Leadership Seneca County's March Class

The March Leadership class was a busy one, starting with having Melissa Perry Photography taking professional headshots and a class photo.   The remainder of the day was spent learning about our local manufacturers. The Leadership Class was able to tour three different manufacturing facilities. LSC toured American Fine Sinter, National Machinery and NOX Flooring.  The class found it was interesting to learn about the international connections that we have right here in Seneca County within these businesses. It was very insightful to tour the locations and learn about the history of the businesses and their reasons for coming to Seneca County. The class was amazed by the number of jobs and different opportunities that there are available to our county in manufacturing.  

NOX Flooring

NOX Corporation was founded in 1994, in Korea, as a family owned company foucsuing on LVT flooring innovation, design and manufacturing for global customers.  In 2015, they opened their first NOX US factory in Fostoria, Ohio.  NOX partnered together with Roppe to produce vinyal flooring instead of just the rubber flooring they are acustom to making. 

NOX is the only Korean plant in the US to make vinyal flooring.  They employe 222 people and are looking to fill 70 more positions.  Like most businesses, they have been struggling to retain and fill vacancies over the last few years.   NOX plans to add a rail in the near future to aid in transportation of materials.  They sell (market) their flooring to other companies such Lumber Liquidators, Floor Nation, Shaw, and other name brand flooring companies.  Those companies send their labled boxes to NOX, who then fill the order.  NOXs has a separate plant that works on the design aspect of their product.

National Machinery

National Machinery is a cold formed metal factory whose headquarters are located in Tiffin, Ohio.  In addition to Tiffin, they also have plants in several other countries such as Germany, China and Japan.  The Tiffin site employs 350 works, with any additional 70 employed in Germany and China, and 12 in Japan.  National’s foreign locations generally specialize in sales, services and support, however they do some new and rebuild of products in China. 

National Machinery builds 30 new machines and 20 rebuilds yearly.   Their revenue stream consists of three sectors: new build, which accounts for 50% of sales, 40% from rebuild and service support, and 10% from development of tooling and new parts.  Annually, National ships 22,000 parts with a consistent flow of new and rebuilt parts back and forth from Tiffin to China.   Capacitity is a current issue National Machinery is facing.

American Fine Sinter (AFS)

AFS, is a Tier 1 supplier for Toyota, whose business is 90% Japanese based.  There are 8-10 plants worldwide, but AFS is the only American plant in the US.  AFS, faces only three to four competitors.  Presidents change hands every 5 years with engineers changing every 3.  AFS takes powdered metal (mostly iron) and presses it then packs it into shape.  The sinter process heats parts up to temperatures just below melting, then cools them down.  This process allows them to make detailed parts.  In fact, all Toyota’s in America have engine parts that come from AFS.  In total, they make 4 million parts annually, which accounts for their exponential growth since 2012.

The increase in growth along with the economy and COVID, has led to labor shortages which has required AFS to bring in help from Japan.  Even with the addition of employees, AFS is still short 43 people to fill gaps in production.  As a whole, AFS employs 300 workers.  To combat the ongoing labor shortage, AFS will only bring in future business that can have automation but promises the descision will never impact the employment status of current employees.  Another rising concern for AFS is the increase in Tariffs; AFS currently uses air and sea for shipping.  They ship three days a week to Mexico and import powder from Japan.