Making it Big

The winners of the first Washington Manufacturing Awards show the importance of manufacturing to Washington’s diverse economy.

By Bill Virgin | June 2010 | FROM THE PRINT EDITION

Photographs by Hayley Young and Catherine Ledner

The Judges

To select the winners of the first Washington Manufacturing Awards, we drew upon a panel of experts from business and academia.

Ron Benoit
Partner
Moss Adams

Peter Haug
Professor, Management
Western Washington University

Loren Lyon
CEO
Magic Wheels Inc.

Robert Olsen
Director, Harold Frank Engineering Entrepreneurship Institute
Washington State University

Ted Sprague
President
Cowlitz Economic Development Council

Richard Lee Storch
Chair, Industrial & Systems Engineering
University of Washington

John H. Vicklund
President
Impact Washington

Bill Virgin
Editor & Publisher
Washington Manufacturing Alert
Columnist
Seattle Business magazine

Gary White
Business Retention and Expansion
Tridec

If you heard that manufacturing is a sunset industry and that innovation had moved on to biotech labs and software code writers, you heard wrong.

As the stories of the award winners in Seattle Business magazine’s first Washington Manufacturing Awards demonstrate, manufacturing in this state is not only alive and kicking even in the midst of a brutal economic recession, it’s also a thriving generator of innovative ideas, companies, products, technologies and people.

It matters hugely to Washington’s economy that manufacturing does well. “It’s the one industry that really adds value,” says Peter Haug, professor of manufacturing management at Western Washington University and one of the judges for the awards. “You’re actually producing a tangible item. It’s not just about moving money from place to place or investments or services. It’s about actually building something that people will use and consume and pay money for. Supporting that is the fact that these are very good-paying jobs. While employment has gone down, the jobs that are remaining tend to be very highly skilled, very technical, requiring a high level of education and knowledge.”

Even with the layoffs and plant closings that have hit it and most other sectors of the economy, manufacturing still provides 255,000 jobs in Washington state, about 9 percent of total non-farm employment. Its economic contribution is even bigger; manufacturing’s share of total gross business income in Washington is about 21 percent, according to the latest data available from the State Department of Revenue.

To keep manufacturing thriving will take work because immense challenges loom—competition with lower-cost production centers like China, rising energy and raw-material costs, and the loss of skilled, experienced workers as the baby-boom generation moves into the retirement years.

But manufacturers appear willing to take on those challenges. As David Giuliani, founder and chief executive of Pacific Bioscience Laboratories Inc. and one of our award winners, puts it, “Let’s get manufacturing going again in this country, shall we?”

Thanks to the efforts of the companies profiled here, we are.

Click for the winners...

Click here to see a photo gallery from our awards ceremony May 17.