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4 Companies Share Spotlight at Shenango Chamber Event
HERMITAGE, Pa. – Officials with Ellwood Crankshaft and Machine Co. expect to make a decision soon on where to build a $50 million plant to manufacture products targeting opportunities in the large engine market, a company spokeswoman said Tuesday.
A Shenango Valley site is among the locations being considered for the project, said Amy Weller, director of community and employee development at Ellwood Crankshaft Group, one of four presenters at the Hermitage at Sunrise event held at the Training & Workforce Development Center at the LindenPointe Innovative Business Campus. The event was presented by the Shenango Valley Chamber of Commerce.
“We need larger forging presses. We need larger heating furnaces. We can’t play in this market right now,” Weller told the chamber members and guests.
The company had what Weller described as “the perfect place” for the expansion with “beaucoup land” at one of its other Pennsylvania campuses. “However, we can’t find the workforce. We cannot find the people to serve and work in our facility there, let alone hire 35 to 50 employees to serve this next market, so we’re in the process of identifying a couple of locations,” she remarked.
“I’m personally hoping that [the Shenango Valley site is] the one they pursue but there’s also a few other ones that are on the table,” she acknowledged.
“This is actually a hundred-year press. Wherever it lands it’ll be there for at least a century,” she said.
Founded as Ellwood City Forge more than a century ago, Ellwood Crankshaft Group has 17 business units and about 30 facilities around the country with some 2,600 employees. Its products are shipped around the globe, and because of demand about 70% of the company’s workforce works four 12-hour days then is off four days, earning a $2-per-hour bonus, Weller said.
“Our workforce here in this area is paramount. We have been so pleased with how flexible and cooperative they have been,” she remarked.
The breakfast program kicked off with a presentation by David George, the president of Joy Cone Co. Founded in 1918 as a side business by his grandfather, Albert George, what was then known as the George and Thomas Cone Co. grew into his main business soon and did “pretty well” until a fire during World War II. Building permits were difficult to obtain due to tight supplies during the war and his grandfather never got the business “anywhere close to where it was” afterward, he recalled. The business was down to a single customer when David’s father and uncle took over in 1964, and after another devastating fire that year they moved the business from Sharon to Hermitage.
The brothers also moved the business beyond food service accounts into the retail business, which his dad wanted, George recalled. During the 1970s the company, since renamed Joy Cone, acquired Dairy Queen as an account and subsequently began doing business with Nabisco as well. The company’s expansion, which has included acquiring business from McDonald’s, includes adding a plant in Flagstaff, Ariz., and acquiring competitors so that it is now probably the largest cone company in the world, he estimated.
Joy Cone now has 75% of the retail market and 60% of the food service market, he reported.
“The cone industry is relatively labor intensive but over the years we’ve automated,” a process that began during the 1980s, he said. Despite concerns that automation would cost workers their jobs, his father told him the company would need to hire more people as it became more efficient “and that’s exactly what happened,” George said.
“We can produce a lot more per hour than we ever did” and the company has never had to lay off employees because of efficiency though it does have seasonal layoffs, he said.
A year ago, Joy Cone added a 90,000-square-foot sugar and waffle cone room that will allow it to supply cones for manufacturers of confections such as Drumstick sundae cones, or dairy pack, he said. “For us to really grow we have to be active in dairy pack,” which Joy Cone hopes to dominate as it does in its other market segments, he remarked.
Louise Lowrey, executive vice president of First National Bank of Pennsylvania and director of the F.N.B. Technology Center, waved a mobile phone and discussed the latest way “these little devices” have changed the world for F.N.B.’s customers. Just a day earlier the bank introduced the ability for customers to photograph a check using their phone and deposit it to into their account.
That process grew out of a change that took place in banking because of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks when air traffic was halted for several days, preventing checks being transported by those planes from clearing. The Check 21 legislation passed by Congress in 2003 permitted the use of a digital version of the original check for remote deposit.
Technology support for the entire corporation, which has 240 banking offices, 3,000 employees and more than $12 billion in assets, is handled at the technology center. The bank has 225 technologists, primarily based in Hermitage. She also told the audience that F.N.B. now has the third largest market share in the Pittsburgh metropolitan statistical area.
Concluding the program was Yvonne English, executive director of the eCenter@lindenPointe, who outlined the various services the incubator offers. In addition to space for entrepreneurs, those include coaching and mentoring, networking and providing links to potential funding such as venture capitalists, angel investors and banks.
Among the young companies English is working with at the eCenter is a company that takes electricity and runs it through harder metals to make them more flexible, a firm that translates websites for foreign languages and advises companies how to set up websites so as not to “hardcode” English into them, and an entrepreneur working on a mobile application to help autistic children by preparing them for social situations.
Copyright 2012 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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