Business View Magazine | December 2018

58 59 STAINLESS FOUNDRY & ENGINEERING INC. to be able to train and develop the workforce of the future.” Another current challenge facing SFE concerns the issue of tariffs on steel and other metals.On one side of the ledger, Stachowiak says that it’s having a negative effect.“Scrap metal is a good percentage of our product that we re-melt in production and we’re seeing the pricing on that go up as a result of the tariffs.”However, there is a positive side, as well. “It has helped us with a lot of potential customers and prospects that were looking at buying product overseas or have been buying product overseas,”he remarks.“They’re now starting to take a look at what their true total landed cost is, so that’s giving us some opportunities in the marketplace to re-intro- duce ourselves and start some dialogue with some previous customers that had been moving, or had moved, their products overseas.” In the long run, though, facing tough challenges is nothing new for this 72-year old company that has carved out a sizable niche in the market with over 600 domestic and international customers in its order book, 175 employees, and annual revenues in the neighborhood of $30 million.“We like the tough challenging projects,” says Stachowiak, in conclusion. “So, bring us a challenge and we’ll find a solution.” changing with howwe present ourselves to the marketplace and how customers are finding us– there’s a lot more activity directly from the website.” As is the case in manymanufacturing sectors, one of SFE’s current challenges is finding highly skilled technical and process engineering people to sup- port the business.“We’re also having some trouble in terms of skilled pattern mold makers and weld- ers,”Stachowiak adds.“It’s a very tight labor market. Like many companies,we’re seeing an aging work- force and we’re planning for a lot of retirements over the next five years.There’s not a huge pool to pull from, so we started reaching out to local high schools, community colleges and outreach programs to help educate the youth. “Last year,we started a youth apprenticeship program; we started with three high school stu- dents that are working with us on a part-time basis while they’re still going to school to help expand and increase those capabilities.We’ve decided that, in today’s market,we need to take on that training and provide that skill set.Another example is a pro- gramwe started a number of years ago–we took a designer who went to two years of tech school to be a CAD designer.We brought her into the business; we sent her out for some additional classes; we did some hands-on learning here in the foundry; and over the course of about three or four years, she worked her way up to being a foundry engineer in our investment foundry. “Our jobs are structured in a three-tier system; we bring folks in on the entry level; we teach them some basic skills; we get them comfortable working in the environment; and then, as they progress and start learning new skills, they can earn higher com- pensation.We’ve got that structure in place for us PREFERRED VENDOR n Inspectech Corporation www.inspectechcorp.com InspecTech Corp. is committed to being the best value in NDT, offering our customers the highest standards of quality with con- sistent fair pricing.This policy has enabled the foundry industry to secure lasting accounts using InspecTech Corp. as their partner in non-destructive testing. With inspection labs strategically placed around the country our team of level 3 technicians provide superior service in magnetic particle inspection, liquid penetrant inspection and x-ray/digital radiography or computed radiography.