticut to New York.

On a side note, another sector that continues to see growth is the film industry. The high streaming and broadcasting capabilities here have increased the number of digital media and entertainment companies in the area. Just this summer, Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne were in Stamford shooting for The Good Nurse, and it looks as though this trend is only expected to grow. Other recent media productions include The Noel Diary, a Disney movie called Baskets, a Stephen King novella featuring Donald Sutherland, and a vast number of commercials.

With NBC Sports Group here, all of the Olympics footage broadcast by NBC Sports comes through every four years. This summer, NBC Sports brought approximately 1100 people into the city to help produce the Olympics. Other longstanding media companies in the city include The People’s Court, Maury, and the Steve Wilkos Show.

Stamford is officially the second-largest city within Connecticut as it has now outgrown New Haven. It is operating at a ninety-seven percent occupancy rate in its multi-family apartment buildings and is ranked second in Fairfield County in housing sales. In roughly two years, the population grew from 126,000 to 135,470, and the city has done an impressive job of keeping up with its growth in terms of infrastructure and workforce development.

“We’ve grown quite a bit, and I would think that we’re actually over 136,400 people just because of the new apartment buildings that have opened up,” Madden estimates. “We expect to grow more over the next five years, and I suspect that we will be moving into the 140,000s over the next three years as we get more apartment buildings opening up.”

The clear reason for such expansion within the city is that Stamford truly has it all. It is filled with the amenities that families and businesses want, and it provides real support to the community. “This administration has worked really hard over the last eight years to make sure we’re fulfilling the needs of our residents as well as the business community.”

The post On Track for Continued Growth in the New Hub of Technology and Innovation<p class="company">City of Stamford, CT</p> appeared first on Business In Focus Magazine.

Sweetwater County is home to the largest natural soda ash mine and production site on the planet. Operated by Genesis Alkali, the site is one the few in the world to produce soda ash naturally. “The rest of the world produces it through a chemical process,” explains David Caplan, Director of Communications for Genesis Alkali. He adds that the soda ash produced in Sweetwater County is “much more environmentally friendly,” because “we don’t use nearly the energy that the synthetic method involves.”

Soda ash, derived from trona, is a necessary ingredient in glass production, making Sweetwater County’s trona mines critical to the global glass supply. “About fifty percent of all the soda ash we make ends up going to glass makers all around the world,” Caplan says of the Genesis Alkali site. “They [use it to] make all kinds of glass—for car windshields, for buildings, for bottles, anything you can imagine that’s made out of glass. [Soda ash is] a very necessary ingredient in today’s world because we couldn’t survive without glass for very long.”

Genesis Alkali is currently expanding its Granger facility to create a next-generation mining operation that will utilize special technology created and patented by the company. The expansion will boost the community economically “in a time when we really need it, particularly in Wyoming with the coal industry really dissipating,” says Joe Vasco, Venture Manager for the $350 million project.

The construction phase will continue into 2023 and create approximately 350 jobs. “Having that many folks working here in Sweetwater County, obviously, that’s a huge economic impact,” Vasco points out. “They live here, so you know they’re spending the dollars here, so they’re boosting the economy here.” Once the facility is fully expanded, the site will employ around 125 permanent employees. “Those are fulltime, good jobs for this area,” Vasco says. “That’s a boost to the county and, really, the state of Wyoming.”

The company’s new technology will dissolve and pump trona to the surface, instead of having to send workers underground to mine it. “This site will be completely solution-fed,” Vasco says. “There’re no folks underground. 1.3 million tons would come strictly from solution processing technology that we created and patented.”

Caplan adds that, “If we look out into the future—twenty, fifty years from now, a hundred years from now—making soda ash this way with the water we pump down into these underground mines with no miners underground anymore—that really is the wave of the future. That’s how soda ash will be made decades from now, and we’re doing it right now. We’re pioneering this technology.”

The advantage is economic. “You take away a lot of the fixed costs and variable costs associated with hard-rock mining,” Vasco says. “You trade it for pumping costs, which is more cost-effective. At the end of the day, [it] is a very cost-competitive business that will be here for the long haul.”

Genesis Alkali is not the only operation that sees big potential in Sweetwater County’s trona deposits. The Pacific and Atlantic Soda Company is currently in the proposal phase of developing a trona facility in Sweetwater County. Ciner’s trona mine has recently been approved for a major expansion and construction is slated to begin in the near future.

In addition, Sweetwater County’s airport is undergoing renovations, making travel in and out of the area easier for people looking to do business here.

