Industrial Resource
Center Network

Directors of the Pennsylvania IRCs.

In order to enhance collaboration among like groups throughout the IRCs, the planning committee has provided a venue to have breakfast with your peers.  Please choose which breakfast you would like to attend.  Each segment will have a dedicated room with a hearty breakfast buffet and beverages!

Operations staff of the IRCs.

In order to enhance collaboration among like groups throughout the IRCs, the planning committee has provided a venue to have breakfast with your peers.  Please choose which breakfast you would like to attend.  Each segment will have a dedicated room with a hearty breakfast buffet and beverages!

Support staff for the IRCs that conduct activities such as reporting, accounting, etc. 

In order to enhance collaboration among like groups throughout the IRCs, the planning committee has provided a venue to have breakfast with your peers.  Please choose which breakfast you would like to attend.  Each segment will have a dedicated room with a hearty breakfast buffet and beverages!

Marketing, Public Relations, etc. staff of the IRCs.

In order to enhance collaboration among like groups throughout the IRCs, the planning committee has provided a venue to have breakfast with your peers.  Please choose which breakfast you would like to attend.  Each segment will have a dedicated room with a hearty breakfast buffet and beverages!

Sales staff of the IRCs. 

In order to enhance collaboration among like groups throughout the IRCs, the planning committee has provided a venue to have breakfast with your peers.  Please choose which breakfast you would like to attend.  Each segment will have a dedicated room with a hearty breakfast buffet and beverages!

Service delivery staff to include performance improvement, business growth services, training, etc.

In order to enhance collaboration among like groups throughout the IRCs, the planning committee has provided a venue to have breakfast with your peers.  Please choose which breakfast you would like to attend.  Each segment will have a dedicated room with a hearty breakfast buffet and beverages!

Information technology staff of the IRCs. 

In order to enhance collaboration among like groups throughout the IRCs, the planning committee has provided a venue to have breakfast with your peers.  Please choose which breakfast you would like to attend.  Each segment will have a dedicated room with a hearty breakfast buffet and beverages!

Kenny Steinbacher, IMC
Lauren Bryson, IRC Network

When you leave this session you will be thunderstruck at the power of technology.  You will gain the enthusiasm and brain power of technology tips and tricks from Kenny Steinbacher, IMC.  A few sneak peeks include learning about free software to make your life easier including Desktop QuicksSearch, Password Manager, Portable Applications and much more.  You will also gain Microsoft application time saving tips including styles, free templates, etc.  There will be internet tips to enhance your knowledge base with RSS Feeds, Home Pages, etc.  Lauren will be providing an update on the IRC Network SharePoint tool including an overview, review of specific features and next steps.  Kenny will be providing tips and tricks to maximize Microsoft SharePoint as well including linking calendars to your Outlook, alerts, etc.  There will be time allocated for techy questions and answers including "How Vista relates to other software"... It is a guarantee that you will walk away with at least one tip or trick you will implement within a day!

STEM, Adventures in Technology

Rob McLlvaine, MANTEC
Mel Payne, DVIRC

This session will include updates and information on the STEM iniaitive, Adventures in Technology intiative and other talent development pipeline projects and initiatives IRC’s and IRC clients can benefit from.

Craig Fredrickson, Lead Lean Champion at GE

In this session Craig, the Lead Lean Champion at GE, will talk about GE’s journey in Lean and will provide value stories, a visual management discussion and talk about the Gemba activity.  There will also be a portion for question and answers.

Lou Musante, ECHO Strategies

This workshop presents hard facts on the habits that enable certain SME manufacturers to put more money on the bottom line and at the same time grow their top line revenues. Attend this interactive, dialog-based session and you will learn what organizational behaviors and business processes innovative learning firms employ. In addition, an 8-question assessment tool will be demonstrated that allows marketing and sales personnel to quickly classify prospects or existing customers according to their innovation and learning capacities. This workshop will only be presented one time during the conference.

