Students learn about careers at New Millennium
HOPE, Ark.—Students at Hope High School, Yerger Middle School and Hope Academy of Public Service were introduced to local career opportunities as leaders from New Millennium Building Systems plant visited the campuses and provided insight on their business.
The company is the second-largest provider of steel joists and metal decking to the U.S. market.
Michael Winarta, general manager of the Hope plant, provided an overview to the company during the series of visits in conjunction with the schools’ Manufacturer of the Month program.
Winarta and detailer Joseph Craigen, along with system engineer Raymond Thomason visited all three campuses while production manager Mark Williams and engineering manager Brady Broom visited Hope High with Winarta.
Winarta said most of the approximately 270 employees at the Hope facility on Arkansas Highway 32 are residents of the immediate Hempstead County area.
“We like to make sure that we help the area,” he said.
New Millennium Building Systems is part of Steel Dynamics, which is the third-largest domestic producer of steel in the United States, Winarta said.
“Steel Dynamics has three distinct divisions in itself,” he said. “The first one is the steel division, where the steel is actually being made into different types of products such as I-beams, flat roll, plate steel, merchant bar.”
Those steel products are then used to produce construction and manufacturing components, Winarta said. “The steel division accounts for about 72 percent of the net income of Steel Dynamics from 2017.”
Metal recycling was the next-largest income center for the parent company in 2017.
“It shows something about the sustainability of our product, where that steel can be recycled and reused,” he said.
New Millennium, the third corporate division, has seven locations the U.S. and Mexico, with about 1,300 employees.
“We basically make two very distinct products. The first one is steel joists, the next is steel decking,” Winarta said.
He noted that New Millennium takes a building owner’s concept and envisions how to provide a literal framework to accomplish it from an architectural design.
“Normally, what they are used for is roof designs and floor ways,” Winarta said. “They are structural products designed to carry loads. So, somebody came up with an idea of how to put a building together, how they would like it to look; that is put into a document that comes to us ready to start making things happen. We try to make some of those visions come true.”
Getting from design to fabrication for a particular project requires multiple skills and disciplines, including fabrication, welding, engineering, marketing sales, accounting, and customer services. That diversity creates multiple job opportunities for students who have graduated from high school or college, he said.
“Normally, we start out with our sales department, where a contract drawing is bid,” Winarta said. “Then, we estimate the cost of the steel joist and decking for the project. So, when New Millennium becomes the successful bidder, we move into the engineering department to make our own drawings and releasing the orders to the shop so that the shop can build them.”
Production then oversees the fabrication of the joists and decking according to specifications. Once done, the customer service department, in conjunction with the customer, works on shipping it out.
When it comes to pay, Winarta said it is incentive driven.
“It always starts out with a base pay, and everybody within the company has a base pay,” he said. “Then, you have incentives that come from team performance.”
For the production employees that translates to bonus payments that vary based upon the efficiencies within a particular project, Winarta said. That means every employee in the plant can potentially benefit directly from each project through incentive payments.
He also said the company as a whole puts 8 percent of its pretax income in a “bucket” and the following year that money is given to all of the employees.
The profitability of the company as a whole can translate to substantial incentive payments, Winarta said.
“Last year was one of the best we have had, and that comes to about 13 percent of the annual pay that somebody has earned,” he said.
New Millennium offers a 401k tax-based incentive plan based upon company performance, and Steel Dynamics offers an employee stock rewards plan.
“Every employee of Steel Dynamics would get shares of Steel Dynamics; we are a NASDAQ listed company, and every employee gets shares every year,” he said.