The Competitive Edges
  The Wisconsin Manufacturing Extension Partnership                                            June 2012 
Featured Video
PSI logo
Click on the graphic above to see a video featuring three Wisconsin manufacturers' experiences with the
PSI program.

Want to learn more about PSI?  Contact Randy Bertram, PSI program manager:
Articles of interest



Where the manufacturing jobs really are - Blog post by Jeff Moad, Manufacturing Executive
Greetings!

A new report highlights the results to date achieved by manufacturers participating in the Wisconsin Profitable Sustainability Initiative (PSI), which began in April of 2010.
 
PSI's unique approach focuses on helping manufacturers save money, meet their business objectives and positively impact the environment. To date, PSI has saved 67 Wisconsin manufacturers $6.4 million annually; with $19.7 million in savings projected over three years.
Randy Bertram wins national award for PSI
Bertram/kilmer
Randy Bertram and Roger Kilmer
At the national conference of the NIST Hollings Manufacturing Extension Partnerships (MEP) in May, Randy Bertram of the Wisconsin Manufacturing Extension Partnership (WMEP) was named "Practitioner of the Year." This award recognizes MEP staff whose specialized capabilities enabled them to make a significant, innovative and sustainable impact within client companies and across the MEP system in the past year.  The MEP, a program of the US Department of Commerce, is a public-private partnership that teams with industry as well as state and local organizations to support small to midsize manufacturers with services that drive growth, accelerate innovation, and promote sustainability and continuous improvement. There are 1,700 technical experts in nearly 350 manufacturing extension offices across the country.  

Read full press release 
What we need to do to solve the skills gap
Tim Sullivan
Tim Sullivan
Tim Sullivan, special consultant for business and work force development to the state of Wisconsin and former chief executive officer of mining equipment maker Bucyrus International Inc., shared his thoughts with 400 of Wisconsin's manufacturers at the recent "Manufacturing Matters!" conference in Milwaukee.

In his presentation, he cited statistics from recent Georgetown studies that revealed:
  • 61% of the jobs in Wisconsin will require a post-secondary education in 2018: a total of 925,000 jobs
  • 70% of the jobs available today need a two year degree 
  • Our total Wisconsin workforce is 2.8 million;  we will need to replace one third of our workforce in the next six years
  • 38,000 of the job openings will be due to growth, the rest are replacements of retiring workers
 
 
 
Guess who wrote this:
 
"Take a few more instances of saving. The sweepings net six hundred thousand dollars a year. Experiments  are constantly going on in the utilization of scrap. In one of the stamping operations, six inch circles of sheet metal are cut out. These formerly went into scrap. The waste worried the men. They worked to find uses for the discs. They found that the plates were just the right size and shape to stamp into radiator caps but the metal was not think enough. They tried a double thickness of plates, with the result that they made a cap which tests proved to be stronger than the one made out of a single sheet of metal. We get 150,000 of those discs a day. We have now found a use for about 20,000 a day and expect to find further uses for the remainder."