Rick DeMoss, Industrial Research Services
Tom Meshanko, Catalyst Connection

Catalyst Connection and 3rd party partner Industrial Research Services have been conducting successful Lead Generation and Qualification services for manufacturing clients since 1998.  In this session, Tom Meshanko from Catalyst Connection and Rick DeMoss from Industrial Research Services will cover best practices related to the following topics:

• Setting the goals and expectations
• Analyzing the client customer database to understand past success
• Narrowing the focus for optimal results
• Setting the parameters for the most appropriate and highest priority prospect targets
• Determining the decision makers, qualification criteria and key information to be collected
• Conducting phonebased data collection and prospect qualification
• Presenting the results and determining best next steps and followup
• Optimizing positive impact and ROI for the client

Gene Hess, DCED
Dave Cranmer, MEP

Patty Bowen, PA Workforce Investment Board

Industry Partnerships are the cornerstone of Pennsylvania's new, industry-led, demand-driven workforce development strategy. This new strategy is focused on creating a skilled workforce through industry-specific training and education programs developed in cooperation with business and industry leaders â€" with funding made possible through the support of the Pennsylvania General Assembly.   Pennsylvania is one of the initial states that utilized the industry cluster approach.  Through key industry identification, partnership development, and the promotion of a career pathways model, Pennsylvania wants to ensure that every citizen has the opportunity to obtain, at minimum, family sustaining wages.  There are more than 6,100 businesses involved in nearly 90 Industry Partnerships across Pennsylvania. Over 53,000 workers have been trained for jobs in critical Pennsylvania industries in which higher-skill, higher-wage jobs exist.

Frank DeWolf, RFID Center of Excellence, located at Penn State Behrend
Chris Wassel, RFID Center of Excellence, located at Penn State Behrend
Brain Zentis, RFID Center of Excellence, located at Penn State Behrend

This session will consist of an overview of radio frequency identification technologies along with many hands-on interactive demonstrations.  Topics will include the various types of RFID technologies, RFID standards, examples of business process applications, and enterprise integration.  The session will also cover the application of RFID technology to supply chain management processes utilizing Wal-Mart and the Department of Defense as examples.  The technology demonstrations will include RFID readers, RFID tags, impacts of various materials such as metals and liquids, product tagging guidelines, and distance read capabilities.

Lou Musante, ECHO Strategies

This highly interactive workshop will demonstrate proven and leading-edge methods to both listen to and look at customers to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of new product and service development processes, strategic planning and new market development. These tools complement and should be helpful in selling and in the delivery of the Business Growth Services offered by the IRC Network. Tools to be profiled include the AEIOU Method, Shadowing, Adopt a User, Fly on the Wall, Think Aloud Protocol, Delphi Forecasting Panels and Knowledge Mining. A special case study will be presented to help CEO customers "see how" to double the productivity of their sales force.

Denny Caruso, Caruso & Associates

In a recent survey of 1,086 Mid-Atlantic Manufacturers 73% said that finding new customers was their number one business objective. Yet a full 82% of those companies were unhappy with their success. Although finding new customers is their top priority, most small companies struggle with making it happen.  Why?

Making it happen:

• Is expensive
•  Takes lots of time
•  Is complicated
•  Takes special skills
•  Is risky
•  Is just plain hard to do

BUT!!!!!!!! FINDING NEW CUSTOMERS DOES NOT HAVE TO BE ANY OF THE ABOVE!

Today manufacturing companies can:

• Cultivate prospects for pennies
• Dramatically reduce the time it takes to get new customers
•  Simplify the process
•  Quickly develop everything you need to start
•  Minimize risk
•  Be in control
•  Make it easy to make it happen

Your clients can have similar results!

If increasing the number of companies your manufacturers service is important to growing their business, now is your opportunity to offer them an easier more effective way to get more new customers.

The Attract More New Customers program will:

• Substantially increase the number of RFQ's your clients receive
•  Measurably reduce your clients cost of customer acquisition
•  Consistently maintain a flow of new customer opportunities for your manufacturers
•  Effectively attract more profitable customers to each of your clients

The Attract More New Customers program will systematically help your customers to more easily find and win more new customers. Over 12 years of application with hundreds of small to mid size companies have gone into constructing this best practice program. The principles are easy to learn and when implemented, really work for even the smallest of companies.

Contact: Mike Noble

Sign up to watch a short film about biofuel then tour the facility (Seating is limited). Lake Erie BioFuels is Pennsylvania's first large scale Bio diesel facility. The facility can produce 45 million gallons per year. Lake Erie BioFuels began operations in November 2007. Biodiesel is a domestic renewable fuel for diesel engines derived from natural oils like soybean oil or animal fats. The tour will take you through both the preparation of incoming feed stock to the actual production of BioFuels, byproducts and shipping. The tour will last approximately one hour. No high heels or open toe shoes allowed.

