Virginia Tech Leads a New Center to Help Manufacturers

Manufacturers today are faced with relentless pressure to cut costs, improve operations, and offer new products and services in response to ever-changing customer demands and preferences. To remain competitive, firms must keep abreast of and continually develop and implement new processes, methods, and technologies. The Center for High Performance Manufacturing was developed to help manufacturing firms in this pursuit, i.e., to become high-performance manufacturers in their respective industries.

The Center is led by Virginia Tech, with participation from James Madison University, the College of William and Mary, and Virginia State University. It was launched in July 2001 with $4.35M in funding from the State of Virginia (Commonwealth Technology Research Fund) and a $4.6M matching funds from the Universities and several equipment manufacturers.

The mission of the Center for High Performance Manufacturing is: To help manufacturing firms (especially those in Virginia) become high-performance manufacturers, in their respective industries, via research and development of enabling tools and technologies and the successful transfer and implementation of these items.

To provide various avenues for fulfilling its mission, the Center focuses on projects in five areas of specialization. These include: Manufacturing Logistics/Supply Chain Management and Production & Information Systems, Flexible Automation and Computer Integrated Manufacturing, Low Cost Composite Manufacturing and Rapid Prototyping/Rapid Tooling. While these are currently defined areas of research, the center is open to working with the manufacturers to solve their problems in whatever area it happens to be. The center can bring together the relevant expertise from the vast knowledge resources of Virginia Tech to meet the need of the manufacturer.

The Center for High Performance Manufacturing works by maintaining an affiliation of member companies. Each company pays an annual membership fee. Funds are then used to (i) perform projects of mutual interest to multiple companies, (ii) transfer results back to member companies, (iii) provide limited seminars, training courses, etc. to member companies, and (iv) run the Center. Companies wishing to collaborate on projects for tackling their specific problems may do so at additional cost.

All member companies enjoy many benefits including:

• Synergy – interaction between Center members can lead to new ideas for solving manufacturing problems.
• Leveraging – of time, resources, and funding, allowing efficient tackling of large-scale research projects.

For more information on the center, please visit the webpage at www.eng.vt.edu/chpm/ or contact Dr. Sanjay Jain, CPIM, (703) 535-3447, sanjay.jain@vt.edu, the center’s research faculty in the Northern Virginia area.