Name: Brian Beland Title: President Company: KV Tooling, LLC Website: www.kvtooling.com Give us the elevator pitch about your company. What’s your primary focus? Who is your ideal customer? Beland: KV Tooling, LLC is a small tool manufacturing and reconditioning company in business in Augusta, Maine for 17 years. We are dedicated to delivering the best
Browsing: Industry Spotlight
As we near the end of Q1, the scope of 2021 remains open, but a little more defined as the year pushes forward and we being to find our way out of the Covid-19 pandemic. Vaccines are being positioned, and, though complicated and still finding footing from an efficiency standpoint, there is an end
in sight. Bold words, for sure, but, like everything else in life, there’s an end to this as well. All things culminate at some point, and so too will this moment in our history.
Name: Luke Grilli Title: VP Sales & Marketing Company: The MuShield Company Inc. Website: www.mushield.com Give us the elevator pitch about your company. What’s your primary focus? Who is your ideal customer? Grilli: MuShield specializes in the fabrication and heat treatment of magnetic shielding components, mainly from high permeability mumetal, and for the Aerospace, Defense
As we started in on the prospects of a new year, we got word that the founder of this very magazine has passed away. A terrible start to 2021 for us on a personal level. Bill Bryson was a man we came to deeply respect immediately upon meeting him a couple of years ago to talk about his transition out of The Gateway Magazine. He was looking to sell it to an interested party, but he also made it clear that he’d just as presume shutting it down than selling to the wrong people. So, we knew we had to make an impression. Our approach? Just be ourselves.
We started this series a couple of months back, and, as a refresher, we thought it might be fun to, from time-to-time, revisit some old pieces of content that have lived in the pages of the Gateway Magazine at some point in the last 20+ years of the periodical’s existence. This will also serve as a welcome departure from all the pandemic prose we seem to have been typing up for the past nine-months… With that departure in mind and in the spirit of taking “a look back,” let’s move forward (as best we can)! In many ways, the industry has changed greatly, while, in others, it’s “business as usual”, where we’re simply looking to continue the grind and get ourselves from point A to point B in a job cycle.
Hear from a handful of our collective New England manufacturers who share their own thoughts on what 2020 hit them with, what was learned, and what the future might hold. Sometimes hearing from your peers is the best study on how we can move forward as an industry.
We thought it might be fun to, from time-to-time, revisit some old pieces of content that have lived in the pages of the Gateway Magazine at some point in the last 20+ years of the periodical’s existence. This will also serve as a welcome departure from all the pandemic prose we seem to have been typing up for the past six-months… With that departure in mind and in the spirit of taking “a look back,” let’s move forward (as best we can)! In many ways, the industry has changed greatly, while, in others, it’s “business as usual” where we’re simply looking to continue the grind and get ourselves from point A to point B in a job cycle.
Reuters recently (on September 15th) announced reports on the manufacturing industry that showcased four consecutive months of growth following a stagnant, pandemic fueled period that marred the overall market for basically the first half of 2020. So, again, good news is we’ve seen more growth with data showing that manufacturing production rose 1% in August, which was preceded by 3.9% of growth in July. Numbers are obviously still way down across the board, but we’ve seen some recovery.
Piggybacking off of last month’s industry insight feature about strengthening our supply chains and tightening the reins on how far we’re spreading the cumulative links of that chain (you, know, trying to keep it “local,” and/or domestic vs. offshoring our manufacturing operations – we thought it might be an interesting conversation to talk about the foothold 5G networking is having within the industrial sector.
Supply chain.
It’s a multi-faceted topic, and, as you’re long flipped the pages of the Gateway Magazine, you’re aware that we’ve long been proponents of keeping manufacturing tasks “inhouse,” or, as it stands, “in-network,” and that network, as it were, is of much benefit if it remains in and around our direct “neck of the woods.” This couldn’t be more important right now. As the months have pressed on since the pandemic took hold back in March, supply chains have broken down, and industries far and wide have experienced tremendous cause(s) for alarm.