Sweetwater County managed to overcome the pandemic’s economic challenges by coming together as a community. “We’re very resilient here,” says Kayla McDonald, economic development specialist of the Sweetwater EDC. “We’re very community-focused. When businesses were struggling, everybody rallied together to support one another. We had several businesses that were facing critical shutdown—small businesses—and the community supported them to help them get through.”

McDonald goes on to explain that COVID “taught our community to be more proactive in working together and finding that synergy,” and that Sweetwater County has become “very self-sufficient.” For example, the county embraced a diversification initiative originally proposed by the state of Wyoming and took it to the next level. “They identified sites within the state that would be energy hubs or innovation areas, and Sweetwater County took that initiative, and we started doing our own research and identified our own sites,” McDonald says.

As a result, the county is now on phase two of the development of thousands of acres located near the airport on Middle Baxter Road. Currently, Sweetwater County is seeking a state grant for a feasibility study to determine the site’s potential as a renewable energy hub for the region. The next step in the process will include looking at partnerships with companies in target industries.

Sweetwater County recently submitted a proposal for the chance to locate the State of Wyoming’s first nuclear reactor project. In November, TerraPower announced Kemmerer, Wyoming as the preferred site for the Natrium™ reactor demonstration project, which is a TerraPower and GE-Hitachi technology, and is one of two competitively-selected advanced reactor demonstration projects (ARDP) supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Sweetwater County will be a key component to this project announcement with Kemmerer being located in Lincoln County, which is about an hour away from Sweetwater County.

McDonald says, “We expect to see some economic impact from this project once it is operational. We also believe that our skilled workforce will be instrumental in aiding in filling jobs and skills needed to help fill the employment gaps.”

Sweetwater County’s potential for attracting new projects goes far beyond nuclear power due to its skilled, qualified workers. “We have a strong workforce,” says Eric Bingham, Land Use Director for the Sweetwater EDC. “They could move into a manufacturing-type facility with the skills that they have here locally. That’s always the key with business attraction and development.”

Western Wyoming Community College is particularly focused on workforce training and development. “Our community college is right in the top ten in the nation in community colleges,” McDonald says. “They actually have industry programs… They have onsite training for anybody. So if you’re working in the trona mine or in the coalmine and you need additional education, our community college partners with existing industry to get their employees educated, to go through the proper training.”

Additionally, the Southwest Manufacturing Partnership, established in 2018 by the mining industry and other partners, offers a certificate program through the community college “to help the pipeline of operators through the different mines around here,” McDonald says. “So basically, it’s one certificate, and those students that go through that training are a hundred percent placed within one of those industries. So they can get hired on immediately at a trona [facility] or out at our phosphate plant and immediately can start with a ninety-day probationary period with an option to hire… Our college is very apt to assist wherever industry needs, and that’s their direction going forward—to help grow those programs so if we do need to quickly turn around training times for any kind of a future industry and diversification, then we have that ability.”

Sweetwater County is eager to keep moving forward to ensure a prosperous future for the entire community. “We’re learning to be very proactive and not just wait for the next big thing to happen,” McDonald says. “We actually want to lead it.”

The post Moving Forward<p class="company">Sweetwater County EDC</p> appeared first on Business In Focus Magazine.

With the goal of bringing together the private and public sectors for positive change and driving a strategic direction, the Dickinson Area Economic Development Alliance (DAEDA) is led by Lois Ellis. Executive Director of the Alliance for four years now, she says some area companies in the county were founded by families decades ago, and work alongside other businesses in the spirit of camaraderie.

“That sentiment still exists, and there’s a connection because it is such a manufacturing-based community,” she says. “We all know how important it is for the local economy, and most everyone is willing to help when there is a need.”

Community involvement
For the many employees at Systems Control, created in 1962, and BOSS Snowplow, which started manufacturing in Iron Mountain in 1985, long-time employment in these companies is much more than a job; it’s a way of life. Key companies both, these businesses play an integral role in the county’s economic and community fabric.

BOSS Snowplow is a leader in the snow and ice management sector. BOSS is owned by respected manufacturer, The Toro Company of Bloomington, Minnesota. Systems Control is a best-in-class designer/manufacturer of control panels and electrical substation equipment for the transmission and distribution industry. Both businesses are based in Dickinson County’s seat of Iron Mountain, MI, and were owned, at one point, by the same family.

Going beyond the customary donations to local charitable entities, Systems Control and the Northern Lights YMCA Dickinson Center recently renewed an existing partnership with Little Sparks Child Care Center. Formed in 2018, the partnership is now extended through 2024. This will ensure parents have the finest child-care services available for their young ones.