Limit: 30 participants. Available: 30

Contact: Joe Pacinelli, President

Better Baked Foods is a premier frozen French bread and Panini sandwich manufacturer. Our state of the art topping and baking facility can produce over 350,000 pieces of french bread pizza a day and an incredible 120,000 sandwiches per day. We are a "fully integrated" manufacturer in that we have a product development group staffed with degreed food scientists, our own bakery capable of producing and processing over 20,000 pounds of dough a day and two state of the art topping facilities capable of pinpoint placement of ingredients and exact product weight control. We have the packaging capability to produce bulk, shrink or flow wrap product, carton and master cased. We also have an onsite 1,700 pallet space freezer for storage.

During this tour you will better understand the quality and food safety requirements imposed upon food manufacturers and view a mass produced product within a controlled individually packaged environment. Most people have never visited a food manufacturing concern and many find the process fascinating. All of our ingredients have specific shelf life limits and it becomes vitally important that the production scheduling process run as close to "just in time" as possible.

Limit: 35 participants. Available: 5

Contact: John Meckley

Double your tour experience by signing up to tour both the Plastics Engineering and RFID labs at the Behrend Penn State campus.

The Plastics Program at Penn State Erie has been in existence for almost 20 years. Penn State graduates about 30 to 48 students a year. They take positions in the local area as well as around the country. Each year there is 100% job placement. The Penn State Erie Plastics Lab is full of State-of the-Art injection molding equipment. The lab is the largest of any Plastics Program in the country. The majority of equipment in the processing lab is injection molding; however, most of the other major types of processes are represented: blow molding, thermoforming, extrusion, and compression molding. During the tour, you will see some of these processes in action converting plastic pellets into molded parts. We will also show some of the testing equipment that is used to reinforce the lectures on processing. We will also discuss how we use the lab to educate the students.

The RFID Center of Excellence lab is located at the Penn State Behrend campus in Erie. The mission of the center is to conduct RFID research and outreach resulting in strategic advantage and economic growth for industry. The lab is housed at the new 160,000 SF Research and Economic Development Center. You can expect to see/learn and take away from this tour, state-of-the-art RFID equipments such as readers, antennas, portals, conveyor sections, PLC control units and much more. The lab is strategically designed to test and demonstrate reader performance, antenna capabilities, tag analysis, ERP system integration, project tagging optimization and real-time asset tracking.

Limit: 40 participants. Available: 40

Sign up for a tour to see GE Locomotive's new technology, progressive assembly, and understand what is value add and waste.  There will be an opportunity following the tour in their conference room for question and answers.  GE Transportation, a unit of General Electric Company (NYSE: GE), delivers technology solutions for the, rail, marine and mining industries. Products and services include freight and passenger locomotives, diesel engines and gas turbines for marine and industrial applications, motorized systems for mining trucks and drills and gearbox assemblies for wind turbines. With sales in excess of $3 billion, GE Transportation employs approximately 8,000 people worldwide.

Limit: 40 participants. Available: -1

If you would prefer to stay at the Bayfront Convention Center and not participate in the external tours we welcome you to stay and attend a video session where episodes of the "Made in America" show and other video tours of manufacturers will be shown.

6S Workplace Organization for Administrative Areas  is a systematic approach to improving office organization, ordering, cleanliness, and standardization while simultaneously improving office efficiency and reducing lead times. During this session, the group will learn how to apply the 6S System for Administrative Areas which includes the following activities:

• Safety - identifying and eliminating unsafe conditions.
• Sorting - evaluating the need for items currently located within the targeted area and removing unnecessary items.
• Setting in Order - arranging the necessary items in the most logical and most efficient configuration. Also encompasses setting inventory limits, making location indicators, establishing reorder points, etc.
• Shine - cleaning everything in the selected area and using cleaning to ensure office equipment and area cleanliness are maintained.
• Standardization - creating uniformity in the way work within the targeted area is performed and incorporating the first three S's into everyone's daily routines by creating visual displays, checklists and processing controls.
• Sustainment - creating accountability for the preservation and continuance of the 6S System through self-discipline, training, communication and total employee involvement.

George Borowsky, InSight3

People are the ultimate organizational resource.  And, the quality and performance of its managers is the only effective advantage a business can have in a really competitive environment! But, as Peter Drucker put it, writing in the Harvard Business review:

-"Executives spend more time managing people and making people decisions than on anything else.  No other decisions are so long lasting in their consequences or so difficult to unmake.

-And yet, by and large, executives make poor promotion and staffing decisions.  By all accounts, their batting average is no better than .333.  At most, one-third of such decisions turn out right; one-third are minimally effective; and one-third are outright failures. 

-In no other area of management would we put up with such miserable performance."

Learn how personality mapping can objectively describe, measure and predict the work behavior, attitudes, needs, and potential of individuals and groups at all levels of an organization.

