Keeping Your Business in the U.S.A.

Here to bring back the pride, confidence, and jobs that Made in the U.S.A. once generated--Keeping Your Business in the U.S.A.: Profit Globally While Operating Locally shows American enterprises how to survive and prosper while keeping their manufacturing base within the United States. It tells the stories of three manufacturing companies that have been able to buck the outsourcing trend and achieve overwhelming success while keeping jobs in the States.

Using case studies, the book illustrates each company's story from the day it started. It examines the successes, failures, lessons learned, and methods used by each company to achieve and sustain success. The authors integrate nearly a century of combined experience to compare the different business strategies, make key observations, and provide helpful tips for duplicating the recipes that led to these companies' overwhelming success.

Debunking the myth that U.S. manufacturers can't compete with cheap labor countries, the authors detail seven recipes they have found to be common denominators among the successful companies they have encountered. These manufacturing veterans provide you with simple but effective ingredients, the recipes, and the way of thinking needed to re-establish Made in the U.S.A. as the beacon of progress and quality it once was.

Watch co-author Paul Piechota discuss how this book can benefit your business.

Tim Hutzel, past president of MainStream Consulting, is a 45-year veteran of manufacturing management and industrial psychology. His education and life experiences provide him with the unique ability to blend a BS in engineering technology from Miami University (Ohio) with a master's degree in organization development from Bowling Green State University. The joining of these two disciplines piqued his interests to the point where his research and thesis concentrated on Self-Directed Work Teams. Tim has written and implemented several programs on Self-Directed Work Teams including The Design and Implementation of Self-Directed Work Teams, The Daily Management of Self-Directed Work Teams, and The Supervisor's Role in Self-Directed Work Teams. He also developed the Self-Directed Work Team course for the Association for Quality and Participation.

This blend of the technical and organizational has provided Tim with the advantage of having a radar screen that goes far beyond the normal scope and toolbox of traditional Lean implementers who focus on kaizen or Lean events. Although trained by the Shingijutsu experts while he worked in Japan, he discovered that the missing link to sustainment of Lean was the need to treat Lean transformation as an organizational development initiative, not simply a series of Lean events in hopes that the organization would eventually get it. Tim, who was responsible for Lean at GE Aircraft Engines and on the Jack Welch select team to implement Lean across all of GE, recalls, Whenever we would ask the Japanese what was next after kaizen they never seemed to understand our need to connect the dots organizationally. I now understand why. Kaizen was only one component of the Toyota Production System (TPS), which began with Japan's reconstruction in the late 1940s. TPS and kaizen evolved over 50 years. The organizational aspect of Lean was always in the background with them as Lean evolved; Shingijutsu never appreciated that we westerners needed to understand that. That was my epiphany--that Lean transformation meant coaching the entire organization to behave in a holistic Lean context, not just the shop floor, not just manufacturing, and not just by conducting Lean events.

Paul Piechota is the executive director for the Center for Competitive Change at the University of Dayton Research Institute. In his positions at UDRI, Paul currently is the principal investigator/project manager for a four-year, multimillion dollar government-sponsored project on performance-based competency mapping. As executive director, he leads the university's outreach center focused on helping companies achieve organizational and operational excellence from leadership team to the shop floor, bank, and healthcare workforce. Paul also held many positions ranging from senior vice president of a small business to concluding a successful 14-year career with NCR that took him from developing and teaching financial systems to top worldwide banking engineers. His career shifted to becoming the senior product engineer for a six-state territory for Texas Instruments Mobility Computing Business Unit. He has had a diversified 26-year career also bringing his early project and process management forward.

Paul has authored of over 30 publications with such titles as Transforming the Enterprise, Getting to the Future First!, and Establishing a Method for Process and Culture Change in the Military. Along with being professionally employed, Paul is currently a facilitator for the Dayton President's Forum and active member with the Dayton Tooling and manufacturing Association Workforce Development Committee, Montgomery County Business First Resource Representative, and Dayton Chamber of Commerce Workforce Oversight Committee/ Annual Raj Soin Small Business Innovation Evaluation Team.

Other active memberships include Montgomery County Business First, State of Ohio Manufacturing Sector Strategy Committee, Regional Project Management Group, LinkedIn Six Sigma and Lean Groups, and American Society for Quality. Piechota has a BS in marketing from Wright State University and a MA in business performance across global marketplaces from the McGregor School of Management at Antioch College. His PhD program at the University of Dayton is on hold until after the publication of this book.