“We are the primary sponsor,” says Systems Control CEO Brad Lebouef. “Not only revitalizing its facility, the YMCA also offers much-needed daycare services which are welcomed by people in the community and our employees. As this program evolves, the goal is to have expanded hours to assist our off-shift families. I think that speaks to the community,” says Lebouef. With the company for 20 years – four of them as CEO – Lebouef says Systems Control has always been a believer in giving back.

In September, a ribbon-cutting ceremony was held for the new Imagination Factory Children’s Museum in Iron Mountain. Undergoing two years of renovation and exhibit installations, the Museum – with manufacturing exhibits relating to local industries – has already welcomed thousands of guests.

An important part of the community, the Museum benefitted from over 300 financial donations, and features displays from BOSS, Systems Control, and other companies. “The museum reflects our community makeup and provides another way to connect our community to the economy,” says Ellis of the resource and its value to parents and children alike.

Local loyalty
With a population of about 25,000, Dickinson County is the area’s largest economic center. Bordering Wisconsin – which draws workers to the area – the actual market-area count is closer to 35,000. Located just 100 miles from Green Bay, a large community with a population of almost 108,000, the county is well-connected to rail and to an extensive freeway system.

Thanks to its location and manufacturing legacy, Dickinson County is a popular base for existing and new businesses alike. In recent years, both BOSS Snowplow and Systems Control have made major investments in expanding their footprint.

In 2005, the same facility housed both companies. The next year, Systems Control bought a new facility, which today measures over 400,000 square feet following several additions, including one in 2018.

“Demand is strong, and the brand and reputation we’ve built in the market is the top brand,” says Lebouef of the expansions. With about 750 employees, Systems Control recently acquired a second facility in Des Moines to meet customer demand. “If I could right now, I’d take 100 production employees,” says Lebouef of the need for additional workers. To aid in attraction, we are now providing area-leading starting wages for production employees.”

Much like Systems Control, BOSS Snowplow has also undergone multiple expansions, including an added 44,000 square feet to the north of its existing building for a new powder coating system, and another 19,000 square feet on the south to expand its machine area.

Investing over a million dollars into its product development lab – a research and development facility – the company recently broke ground on an office expansion which will more than double its existing office space.

“We are pretty excited about the investment BOSS and Toro have made into the community here and the facility at Iron Mountain,” says Jody Christy, Vice President of the BOSS products division. With over 400 staff, BOSS is the biggest single brand of snow and ice removal equipment in North America, with exports to Europe, Asia, Australia, and other countries.

Addressing challenges
Like many other area manufacturers, BOSS and Systems Control are experiencing a shortage of workers, which has only increased during the COVID-19 pandemic.

One way the county and the DAEDA are addressing the issue of attracting and retaining employees is by building a talent pipeline, raising awareness about good, well-paying careers in the community, and reaching young people in K-12 by helping them match education opportunities to available careers.

In this way, they can sustain the community members, instead of them having turn elsewhere for jobs. Their efforts include setting up task forces on talent and education, marketing and branding.

“We make a lot of educational efforts to help people understand that a four-year degree isn’t always the best path for every student,” says Ellis, “and that there are other options to have wonderful careers where you can grow and have financial rewards that can make a very nice life for yourself.”

An example of community outreach is the annual Virtual Heavy Metal Tours Manufacturing Day Event for ninth graders held in October, a month-long social campaign for manufacturing, and virtual legislative visits with leaders at the state capitol.

In 2020, this saw the collaboration of five companies, along with Bay West, Dickinson-Iron Intermediate School District (DIISD), and the MichiganWorks! Association, which focuses on advancing prosperity through a skilled workforce.

Reaching out to schools in the area, some manufacturers have created partnerships with a vocational center, focusing on much-needed skills like welding and electrical wiring. A number are working with Bay College to help augment skill sets, with a special certificate for welding.

“A lot of it is about awareness, and we are pushing at the middle and high school levels to really break the tie between manufacturing not being a career and being a dirty and grungy job, and I think we are a good example of that,” says Lebouef.

Even with much manufacturing growth in Dickinson County, other companies like BOSS have had to expand their coverage for new talent and are reaching out beyond the county’s boundaries through job fairs and other means.

There are, according to Christy, lots of available opportunities for production and professional positions alike. “You can have a great career and quality of life where you grew up,” he says.

With workplace flexibility on offer, some staff can work from home, which allows BOSS to broaden its geographic reach.

Area investment
From healthcare to re-invigorating its downtowns, Dickinson County is actively ensuring an outstanding quality of life for its residents.

