15 minute read
Modern-Day Manufacturing
Custom Metal Designs Melds Talent and Technology
BY DIANE SEARS
Advertisement
Photography by Julie Fletcher
When some people think of manufacturing, their minds call up images of the 1800s and dark, dangerous, dirty sweatshops. They don’t think of today’s manufacturing facilities with bright lights, robotic equipment, computers and clean surfaces.
That bothers Ray Aguerrevere, executive vice president and general manager of Custom Metal Designs in west Orange County, which manufactures equipment that helps other manufacturers automate. It bothers him so much that he has become a champion of the industry. He serves as president of the Manufacturers Association of Central Florida and chair of the board of Florida Makes, and he also sits on a national advisory board for the manufacturing extension partnership program of the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
One of his missions is to get more men and women into manufacturing professions — whether they are young people looking for their first jobs or career changers. To promote that mission and to celebrate October as Manufacturing Month, Custom Metal Designs brings in groups of students this time of year to tour the 60,000-square-foot facility that employs about 100 people.
“When I talk to kids, I show them everything we do and say, ‘Hey, do you like video games? Well look, I’ve got five people upstairs and all they do is play with 3D models making parts, making machines and making things move.’”
The key is in persuading their parents to let them take the tour. “Historically, manufacturing has had a stigma,” Aguerrevere said. “If you look at all the things manufacturing does nowadays, and how technical it is and how advanced it's gotten, it's a whole different industry. I always tell people that in our organization, there’s not one job we don't have. We have facilities maintenance, accounting, marketing, engineering, sales, administration, machinists, welders, mechanics, installers, procurement, shipping and receiving. Manufacturing is a great career. You get in and the sky's the limit. You can go anywhere.”
Career Path
Aguerrevere’s own venture into manufacturing happened by chance. He was a commercial market lender for AmSouth Bank, which later became Regions Bank, and he had gotten to know Steven Grimes, whose father founded Custom Metal Designs in 1972.
Steven Grimes told this story about his father, Saul, in an industry publication in
— Ray Aguerrevere
Custom Metal Designs employs about 100 people in positions ranging from engineering to shipping and receiving
Ray Aguerrevere and Steven Grimes
2018: “Our company was one of the first to introduce conveyor systems to move milk bottles across a plant. My dad would go into dairy plants and see people carrying boxes of bottles all through the facility from the trucks to filling machines. He understood the business and how to make it better. His driving desire was to build systems and customer relationships to last a lifetime.”
When Saul Grimes retired, the man who had been the company’s chief financial officer for 30 years retired alongside him. Steven Grimes had grown up with the business his father formed the year he was born, and he had been working there since returning home from college in 1994. He took over the position of president from his father in 2000, and he turned to Aguerrevere for assistance.
“Steven approached me about coming in and running the finance function of the company, and from there it grew,” Aguerrevere said. “We were much smaller than we are now, about $4 million in revenue, and now we’re pushing $15 million.
he became the vice president and general manager about eight years ago — a role that often positions him as a spokesman for the company within the industry.
Childhood Dream
Aguerrevere’s fascination with heavy equipment started in his early years. He remembers the excitement he felt every week on trash day as a 6-year-old in his birthplace of Caracas, Venezuela. His parents, who were from the United States, were in Latin America for his father’s work in the oil industry.
“I was fascinated by garbage. We lived in a big building, and we’d send our trash down a chute to a centralized location. There would be maybe 80 bags, and the truck would come get it and put it in the compactor. I would sit on the balcony of our seventh-floor apartment watching the process happen, and I would tell my mom, ‘That's what I want to be when I grow up! I want to be a garbage man.’
“Somehow I grew out of that and I got into finance. When I was 13, I subscribed to The Wall Street Journal, and I've been a finance nerd ever since.”
When Aguerrevere was 8, his father’s job took the family to Panama. It was an unsettled period, when dictator Manuel Noriega was taken down in a U.S. invasion to stand trial on charges of racketeering, drug smuggling and money laundering.
“It was a very bad time for a while, and my mom had a stink bomb thrown through a car window when my sister and I were
in the car,” he said. “My mom came home and said to my dad, ‘That's it. We’re leaving. We’re bringing the kids back to the States.’ That's how I ended up in Orlando.”
As Custom Metal Designs prepares to mark its 50th year in 2022, it faces some of the same challenges as other manufacturing companies that are holding on through the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I've been doing this for 16 years, and it's never been harder to run a business,” Aguerrevere said. “On top of not finding the staff you need, now we've got material shortages. You can’t buy metal. We're busier than we've ever been. The logistics of everything have gotten insanely complicated.”
