The Investment Casting Institute

THE INVESTMENT CASTING INSTITUTE are people who have worked in the industry and want to stay involved. They pay a nominal fee to get our magazine and membership discounts if they want to come to one of our events. Honorary members are those individuals who we see to be a great value to the industry; they are retirees and they get the same rights as alumni, they just don’t have to pay for it. These people work on com- mittees and help drive things forward in their retirement.” BVM: How do you explain the benefits of membership when talking to prospective member companies? Fritz: “When you’re do- ing that, you’re in a sales role, and to be a good salesman, you need to understand your poten- tial customer; you need to understand what their needs are and take your strengths and position them against their needs. So, for example, if I’m talking with a smaller company, somebody that might not have all the resources or the buying volumes to get the best pricing, I take the time to share with them how they can take advantage of a lot of our member programs that would provide them discounts on things that they need to run their business. “We’re not talking about direct materials here, but we might be talking about office equipment, for example; we might be talking about discount travel programs; we might be talking about discounted programs through various freight and shipping companies that we have arrangements with–ways that we can help a company reduce its costs. Additionally, these companies typically don’t have as advanced technologies as the larger organizations. So, we try to address the areas that they’re trying to grow into.We’ll discuss train- ing and support orga- nizations; we highlight our technical resources and the free counsel that our technical com- mittee offers people. If they’re having a problem with a process, they can come to us and we will respond to them after a panel of experts has reviewed their situation. So, you try to highlight the things that that company may derive benefit from. That’s a key element. “On the other hand, you might be talking to a very large company that has all the resources it needs, and, quite frankly, may not need a group like the Investment Cast- ing Institute. The approach with somebody like that might be very different.We have the largest manufacturers in the industry as members and if you were to talk with them, they might say, they don’t ‘need’ the ICI, but they’re members because it’s how they give back to the industry - like work- ing with elementary and high school students, trying to instill an inter- est in manufacturing and the investment casting process. They’ll talk about engineering and try to get people excited.We work with colleges, and we offer scholarship programs for students who do intern- ships. And a lot of the larger companies work with us for these types of programs. So, it’s more out of the humanitarian need to give back to the com- munity that we’ll see a lot of these larger companies get involved. “They also know that we help educate their custom- ers; we bring customers to the industry, people who might be buying forgings, precision machinings, fabrications, and show them that they can make similar or identical prod- ucts with the investment casting process, quite often reducing their overall manufacturing costs. So, we do a lot of education of the potential customer at various trade shows. In fact, we run the world’s