Recently, the county announced a planned partnership between the Dickinson County Healthcare System and the Marshfield Clinic, which will see the construction of a new game-changing cancer center.

“It’s exciting to see,” says Ellis. “The Marshfield partnership will bring even better healthcare opportunities to our community than we have today.” Healthcare is a large segment of the economy, she adds, with the county having a sizable hospital and a full federal VA Medical Center.

“Veterans come from all over the region to be treated here, and they locate here, because it is accessible to them.”

Along with healthcare, the county’s downtowns are undergoing a revitalization. To maximize space, upper stories of some buildings are being converted into apartments, located near restaurants, cafés and retail shops. Additionally, a new Marriott hotel of about 100 rooms will be built in 2022, adding more investment into the downtown areas.

From its downtowns to a growing trail network, a new dermatology clinic, investment in parks and playgrounds, a ski jump for World Cup events, a convenient airport and much more, Dickinson County is on the rise.

Underlining its growth, the county recently welcomed a new hunting-products manufacturer, drawn by the many nature activities the area offers.

To ensure the county keeps meeting the needs of its many companies, the Dickinson Area Economic Development Alliance conducts an annual survey of area manufacturers to get a sense of job demands for the coming five years.

The last survey revealed a need for about 750 more employees – many of them in production – to accommodate both retirement figures and growth.

“There’s a manufacturing heritage in this community, and the workforce shows that in its commitment and work ethic,” says Ellis. “It’s a working person’s town, and that’s reflected in the services available. Many of our businesses are open 24 hours because of the shift work. So when it’s in your DNA, it’s something you do really well, and it bodes well for our future.”

The post A Proud Manufacturing Heritage<p class="company">Dickinson Area Economic Development Alliance</p> appeared first on Business In Focus Magazine.

COVID has affected the company but, as an essential service, WOW! Mobile Boutique kiosks were allowed to stay open through the shutdown. The team made adjustments to ensure customer and employee safety while keeping the public supplied with cell phones and plans. They started curbside pickup so customers did not need to come into malls, put Plexiglas around their kiosks, and removed all demonstration phones to lessen customer contact.

In addition, the company introduced a new system that made it possible for customers to book appointments online. “That way they would potentially avoid a line,” says Marketing Manager Matthew Kowalyk. “They are guaranteed to speak to our reps right off the bat. That’s really helped out [and made customers feel] much more comfortable to come in.”

With the shutdown over, but some COVID restrictions still in place, the company is working to navigate the new situation. “Malls are open a hundred percent now in all of our provinces, so we’re just getting back into the swing of things,” Kowalyk says. After months of limited sales opportunities, “Our reps are hungry and ready to go. They’re excited. We’ve been fully open for a couple of months now, and we’re starting to see a lot more traffic. I think people are ready to buy and spend without having to book things online.”

The Plexiglas is still up and customers still are not allowed to handle demonstration phones, but “We’re getting there,” he says. And until the threat passes completely the team will continue to do “anything that we can do to keep our customers safe.”

One issue that hurt business during the pandemic was the loss of marketing opportunities. Pre-pandemic, WOW! Mobile Boutique placed ads throughout malls that relied on foot traffic. With malls closed or operating at a greatly reduced capacity, people simply didn’t see the company’s ads anymore. “We lost a lot of opportunities there [with] the in-mall digital signage,” Kowalyk says. “We basically just couldn’t use it because there was no foot traffic.” In response, the company pivoted to social media. “We really relied on our web presence and social media to get promos out.”

With fewer consumers out shopping, sales dropped during the pandemic, but they have recovered nicely. As soon as malls reopened to full capacity, “Our sales were really good,” he says. Back-to-school shopping throughout August and September drove sales even higher. “I think people were ready to go [shopping again] and the promos definitely helped out.”

The outlook is positive for sales to remain strong. The Christmas rush has come close on the heels of Black Friday sales and will be followed by Boxing week promotions. “Hopefully we’re going to be nuts until the end of a quarter,” Kowalyk says.

From its inception, WOW! Mobile Boutique has focused on its people. The brand has carefully built a reputation for providing impartial, honest advice about cell phones, tablets, and cell phone plans from friendly, knowledgeable, well-trained representatives. Unlike the typical approach, the company’s commission structure does not motivate representatives to push more expensive products or plans, so customers can trust they are getting the best match for their specific needs and budget.