At the beginning of the pandemic, Custom Metal Designs worked to help increase the supply of personal protective equipment including hand sanitizer and disinfecting wipes. “We were working with supply chain partners for the two largest makers of disinfectant wipes to increase the throughput of those containers because at the peak of the pandemic, they couldn't make enough,” he said.
“During the time Orange County was locked down, we were working two shifts, and our employees carried a letter with them stating that we were an essential manufacturer that needed to remain open. They were essential employees at an essential company, and it was cool. We did our part.”
The company strives to get more women into manufacturing. Three of its 9 welders are women.
Workforce Struggles
Today, while the world continues to battle medical effects of the pandemic, manufacturers are dealing with the employment implications.
“From our customers’ perspective, they're having a tough time keeping their production lines and their workplaces fully staffed,” Aguerrevere said. “There’s a misconception with automation that it displaces people and you're going to lay off 30 people. A lot of times what we see is those facilities are understaffed because they can't find the people, so they use automation to move people out of menial jobs.
“We don't see automation as a threat to the workforce. We see it as a tool that can be used to add skill sets to legacy workers within those organizations. As our customers become more efficient, it helps everyone because the product flows better, and over time that leads to better pricing.”
While Custom Metal Designs has been a manufacturer for manufacturers, providing equipment to help companies in the industry automate, it has also been building its reputation as a contract manufacturer, making parts for industries ranging from aerospace to theme parks. The company uses its own automation designs to speed up production — but it still needs workers to keep the factory operating.
“We struggle like everybody else finding welders, machinists and other workers,” Aguerrevere said. “We have a robotic welder in our facility, so we use the automation as part of making our products and services, but we've done nothing but grow head count. Two or three years ago we were in the 70s and now we’re over 100. Automation makes us more competitive.”
Still, Aguerrevere admits other companies are further ahead in the industry because they are using data to drive their activities and business decisions.
“I see the use of data analytics becoming more prominent,” he said. “We collect a lot of data, but we haven't gotten to a point where we're utilizing it to the best of its ability to yield all the information available. There’s a growing need for folks who can work with the data and understand what data is telling them about how to run a business more efficiently and effectively.”
Industry 4.0
As it competes for work globally, Custom Metal Designs continues to strive for efficiency and effectiveness through automation. “We’re going to be growing and hiring more people, even though some of the jobs may not look the same,” Aguerrevere said. “There’s more of a technical focus in what we do now than before, so the lower-skill, entry-level jobs are probably not as prevalent as they were 20 years ago, but we have a lot more engineers, electricians, electrical engineers and mechanics.”
He has been working with local colleges, universities and trade schools to groom the next generation of the manufacturing workforce. He speaks about a young man on his team who was hired right out of a Valencia College program as a machine operator making an entry-level hourly wage and worked his way up to an engineering position in only six years. There are numerous success stories like this in
In the meantime, manufacturers need to continue embracing technology to bring in the best workers and be ready for what the future holds.
“Everybody's interfacing with computers nowadays, from the most junior-level position to me,” Aguerrzevere said. “Even if you're out there on the floor, you're scanning in your work order, you're looking at your drawings on the screen, the software system is telling you what to work on and when, and everything is digital. It’s Industry 4.0. “That's the future. “You've got to be nimble, you've got to adapt and you've got to embrace new technology in this competitive global world or you're going to get left behind.”
Manufacturers are bringing in workers who can be trained to handle equipment as well as technology
Moving You Forward
We’re moving in to move you forward.
We’ve been proudly serving Central Florida from our Downtown Orlando location, but our new location in Winter Park makes it even easier to help businesses just like yours.
Put your goals in motion with our team of local advisors. Business Banking | Personal Banking | Private Banking
NEW LOCATION Winter Park Banking Center 655 West Morse Boulevard Suite 111, Winter Park, FL 32789 407.887.4960 Downtown Orlando Banking Center 420 S. Orange Avenue Suite 150, Orlando, FL 32801 407.545.2662
Orange City Banking Center 1113 Saxon Boulevard Orange City, FL 32763 386.774.0977
A lot of organizations focus on content first. We don’t care about content as much as we care about the outcome. We ask ourselves, ‘What does a learner need to know and do at the completion of this activity?’ Then we deliver that using as little content as we can. Learners are not stupid. They can tell when things aren’t really required, and they tune out. That’s the focus for us.
