EXAIR was recognized by Plant Engineering Magazine as a Product of the Year Award winner in four different categories this past Monday evening at a celebration in Chicago. Readers of the magazine vote to choose the products that they think are the best in each category.
These were the categories and the products that were chosen:
It was a great evening and a wonderful ceremony put together by Jim Langhenry, Bob Vavra, and all of the great folks at CFE Media. As one person at our table said, “it’s a celebration of great people and great companies that still MAKE things!” Everyone here at EXAIR certainly is happy to be a part of a great evening for manufacturing. It was an honor to be chosen for so many prestigious awards and recognized along with so many other industry leaders that still believe that manufacturing and innovation have an important place in our changing world.
Here at EXAIR we are celebrating our 30th year in business, and we are proud that our long history of industry leadership, our continuous development of innovative products, and our great people continue to drive us forward each day.
We don’t do it for the awards or recognition – but they sure are great additions to our large collection!
This isn’t a blog where I’m going to analyze the debate and weigh in on who I think won and who lost. There are thousands of media types and bloggers that have that job, and they are welcome to it.
But there was a moment in the “town hall” debate last Tuesday where one of the audience members asked what the candidates proposed to help college students have more opportunities to land jobs after graduation. Both candidates included manufacturing in their responses. It wasn’t the first or the last time that manufacturing was mentioned that night, which is a good thing.
One of the great things about Twitter is that you can read and post commentary about live events as they happen. It was very interesting to read my Twitter timeline during the debate. I stopped when an old friend, who happens to be a member of the media (notice I didn’t say “liberal” or “left-wing” media), sent out a tweet saying that college graduates would not be interested in working in manufacturing. Obviously, that didn’t sit well with me, and we had a bit of back and forth about it yesterday.
One of the other interesting things that I’ve noticed about this election year is the higher level of interest shown by younger people. My daughter, a high school junior that is too young to vote, has watched all of the debates so far. And so have many of her friends. Can you imagine being interested enough to follow presidential and vice-presidential debates at age 16 or 17? I can’t. That was a real eye opener for me.
Anyway, my daughter was having Twitter exchanges during the debate with her friends as well. One of her friends commented that no one should believe that high-wage, high-skill jobs would be found in manufacturing.
So in real-time during the debate exchange on the topic, friends of ours in the media AND a great student were stating their doubt that manufacturing could be part of the jobs solution for those with an education.
Folks, this is the perception that we have to turn around.
If the media doesn’t think we are viable as an industry and as job creators, that’s a big problem. If students don’t think we are a viable career path, that’s a HUGE problem. If no one out there is telling the story of manufacturing, and up-and-coming entrants into the workforce won’t give us a look, our days as a viable industry are numbered. I know, many people have been saying that for years, but I happen to think that rumors of our demise are a bit premature.
Manufacturing employs 12 million people, or 9% of the workforce
Manufacturing unemployment rate 11.5% BELOW the national average
Manufacturing annual earnings 36.8% ABOVE the national average
19.4% of all good manufactured globally are made in the US
If the US manufacturing economy were its own country, it would rank #9 in the world
Can you believe that we have people that don’t understand the impact and opportunities of manufacturing in this country? It’s mind blowing. We have to change the decades-old perception that manufacturing is a dying industry, and we have to do it quickly.
Take a look around wherever you are right now. Anything man made that you see was MANUFACTURED somewhere. We really couldn’t live our daily lives as we do today without manufacturing.
We have to get this information out there, by any means necessary, so that the next generation understands that we WANT highly skilled, educated people in our manufacturing businesses and that they have the opportunity to earn ABOVE AVERAGE income in exchange for those skills.
Many others have written about the outreach efforts that are needed for manufacturing but are lacking at present. Tuesday’s debate crystallized the need as starkly as ever for me.
This is my first ever attempt at a Top Ten List. I’m easily distracted, and, as such, I’d be lucky to come up with a list of three things on any given topic, on any given day without my attention being diverted…
"Squirrel!"
So, without further ado, and before I start writing about something else entirely, here’s my:
Top Ten List Of What’s Great About EXAIR:
1. We’ve got it. If it’s in the catalog, it’s in stock, and available for immediate shipment. No waiting…and waiting…and waiting…for product, as Brian Farno wrote about recently. With the exception of some of our long Air Knives, which might take a day or two to assemble, if we get an order by 3pm EST, we’ll ship it today.
2. We stand behind our products. EXAIR offers a 30-Day Unconditional Guarantee on all of our products. As hard as we try to specify the right product for your application, sometimes we don’t know until we try. I’m working with a new customer on a Line Vac project right now, where the Stainless Steel unit I recommended is experiencing unexpected abrasive wear. We’re looking at a Heavy Duty Line Vac, and he was hesitant to send the Stainless Steel one back, because he feels he’s taking advantage of us. He’s not.