“We’ve got great people out there,” he says. Customers “know when you come up to a WOW! Mobile Boutique kiosk, you’re going to be dealing with great people. They’re really looking out for your best interest and are unbiased. We’re really just looking for the plans, the phones, and the best promos that you can walk away with. You’ll know that we didn’t try to upsell you on something because that’s just not our people. We’re good people.”

Kowalyk points out how WOW! Mobile Boutique employees maintained the company’s high standards throughout the difficulties of the pandemic. “They’ve been resilient. They’ve been positive. They’ve been strong and they’ve come out of this pandemic with a really positive attitude.”

The company values diversity and recognizes how important it is to offer customers representatives with whom they can relate. “We are embracing our multiculturalism,” he says. “We’ve got a wide range of ethnicities and talents.” Many representatives speak a second language, and the company is highlighting this ability in order to improve the customer experience. For instance, “one rep may speak Italian fluently, and we may be in a market where somebody’s more comfortable speaking Italian, so they can go to that person,” he says. “So that’s another way we can build on our people.”

As the team moves forward, they plan to increase their focus on social media even more. “We learned a lot from the pandemic, so we really want to grow our social media presence and our online presence a lot more,” Kowalyk says. “We always know that word of mouth is the best marketing and through social media, the ability to gain word of mouth marketing is much easier. So we’re really going to try to utilize that.”

And, the team will not stop there. “We’re only eight years old as a brand, so we’re going to be growing a lot, and there are going to be changes coming down the pipeline,” he says. “I’m looking at revamping our website. We are exploring a lot of opportunities to stay fresh and stay relevant and feel exciting. We’re really trying to just raise the excitement level of our brand so, through the course of the year, there’s going to be a lot of developments.”

The team will be sitting down and brainstorming over the next several months to iron out the details. Kowalyk came on board just six months ago and is eager to take WOW! Mobile Boutique in a fresh direction while maintaining the company’s solid foundation. “We’re going to build on what we’re already strong with,” he says.

His colleagues are on the same page. “There’re a lot of new faces in our team that are excited to push the brand forward.” They are all eager to begin meeting face to face again, roll up their sleeves, and get down to business. “That’s when we are going to hit the ground running.”

One thing that will stay the same as Kowalyk and the team strategize for the future is the company’s belief in its representatives in the field. People hold the key to the company’s success, Kowalyk says, and he wants to be sure they receive the support they need to do their best. “We really just want to give our people in the field the tools [they need] to succeed.”

The team is especially eager to put these tools to use in a post-pandemic environment where customers and representatives can fully interact once more. “[We are] excited to see our customers come in freely as opposed to having to book the time,” he says.

“We’ve missed our customers, we’ve missed our regulars, and we’ve missed meeting new people.” As 2021 comes to a close and the new year begins, WOW! Mobile Boutique is more than ready to welcome old and new customers to the friendly, fair shopping experience for which the brand is known.

The post Putting People First<p class="company">WOW! Mobile Boutique</p> appeared first on Business In Focus Magazine.

Founded in 1974 by Laverne Bowen, BOWEN Group quickly established an admired reputation as a boutique recruitment firm, which the team attributes to their commitment to making people the heart and core of their business. In 1985, Laverne’s daughter, Shannon Bowen-Smed, took over the firm with a bold focus on diversity, transparency and collaboration. Now, over 47 years later, BOWEN Group has flourished as a staffing industry leader, receiving recognition as a Best Managed Firm by Deloitte in 2020 and 2021 and recently named one of Canada’s Most Admired Cultures by Waterstone Human Capital for 2021. BOWEN Group now takes its next bold step forward with its recent acquisition by Agilus Work Solutions – a national recruitment and staffing firm focused on the future of recruitment in Canada.

From the beginning of Bowen-Smed’s career, she bravely carved out BOWEN Group’s mandate of making a lasting and positive impact in the community. “Our mission is to make people matter,” she says. “Whether it’s the clients we represent, the talent we cultivate, or the BOWEN team we’ve built—we believe bringing the right people together and celebrating diverse perspectives is the foundation of our culture.”

Bowen-Smed’s commitment to creating diverse and healthy workplaces is at the forefront of her leadership prowess, and was generated authentically from her personal story of strength and perseverance.

When her child, Scott, was stillborn at seven months, she and her husband realized although they were devastated, they still had a lot to be thankful for.

“When we left the hospital without Scott, they gave us a teddy bear and it was the last teddy bear in the hospital,” she says. “It might sound trite, but the idea that we still had something to hold and remember our son by was actually quite monumental. The idea that another family might not was heartbreaking.”

The company then partnered with the Alberta Health Services Bereavement Program, to run a fundraising golf tournament in Scott’s name with a specific incentive in mind.