— Jack McGrath
BY MEAGHAN BRANHAM
Photography by Julie Fletcher
When students with disabilities learn side by side with other students, everybody benefits, according to research conducted over the past 20 years. This has sparked a trend toward “inclusive classrooms,” a concept that interested an Orlando technology company normally focused on professional services.
Digitec Interactive is now partnering with New York University (NYU) to provide teachers with training and tools developed with input from the autistic community. The partnership is the latest innovation for a company that has been evolving since its start more than two decades ago.
It is also the latest project of Jack McGrath, Digitec Interactive’s president and creative director, who joined the company in the mid-1990s. The organization has been focused on creating effective employee training programs for clients including corporations, membership associations, academic institutions, medical companies and nonprofits.
In the beginning, the company’s offerings were largely based on services, McGrath said. Digitec Interactive originally created custom content for organizations such as The Walt Disney Company that involved the hands-on participation of a videographer, a graphic designer and a writer who all created treatments, characters and storylines for key learning experiences. Soon, however, the company saw that a change was coming — and along with it, a chance to reach even more companies with its services.
“People started to be more interested in ‘off-the-shelf’ tools to create their own eLearning content,” McGrath said. “So we started building learning apps and differentiating the quality of our custom content. It was always about how we could get organizations to teach their people faster with training that sticks. Our learning technology can do that. So we were, and still are, building and releasing applications and products that help our clients better engage with their learning community.”
Learning Journeys
In 2003, Digitec Interactive launched Knowledge Direct, doubling down on its investment in products with the learning management platform designed to make creating, delivering and tracking learning for employees easy for managers across industries. Today the company is on version seven and has served more than 3 million learners on the platform.
“As we evolved, we discovered that a lot of clients needed the same kinds of things: a testing engine, registration and an easy way to design, maintain and distribute their online learning. With Knowledge Direct, we focused on professional associations to allow them to offer continuing education online, which gave them an additional product to sell,” McGrath said. “We still serve professional associations with the platform. It’s convenient for members because they can get the training they need when and where they need it.
“With this latest version, we’re broadening out to corporate training, focusing more on learning journeys,” he said. “It’s common for people to get so overwhelmed with content and training at the start of a job that in two weeks, it’s forgotten. These learning journeys are role-based, targeted training released over time, allowing learning and development departments to easily create it.”
Being adaptable to needs is crucial to Digitec Interactive, and so is anticipating the needs of the future. Engaging, effective online learning became more important than ever in a COVID-19 world, just as efficient training did when roles shifted and turnover increased.
In the early 2000s, the concept of “gamification” was catching on as companies used the application of game-playing processes to create a more engaging method of learning. Digitec was ahead of the curve, already developing games like one that won the company its first international recognition: a simulation game allowing
players to learn how to use credit by living out 50 years over the course of game play.
Twenty years later, the company is still proving gamification naysayers wrong with projects like “Mission Timekeeper,” an immersive game created for Disney that involves players traveling through space and visiting different solar systems to learn about the Disney divisions.
PINE Partnership
The company’s latest venture in forward thinking sees it in a new world and a new role, McGrath said. In its new venture, Digitec Interactive is working with NYU Steinhardt to develop the Program for Inclusion and Neurodiversity Education, or PINE.
The program is available for primary and secondary schools, with content and lessons designed to offer educators the training they need to understand learners with autism. The content was developed in partnership with members of the autistic community.
“For the content itself, we needed subject matter experts,” McGrath said. “Some of them were people who had autism, and it was exciting to get creative and collaborate on how to deliver the messages. One of our teachers in the course is nonverbal, so we had to challenge ourselves in asking how we deliver the information in a new way.”
The program is distributed through the Knowledge Direct platform, an easy transition for NYU, which already has leveraged it for much of its continuing education and training.
The two organizations have just wrapped up their third course together. By creating these custom eLearning experiences using the Knowledge Direct platform, they are establishing a model for Digitec to grow its everexpanding services.
“We provide support for users and managed services to keep the content up to date,” McGrath said. “We’ve become a one-stop shop, and that’s a model we’d like to continue.”
For McGrath and Digitec Interactive, the next move is determined by a lasersharp focus on what matters most: delivering information as simply as possible.
“A lot of organizations focus on content first,” McGrath said. “We don’t care about content as much as we care about the outcome. We ask ourselves, ‘What does a learner need to know and do at the completion of this activity?’ Then we deliver that using as little content as we can. Learners are not stupid. They can tell when things aren’t really required, and they tune out. That’s the focus for us.”