• How to reduce costly hiring and promotion mistakes.
• How to significantly improve employee recruitment and selection.
• How to determine "who" is the problem.
• How to identify "hot buttons" and unique motivational needs of  individual employees.
• How to increase job satisfaction and employee commitment.

Jim Shillenn, IMC

With oil prices breaking records this year and with the looming removal of rate caps in 2010 for electricity prices in many areas of Pennsylvaina, manufacturers are facing tough questions about how energy costs will impact their competiveness and if there are any answers on how to reduce energy costs. Manufacturers also have an opportunity to grow their business through evolving opportunities in the renewable energy and green marketplaces.   This presentation will provide an overview of how we got here, some of the lessons we learned and didn’t learn when we faced an energy crisis some thirty years ago and resources that are currently available and incentives that are in place that may help companies save energy, reduce their dependence on fossil fuels or support the development of clean energy products. The presentation will also review the market opportunities which may be ahead as a result of policy incentives and mandates which are now in places.

Joe Radick, Weiler Corporation
Charlie O'Rourke, New Pig Corporation
Tony Manorek, NEPIRC

In this session, you will learn how the IRC network is using the proven Training Within Industries (TWI) methodology for Job Instruction, Job Relations, and Job Methods Improvement training to help companies sustain Lean efforts and create an environment where innovation can thrive. Two Pennsylvania manufacturers will provide case studies on how TWI is being utilized to continuously improve their personnel, processes and products.

Bob Beaury, Penn State University

This session will explore how economic development oriented organizations are using their websites and related electronic materials.  The session will discuss "best practices" in building and implementing websites and will provide specific real-world examples of organizations that are highly successful in the electronic delivery of their information and those that are not.

In addition, in preparation for the session a review of each Center’s site will be conducted so that specific issues and feedback can be provided.

Don Moore, Decision Associates

National studies predict that 50% of entrepreneurially owned businesses in the U.S. will change ownership in the next five years! Statistics show that many of these business successions do not go well, resulting in losses in profitability, growth and jobs. In many cases the result is bankruptcy. Even those that ultimately return to health often do so after an extended period of weak performance. Don will outline economic impact that these problems could have on regional economies. But this presentation is not about doom and gloom. To position IRC's to address these succession issues in your region, Don will present ideas that you can use to help you:

• Understand the types of business succession
• Understand the root causes of poor succession
• Understand the overall process and steps for successful succession
• Prepare entrepreneurs, their businesses and their employees for succession
• Address the complexities of financing a succession to family members, employees or other entrepreneurs in today's difficult financing environment
• Don will finish with a Question and Answer session, so bring your "real life" questions and concerns for discussion.  

The IRC Network has researched potential technology related services that would help to drive top-line growth within the small to midsized enterprise. The Marketing Development Research Project’s objective was to uncover potential market demand services that would help companies identify and secure technology solutions capable of accelerating product enhancement and development. Ultimately, The IRC Network believes this area of service will provide a unique solution for existing businesses that are seeking new sources of revenue and a sustainable increase of their firm’s overall value.

During this session you will learn of the projects findings from members of the project team. The project’s findings will related to the needs of SME CEOs for Technology Services that support New Product Development and Technology based Process Improvement. Additional findings related to the perceptions of various stakeholder and economic development leaders will be provided.

This is an exciting opportunity to learn about the discovery of the need for next generation growth tools that can help drive independent businesses towards the quick and effective commercialization of new technologies. We invite you to participate in this session where you will learn of your SME client’s needs and their suggestions for potential service solutions.

George Borowsky, InSight3

Too much of our thinking is done in a confused way -- especially group thinking processes.  We often try to do too much thinking at once.  Emotions, information, logic, hope, negativity, and creativity get all mixed in together.  It's like juggling too many balls.  As a result, we begin to limit our thinking.  The Six Thinking Hats system provides a practical framework to overcome these challenges.  It's a simple, easy-to-use method that can dramatically change the way you think.  And the way your organization operates.  This system encourages the cooperative exploration of ideas and subjects.  It reduces adversarial thinking and encourages thinking together, which is far more productive.  The Six Thinking Hats system is a concrete and tangible management tool that can help make innovation a reality.  Run more effective and productive meetings.  Foster collaborative thinking and interaction by keeping egos and "turf protection" in check.  Promote the use of several different ways of thinking so that people don't get trapped by negative or critical approaches.  Facilitate parallel thinking to harness ideas from everyone in the organization.

Mike Pahides, DVIRC