Berger to talk research, manufacturing jobs at Rotary

LIMA - With phrases such as electromagnetic forming, agile manufacturing and advanced materials, the work and research at American Trim sounds pie-in-the-sky abstract.

Company research and development director Steve Hatkevich makes exploring new ways to make things very real: "Without what we've been doing, this building we're sitting in now would be vacant. Now we're talking about expanding the parking lot."

Expanding the parking lot is because more people are working at the 60-year-old company. New jobs, even in this economy, is what Mayor David Berger will talk about today with a noon address to the Lima Rotary Club.

While developing new products, American Trim also developed a new manufacturing model, Berger said. That model can be a solution to the American manufacturing crisis, Berger said.

"Our diagnosis is that manufacturing is burdened with systems that are slow, hugely capital intensive and therefore difficult to change," Berger said ahead of his remarks today. "If the problem is a large set of systems that can't move rapidly, could we create a system that is the opposite of that, segmented, changing rapidly with narrow targets?"

Berger will use projects at American Trim, such as development of fuel cell engines, truck bumpers and appliance coatings to explain a new kind of economic development from the city and its partners.

The city-created Ohio Energy and Advanced Manufacturing Center will stimulate economic development by providing a place where collaborating companies, perhaps even once competing companies, can develop and share intellectual property, Berger said. The result is solutions to manufacturing needs, the actual making of things and job creation.

The country has lost nearly 4 million manufacturing jobs since 1999, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, including 268,000 in Ohio.

For generations, the American manufacturing machine excelled at mass production, but it's losing to cheap labor around the globe. One of the answers, Berger believes, is mass customization, the ability to make a small number of products for narrow segments of the population. It hasn't happened yet because the tools and design needed to make the process cheap enough don't exist. The OEAMC will foster the creation of those tools and designs, Berger said.