3. Tech Help. I won’t say I don’t want to brag about the stellar level of technical assistance we offer, because I am indeed compelled to brag about. If you’ve got questions, we’ve got answers to almost all of them. And if we don’t know, we’ve got our Efficiency Lab…we’ll find out.
4. Professor Penurious. Not the person, although he’s a good guy that we all respect and admire (and at times, ridicule mercilessly), but the attitude of efficiency and focus on sustainability that we try to get noticed in those outrageous videos.
5. Social Media. A lot of companies are embracing it as a way to augment and/or enhance the way they do business. We’re one of them, and, it turns out, people notice that we do it well.
6. Quality Control.Statistically, if you never do anything wrong, you’re probably not doing much. As much as we can brag about our low number of defective product returns, we can brag even more about the way they’re handled. Not only do we have a great reputation for righting the wrongs, we have a strong program for making the wrongs not happen again.
7. Innovation.You know, we probably wouldn’t need a new catalog every year if we’d just stop coming up with new, and better, products. We’d also have a lot more room in our trophy case without all those awards that those products keep winning. Oh, the cost of winning…
8. People. One the first Thursday of the month, the whole company gathers together for a brief meeting. Our President, Bryan Peters, tells us how we did on sales & shipments over the past month…it’s always good to know from whence your paycheck cometh…but he never misses an opportunity to point out WHY we did so well: At every meeting, he’s got a list of praises from customers, on everything from how well our products are designed, to how great our technical assistance and customer service is, to how impressive our website and literature are, and how fast & flawlessly we ship. It is indeed a group effort, and I really like being part of this group.
9. Cincinnati.I grew up here, and as soon as I graduated high school, I joined the Navy to see the world and swore I’d never come back. I’m glad my plans didn’t work out, because this is a great place to live, work, and raise a family. Mark Twain may or may not have said “When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati because it’s always twenty years behind the times,” and yes, our airport is in Kentucky, but I bet somebody, somewhere, makes jokes about where you live too. And you don’t have a Big Red Machine. ‘nuff said.
As Election Day just passed, it seemed like an appropriate time to engage in expressing some widely shared sentiment about the state of our country and the equally alarming state of its leadership.
Personally, I don’t identify myself or my political beliefs by party affiliation. I have no t-shirts identifying myself with the letter “D” or the letter “R” (ok, I have a couple with a D on them but it has nothing to do with politics). I don’t pay particular attention to whether I live in a “red” state or a “blue” one (it actually changes colors from time to time). I have no real preference for donkeys or elephants (I do, however, notice that the things they leave behind have a lot in common). When Facebook asked my political affiliation, I chose the “Common Sense Party”. Why would Facebook care about this? There’s hardly anything more amusing than watching friends argue politics to the point of exhaustion on the almighty public forum that is Facebook. It’s not nearly as amusing as it is frightening that politics has become religion in this country, complete with blind devotion and intolerance.
Thanks to a busy life, I know a lot of people. All different kinds of people. Business owners, bankers, attorneys and accountants. Health care workers. Government employees. Pastors. Factory workers, artists, engineers, maintenance workers. People that are unemployed, and people surviving on public assistance. Students, teachers and school administrators. Public safety workers. It’s really a pretty diverse cross section when you think about it. And yet, most of us have some things in common with regard to politics and our government.
We’re pissed. We’re disgusted. We’re fed up.
Most of our politicians long since forgot the reasons they were elected, but instead have succumbed to the siren’s songs of tenure, rank and power. Time that should be spent doing the nation’s business is instead spent posturing for television cameras and other media in an inane fashion in order to build personal brands, attract contributions, and jockey for position within their own parties.
The one with the most face time wins, right? Wrong. We all lose.
The overwhelming quest for attention, advancement and re-election has trumped the idea of doing their elected jobs well. There’s no excuse for not approving the federal budget on time for most of the past 35 years. There’s also no excuse for not raising the debt ceiling this past August until the last possible moment. It seems that the upcoming fiscal reform deadline is destined for the same fate. There’s no excuse for delaying the more difficult decisions until 2013 and beyond. A responsible budget policy? No. A coordinated manufacturing policy? Nowhere in sight. Immigration reform? No. Meaningful campaign finance reform? Keep dreaming.
Common sense is apparently out of our reach for the foreseeable future.
Is it any wonder that we now have a generation (an entire generation!) that doesn’t really see the value in voting? Is it any wonder that we’ve seen the emergence of groups like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street?
The dissatisfaction of most people I know is already palpable and still growing. Most of us are ordinary people, people that would prefer to concentrate on things in our lives OTHER than politics. And yet we can’t because the dysfunction in the current system is very close to leaving us no alternative but to become much MORE involved.
Arab Spring should be a cautionary tale for our nation’s leaders. If our elected representatives won’t fix the system, then ordinary people will have no choice but to fix it ourselves.
