Paul Boers has been making greenhouses in the Niagara area for over 50 years.  Their challenge is they have a large customer base and make greenhouses that vary in price from a few thousand dollars up to a few million dollars. They had created a great spaghetti diagram to illustrate the current process and have started to put steps in place to improve the process.  Wernher, General Manager at Paul Boers, walked us through their current process and some of the changes he had made.  As he walked…

One of the challenges at Ingersoll is their hot tong work and the way they work around this is through job rotation. 

Some questions discussed included:

• How do you measure the success of your Health and Safety program?
• How do you enforce your Safety policies and procedures?
• How do you communicate your Safety program to your staff?
• How do you keep your Health and Safety program fresh with your employees?
• How do you keep your Health and Safety committee fresh?
• What challenges do you have…

We started with a short presentation by Thuy Dam from McMaster University's Engineering Co-op program.  She walked us through some of the great programs available for those companies interested in hiring engineers.  Her full presentation and contact information is available for download. 

We were also joined by Rebecca Bourgue from the MITACS program.  For more information on their funding available for Manufacturers please download this pdf. 

We discussed the organizational challenge of…

Why does it seem that the older we get the faster the years go?  I can't believe I'm looking at December 2011 in my calendar.  I'm just getting use to use to the fact that my oldest son is 10 when his 11^th birthday is just over 2 months away!

We had a great variety of SIG events in Hamilton/Niagara in 2011 - a couple of the highlights were the event at Paul Boers where we were privileged to have Geordie Raine from Montana HR speak to us about their Turnaround Interview program. The Turnaround…

This facility was moved from Ottawa in 2010 and provides proof that manufacturing is innovative and alive in Ontario. This lab is dedicated to metals and materials fabrication, processing and evaluation.  Check them out on the Natural Resources Canada site here.

The mandate of the CANMET-MTL materials lab is to develop and deploy technologies that improve all aspects of producing and using value-added products derived from metals and minerals. CANMET's materials research focuses on three…

For our Hamilton/Niagara event we dipped into a new SIG topic when we decided to focus on the Customer Service department within a manufacturing plant.  We had a diverse group of over a dozen manufacturers who all struggled with the Customer Service department getting the respect and training they need to be successful.

Some of the areas we covered included:

• What skills are key for the Customer Service staff to have?  This included a long list including people side (essential skills);…

A small but mighty group joined together at BHH benefits to discuss benefits, pension and wage trends.  It is always amazing that a diverse group of manufacturers can have such similar challenges.

We focused on 3 key areas of total compensation:

Wages - We discussed how much companies pay their basic general labourers.  It was also interesting to see that 2 of the participating companies were both struggling to fill technical sales type roles.  We discussed strategies that had worked to fill…

This SIG had a guest speaker Mike Hamilton from Hick Morley who provided us with a Legal Update as well as information on the upcoming AODA standards. 

Some of the areas we discussed included:

• How does this legislation impact my organization (there are different requirements for organizations over 50 employees and those under 50 employees)?  All private sector organizations with more than 1 employee will be impacted by the legislation
• What practices do I currently have in place that needs…

Return to work is a common challenge to most manufacturers.  This SIG gave us the opportunity to have 3 guests from Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) talk to us about WSIB from their point of view and answer questions regarding claims management and return to work. The speakers from WSIB gave us some great insight and better understanding into the new Work Reintegration program at WSIB (what we use to refer to as the return to work program and the LMR - Labour market re-entry program).