The plan was to run the tournament and raise $5,000 to buy bears. Instead, they sold out the event, raised $45,000, and not only bought bears, but built a delivery room in Scott’s honour at Rockyview General Hospital, and went on to run the tournament for another 14 years, raising $1.2 million.

Still focused on building a family, Bowen-Smed and her husband looked to adoption. “We proceeded through the adoption service—our first child, who joined us at age two-and-a-half, came to us as our daughter,” says Bowen-Smed. “Our child at 17 proclaimed that he was a man in a girl’s body, and so I journeyed with him through the whole transgender process. We worked with a private surgeon, and he went in as our daughter, came out as our son.”

When the couple adopted their second daughter as a newborn, they realized their family was complete, and with both children being of mixed-race heritage, the couple also embraced the blessing of diversity.

This resolve to take personal experiences and create a company that celebrates the excellence of all Canadians has become Bowen-Smed’s hallmark.

“I think we’ve done an incredible job of doing exactly that. About 91 percent of our organization identifies as diverse, whether that’s sex, gender, or ethnically. It’s the most amazing melting pot of the world,” Bowen-Smed adds.

Throughout Bowen-Smed’s tenure BOWEN Group has worked diligently to distinguish itself in a crowded and intensely competitive industry to become a diversity and inclusion leader in Canada.

“We’ve been a leader in our industry around safety management, with a commitment that’s also responsible for mental and emotional safety,” she says. “One of the questions we ask employees is do they feel comfortable coming to us with any kind of work or emotional-related challenges, and do they think we have the resources to support them,” she says.

For the recent mental health awareness month, the company brought in a guest speaker to address various issues, and reviewed the mental safety resources the organization provides.

“We’re very invested in what I hope will ultimately lead to the holistic happiness of the people we work with and the people we represent. We really try to walk the talk, living our mission, which is all about making people matter,” she says.

“I would argue that we were probably ahead of our time and critically ahead of the market preparedness to even understand what that meant. The more direct path for us was to really drill down and say, what matters to the world today?”

Included in this narrative was Bowen-Smed’s passion to take a meaningful look at First Nations communities. If her company could start by championing its position in the Indigenous base, maybe it could help people understand and create something bigger, brighter, and more meaningful. This thinking was realised through partnering with Stream Source, an Indigenous-owned provider of Indigenous recruitment aiming to secure long-term sustainable employment and partnerships for Indigenous people and businesses.

It’s been quite a journey, and Bowen-Smed remains passionate about the work done to date. “They say a good leader needs to know when to get out of the way. It’s time for me to get out of the way,” she says. “I’ve been with the organization for 37 years. I started when I was 19, and no one knew that 37 years later I’d still be here. My hope for the company is they get to have another 37 incredible years in what I believe is one of the best industries in the world.”

In October it was announced that Agilus acquired BOWEN Group, effectively combining more than 91 years of recruitment experience, award-winning talent and long-term client relationships. Bowen-Smed has great hopes that Agilus’ 44-year history will bring a depth of service, and its offices in 14 locations throughout Canada will speed growth and strengthen their combined competitive positions across the country.

“To be a great company, our organization needed to be lifted up by a great company to help us be bigger, bolder, and better,” Bowen-Smed says. “The acquisition allows us to leverage the incredible work we’ve done, and it brings our team huge development and potential that a company our size couldn’t otherwise get.”

Agilus’ CEO, Craig Brown, echoes Bowen-Smed’s vision for the future. “BOWEN’s reputation as a trusted advisor in Canada is evidenced by the strength of their client relationships, many of which have spanned decades.”

Brown says he’s not only optimistic, but confident in the combined future of BOWEN Group and Agilus. “Recruitment firms play a critical role for the future,” he says. “Talent is the number one driver of organizational success, and in a future where workforce flexibility will increase, we’ll play an impactful role in supporting the connection of talent and employers.”

Both Bowen-Smed and Brown say that with the vaccine mandate finally pushing back on the pandemic businesses in Canada are getting back to work, and that means the demand for qualified candidates has never been higher. BOWEN Group complements Agilus’ focus of creating a better candidate experience and attracting more diverse candidates through community involvement and better tools such as genderless job postings and unbiased or “blind recruiting.” “Convenience, ease of use, and a quality experience are something today’s candidates demand when looking for work,” Brown says.

“Agilus is also looking at digitization to streamline the candidate lifecycle and spend more time on the candidate experience—building relationships and understanding the candidate’s skillset and motivation,” he explains. “This means the candidate can give attention to their job search when it’s convenient for them and then spend time with a recruiter when the pre-screening tasks are complete.”

