Industry outlook: i don't think most utahns are aware of the diversity of manufacturing in utah. tell us what your company does. what is most important to you as a manufacturer?

• Position: Outlook - Discussion

JENKINS: Peterson Incorporated is a heavy metal manufacturing company. We build anything from amusement park rides to large vessels for the petrochemical industry. We do a lot of nuclear work for nuclear power plants and decommissioning power plants.

LAMPROPOULOS: Merit Medical has 3,020 employees, of which about 1,750 are located in Utah. We do most of our research and development here. A good portion of the innovation comes from our facilities here and our engineers and scientists and people that come from our great universities. That's why we're here.

SUCHAN: Our primary brand is Malt-0-Meal cereal, and we employ about 250 employees in Tremonton.

BRUCE: At Rio Tinto Kennecott Utah Copper, we manufacture refined metals, which are on the front end of most of your value streams somewhere, either for your equipment or what you manufacture. We are a mining company, but 60 percent of our assets are in manufacturing after the mine.

3. TAYLOR: Blendtec employs 500 people in Utah County. We manufacture 80 percent of our blenders in Orem. We've got other products coming out, and having our engineers and our production capability housed together really creates a competitive edge for us. And we're in the process of bringing our motor line here to Utah to start manufacturing our motors here as well.

BOWERS: One of the reasons that manufacturing today is exciting is the revolution that we're seeing in manufacturing--the trend of reshoring, with Asian source products coming back into the U.S. and back into the local economy. MityLite definitely is participating in that, having brought back several products into our own facilities. So besides providing a quality product, institutional furniture, we feel like we're participating in something that's much bigger in our local and state economy.

LEE: 4Life Research has about 500 employees here in Utah and over 1,000 worldwide. We do business in nearly 60 countries around the world, but most of our manufacturing takes place here in Utah. What is most important to us in manufacturing is having proper quality systems, as we operate in the heavily regulated dietary supplements industry.

EYRING: Orbit Irrigation is investing in manufacturing locally to shorten our lead times, reduce our inventories. And ''made in USA" matters to our customers.

DE JAGER: Manufacturing is important for us at Black Diamond, but also design and engineering because what we say is "design, engineer, make, use and then repeat." Currently, we have a manufacturing facility here in Salt Lake City and in China. We are looking to optimize our international footprint, which means we are planning to reshore all of our manufacturing to Salt Lake City to improve the quality.

SORENSEN: WestCAMP is a nonprofit host of the Manufacturing Extension Partnership; it actually hosted the MEP when it was founded almost 20 years ago and continues to host the MEP. WestCAMP stands for the Western Center for Advanced Manufacturing Programs. We were a cofounder of Rocky Mountain Testing Solutions and recently completed a five-year, multi-million-dollar project called Smart Grid. We started and continue to expand the Rapid Product Realization Center at BYU, now also at UVU. We were cofounder of the Western Energy Training Center where we trained in a five-year period about 24,000 people in a five-state area.

We have a great concern that the majority of the people outside of manufacturing still think manufacturing is blue bib overalls and smokestacks, and also that there's not an appreciation for the fact that 98, 99 percent of our manufacturers in Utah are really small business, with about 25 employees. If you look at the last two decades, we lose from 250 to 500 manufacturers in the state of Utah every year that go out of business. Those are basically small businesses that encounter some challenge and internally don't have the resources to address it.

BHASKAR: Fatpipe Networks makes mission-critical wide area networks. We are one of the few technology companies that actually manufactures our own products right here in the state.

I see three things happening in the manufacturing industry. One is energy costs coming down significantly. I see chemical industries taking off again. And I also see robotics strengthening to balance out costs. It's going to be an exciting 10-, 20-year period.

BINGHAM: There are three industries that create new wealth: agriculture, mining and manufacturing. And all three of those industries have much of the same image challenge, which is today's younger generation doesn't see it as high tech, they don't see it as advanced.

Everything in our daily lives is either mined, grown or manufactured, yet the public doesn't have the perception of what it is that we produce. They don't see this soda can and think that it was extruded, it was rolled, it was produced, it was manufactured. They don't think of their watch. They don't think of their vehicle. Today's youth has a very limited understanding of what manufacturing is. So our focus moving forward is helping you change the image of manufacturing so that today's youth understand that Black Diamond products are manufactured, that the ice clamp-ons have to be made before you can purchase them.

That has a huge impact on workforce. We can't fill the pipeline with skilled workers because today's youth don't see manufacturing as a sexy industry. Our programs with UCAT are fabulous and they teach what you need in terms of a skilled workforce in your operations. The challenge is getting those students from sixth, seventh, eighth grade, high school into a manufacturing type of degree.

SORENSEN: We invest a lot in the state in STEM. The real question is people who have skills in that area, where do they go to work--for a bank or a tech company? The majority of high-skilled jobs are in manufacturing, in the design and development and production of goods, and we're missing that.

LAMPROPOULOS: At Merit, we routinely have high school groups, Scouts and other groups come visit, probably two times a week. These kids are so engaged when they get there. I'm wondering if we could get other business leaders to talk about setting up maybe a manufacturers' museum. Wouldn't it be cool if we could have a location where we all contributed, set up manufacturing facilities and had high school students come--a place where Merit, Black Diamond and others could actually do manufacturing? We'd have employees who work there. We'd produce products there. Kids could come and see research and development. Then you'd really get kids engaged.

We have a foundry. You ought to see the kids that come there and look at the semiconductors we produce. When they look at the robotics and automation and the things that we're doing, they're absolutely enthralled. They're absolutely engaged.

DE JAGER: l'm from Europe, and I find that manufacturing is a little bit hidden away in Utah. If you go outside you see banks, you see buildings and whatever. If you go to Germany and drive through the industrial parks, you see fantastic, beautiful manufacturing facilities with glass windows you can look through. You can see the robotics. You see the people work. There's a great sense of pride, and manufacturing has much higher status than it has over here.

BRUCE: This is a generational thing, and parents are influential in these young people's decisions. We need to reach their parents. They're the ones who believe that we're not innovative; they believe that very strongly. They weren't targeted. They don't understand, yet they're still heavily influencing their children.

BHASKAR: If you were to take a poll around the room, what advice did you give your children when they were growing up? Chances are you said go into finance, go into high tech. Right? Very few people say go to work in the mines. I didn't tell my kids to go into coal mining.

What we need to focus on are the kids who are not going to be...