A full room of energetic manufacturers and some great speakers and discussion were at the heart of this very special event: Increasing Manufacturing Competitiveness in a down Economy held at Flowserve in Brantford on February 25, 2010.   Special guest speakers, Al Diggins and Chad Metcalf (two very dynamic speakers) talked to the group about how to increase manufacturing competitiveness in tough economic times. Al talked about how diverse our membership was and that we stayed pure to the manufacturers only in our membership.  He also talked about the fact that we have over 900 corporate manufacturing members and 130 000 individual members.   

Al Diggins talked about how successful organizations are taking advantage of programs that are available to help them out…such as:

• Public MEDT lean Training  
• Member needs help
• Networking opportunities
• SRED tax credit programs
• Food Sector networking initiative
• Free online courses
• Energy savings programs
• World class training: lean, human capital, health and safety
• Online health and safety training
• Safety Groups Program

Al also explained that EMC is driven by member needs and that we are constantly evaluating our offerings to match these needs with service offerings. 

Chad Metcalf talked about how organizations are using continuous improvement tools to eliminate unnecessary costs.  He also talked about the power of lean manufacturing.  Other points that were discussed:

• Culture Change in upper and lower management.
• Ways of Identifying waste in your organizations.
• Strategies on eliminating that waste in your organization
• Utilizing underutilized personnel
• Maximizing the talent in your organizations
• Lean strategies such as Value Stream Mapping
• How to develop culture in your organization
• How to set realistic goals for your organizations
• How to identify problems in your organization
• How to tackle problems in your organization

After the speakers, Flowserve provided a shop floor tour of their facility.  This facility is undergoing a lot of research and development work and has been very successfully testing some of their new pumps. 

Thanks again to Ignacio Villalobos, the Canadian Corporate Controller at Flowserve for hosting this excellent event.

Remember EMC is the MOST ACTIVE manufacturing organization in North America!  We deliver knowledge that sticks and encourage our members to share to optimize learning, expertise and resources in order to achieve world-class.  For more information on this or other events in the Brantford and Region, please contact Laura Gibson, Field Service Advisor at 226-388-3894 or by e-mail at lgibson@emccanada.org.