This shift to a candidate-driven market is a direct result of the current tight labour market. Employers are not only looking for qualified candidates, but filling position gaps and skill shortages by assessing and redefining what skills their business needs to generate the outcomes they’re looking for. “They’re looking at talent in a new way,” Brown says. “Asking, ‘where do I find or engage those skills to maximize efforts of the business?’”

This thinking is fostering greater diversity, Brown says, which has been proven to create a more collaborative and productive workplace. Businesses in Canada are targeting candidate pools that have been historically often overlooked due to unconscious biases or underestimated skills set. “We are seeing more Indigenous Peoples, BIPOC, LGBTQ2S+, transgender and neurodiverse candidates getting interviews,” Brown explains. “This aligns with our clients who are committed to diversity and actively seeking to increase the diversity of their candidate pools.”

“Approaching a diverse candidate pool means understanding what tools we utilize to ensure an unbiased approach,” he says. “Clients are now more open to non-traditional candidates—not a direct match to previous roles and titles, but looking at skill sets, resiliency and a growth mindset. This is good news for Canada, and everyone.”

Agilus also offers BOWEN’s clients access to a diverse and engaged community of over 700,000 candidates who work in Engineering, IT, Office/Professional and Light Industrial/Manufacturing. Over 100 recruiters in 14 branches across Canada bring specialized knowledge and experience to every client meeting and candidate conversation.

“Take the Lead, Human Touch and Better Outcomes—these pillars drive our behaviour and strategy. They influence every interaction and conversation from my role, to our operations team, to our recruiters,” Brown says. “Agilus attracts the top talent from across Canada and our people matter – they are our key differentiator from our competitors, and the BOWEN team completes us.”

The post Building a Future Where Everyone Belongs<p class="company">BOWEN Group, a division of Agilus</p> appeared first on Business In Focus Magazine.

This global firm has decades of experience in restoring technical equipment that has been damaged by fire, water, oil leakage, corrosion, dust, mold, salt, physical impact, or other scourges. Returning technical equipment to working order speeds a plant’s recovery and benefits the environment as not having to discard damaged electronics means less waste at landfill sites.

“These days, we see disasters happening everywhere. You can’t read the news and not hear about a flood somewhere, a tornado, a typhoon, a sandstorm. There are situations every day that cause valuable custom equipment to be damaged, which in turn can compromise people’s livelihoods if a plant has to shut down. There are ways to recover from these scenarios very quickly, utilizing the same decontamination processes that are employed daily in printed circuit board and semiconductor plants. It’s not common knowledge that this kind of service exists,” states Amir Rubin, Executive Director of AREPA North America, which is headquartered in Deerfield, Illinois.

“Most folks are not prepared for a disaster and view their options as being very limited when considering the need for fast recovery. There was recently a fire in a semiconductor chip manufacturer in Phoenix. The world is being crippled right now by a shortage of chips. One less plant that can produce these chips is not just devastating to the people that work there, but to everyone else that depends on these chips for their assemblies. Recovery is the quickest way to resume production, saving jobs and minimizing downtime for those impacted by product shortages,” he continues.

AREPA’s main services—all of which are self-performed—include emergency response, preservation and stabilization, decontamination, facilitation of repair and recertification with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), clean lab testing, and preventive reconditioning. Preservation and stabilization centers on slowing or stopping metal surface degradation to avoid pitting. Decontamination involves removing chemicals, soot, and other foreign contaminants from impacted equipment. Clean lab testing entails harvesting samples to quantify the need and the success of the decontamination process. In most facilities smoke does not migrate throughout. Certain areas will be able to resume production immediately, which minimizes business interruption.

Repair and recertification are key aspects of the company’s turnkey recovery services, while preventive reconditioning emphasizes the need to scrutinize operations and keep equipment clean to extend longevity. Once technical equipment has been decontaminated and returned to a pre-loss condition, AREPA works with OEMs to restore functionality and ensure proper calibration. Working with the OEMs ensures that warranties and service contracts are not revoked.

Of these services, “decontamination is the lion’s share of what we do,” says Rubin. “We do help with preservation and stabilization; we perform clean lab testing; and we facilitate repair and recertification, but manufacturers don’t specialize in decontamination post loss.”

The company focuses on commercial equipment for the data center, industrial and manufacturing, renewable energy, marine and offshore, healthcare, and education sectors.

“AREPA can work on equipment from any industry,” he says; however, “We do the most work in industrial and manufacturing plants.”

