Job fair Monday to fill Suhner expansion jobs
The Swiss manufacturer is seeking more than two dozen new employees.
The Swiss manufacturer is seeking more than two dozen new employees.
Suhner Manufacturing Inc. is adding more than two dozen skilled labor positions and will seek applicants during a job fair Monday.
The fair has been necessitated by plans for a significant expansion by Suhner in July. It will be held at the Goodwill Career Center, 154 Hicks Drive, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Monday.
Suhner was founded in 1976 as a manufacturer of flexible shafts primarily for the automotive industry. It has expanded into medical technologies and other applications through the years. The company also supplies electrical power tools and abrasives, automation and cutting units.
The company will take over the former Brugg Cable LLC building right next to the Suhner plant on Anderson Drive. “We have been bursting at the seams,” said Suhner CEO Guido Broder.
Brugg is a sister company
that has shut down its Rome operations. “The economic conditions
for that particular product just were not there,” Broder said.
Brugg North America President Paul Luthi said the company made optical ground wires for utilities. The utilities turned around and leased lines to data and telecommunications companies like AT&T and Verizon.
“The Chinese started to interfere here so we had a decline, deterioration in pricing,” Luthi said. “The utilities decided they would buy the cheap cable and see how it goes. We do not want to deviate from our quality; you see that with most Swiss products, they are a very high quality.”
Most of the employees who were at Brugg have already transitioned to the Suhner staff.
“Two of them have retired, one left for reasons
that I do not know, but we still have 12 of them and they are happy campers,” Broder said.
Most of the equipment from the Brugg building has already been sold, but some of the equipment has yet to be moved out of the building at 25 Anderson Road. It encompasses approximately 22,500 square feet of space, about half of which will be filled up within the next six months.
“This will become a stateof-the-art manufacturing facility,” Broder said.
Ginger Ingram, with Kelly Services Rome, said the company is looking for both skilled laborers and general workers who are willing to work 12-hour shifts from 4 a.m. to 4 p.m. or 4 p.m. to 4 a.m.
Ingram said a high school diploma or GED is required and some manufacturing or assembly experience is preferred.
Broder said the medical technologies division would be the first to relocate to the new building, which will be known as Suhner Manufacturing Plant Two.
The automotive division will move later this fall.
Broder said automotive products represent about 60-65 percent of Suhner’s business. The company manufactures cables that open and close sun roofs. Suhner also makes power cables for adjustable seats in automobiles. “We make about 50 million of those cables a year,” Broder said. “The newest product we’re doing is fairly complicated wind and injection molding for lumbar seat support. We make a lot of those; it’s an area of major growth potential. We’re going to do about 10 million pieces.”
One customer in the medical sector makes up about 15 percent of Suhner’s total sales. Suhner makes a cable that is part of a device used in performing a hysterectomy. Broder said the particular equipment has changed the procedure from requiring a three- to fourday hospital stay to what amounts to an outpatient procedure.
“The quality requirements from that medical company are just huge. They are getting better and better and more detail oriented,” Broder said. A section of the Brugg building has been designated as a clean room where that medical
equipment will be manufactured.
Suhner has three other subsidiaries that will make the move from the original facility. Luthi explained those are trading companies that are selling products from other Suhner divisions made in Switzerland, German and Italy. One division handles shafts used in polishing equipment for industrial power tools, another deals with drilling and tapping equipment for specialty machinery. “At the moment that’s a pretty good business,” Luthi said. “We’re selling a lot to the automotive industry for producing components where you have a lot of holes. We can drill and tap multiple holes in one stroke.”
The third division deals with a food industry line of products used to trim meat for poultry, pork and beef. “We started that a few years ago because they use flexible shafts to run the knife,” Luthi said.
“We sell flexible shafts in every product line that we make or sell,” Luthi said.
Space freed up in the existing building will be converted to training as well as research and development areas. Broder said the company plans to make close to $1.5 million in capital investments in the new facility within the next year and could replicate that again within three or four years.