Perhaps because of its experience dealing with disasters, the arrival of COVID last year did not throw the company off its stride. “COVID didn’t stop hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding, normal accidents, and arson from happening. The need for our service remained strong,” affirms Rubin.

This is not the only company that reconditions technical equipment damaged by fires, floods, and other calamities. Asked how it stands out, he says, “AREPA provides a service that is based on science. Truth be told, our industry is filled with cowboys that chase storms … They’re really no different than ambulance chasers … Every day, two guys and a truck decide that they can fix stuff because there’s insurance money that will pay for it. Insurance carriers are, therefore, leery that equipment that may not be impacted could be cleaned as well, just because it was in the same facility.”

“At AREPA, we think differently. When we walk into a facility, we prove the need for recovery. We quite often also prove, scientifically, our way out of a project, because the equipment was not affected. When you’re working with empirical data, it is what it is.”

The company is also unique in that sustainability and a concern for the environment are core corporate principles. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) “serve as our foundation to reduce our environmental footprint,” states the company website. By restoring technical equipment, it reduces the amount of electronic waste in landfill sites.

“AREPA is committed to environmental sustainability and our clients who are pursuing more sustainable solutions for their businesses and clients. We’ve been doing this for forty years, so our contributions have benefitted the environment and surrounding communities for some time,” Rubin notes.

AREPA’s eco-friendly ethos is also reflected by its support for the right-to-repair legislation. Right-to-repair laws empower users who want to perform their own repairs on damaged electronics. According to a July 15, 2021, article in the New York Times, this can entail making spare parts and information about the product, including “manuals, schematics and software updates,” readily available, allowing unlocking “so owners can install custom software,” and designing devices “in a way as to make repair possible.”

“Without a service like AREPA’s, equipment owners that sustain a loss would have to replace everything by default. The European Parliament will be coming out with a law next year regarding the right to repair electronics. AREPA has already reached out to the European Parliament regarding expansion of this program,” Rubin says.

Given the company’s focus on sustainability, it is no surprise the firm also supports several philanthropic endeavors. “AREPA is called to help restore businesses and livelihoods. The uncertainty people experience during these challenging times is truly heartbreaking. In many cases, our own employees are impacted by hurricanes and tornadoes. As a people-centric organization, we pride ourselves in going the extra mile,” states Rubin. “Over the years, we’ve donated to terrific organizations such as the International Rescue Committee.”

Since the company was founded in Denmark forty years ago, “its focus has always been on recovery of electronic and electric equipment. For quite some time, AREPA was primarily a European entity that focused on losses in their respective markets. They did serve clients outside of those markets, but most of the business was local. In 2017, Envista Forensics acquired AREPA. Envista is a consulting firm that deals with losses globally. It made a great deal of sense to combine an entity that consulted on losses with one that could actually do the recovery work.”

As a division of Envista Forensics, AREPA has branches in the Netherlands, Sweden, Canada, Denmark and the U.S. The company currently employs about 150 workers, roughly the same number as last year.

“We continue hiring and growing each day!” he continues. “We look for folks with a technical aptitude. We have engineers on the team as well as folks with a high school diploma. Our training takes time. A lot of fieldwork [is required] to build a person’s confidence when it comes to reconditioning equipment they have never seen before.”

This emphasis on training and technical aptitude is important because the company maintains exacting standards.

“All AREPA team members are certified IPC specialists. I’ve never seen any of our competitors obtain this certification. AREPA even has an IPC trainer on staff that trains all new employees. IPC is the bible for the electronics industry,” notes Rubin.

IPC is an international association that offers certification programs and “helps OEMs, EMS, PCB manufacturers, cable and wire harness manufacturers, and electronics industry suppliers build electronics better,” according to its website.

AREPA also wants new hires with open minds and good attitudes. The company encourages a caring and trusting culture and wants staff to be able to express their ideas and share their talents.

For all that, he believes labor is the biggest challenge facing the company at present, not counting COVID. “There is plenty of work. Finding folks that are willing to travel for weeks at a time, be away from home eighty percent of the year or more, is incredibly challenging. Our people are incredible. We embrace them and do everything we can to make working for us as rewarding as possible.”

“We are educating the industry about decontamination as a critical part of preventive maintenance. We do a great deal of work in this space in Europe, although not as much in North America.”

Rubin is very optimistic about the future. “In five years, we’re hoping that AREPA becomes a name that most manufacturers recognize as their partner in recovery.”

The post Saving Money and the Environment by Restoring Damaged Electronics<p class="company">AREPA</p> appeared first on Business In Focus Magazine.