Design2Part Magazine March 2014 – ENSER Offers Incentive to Reshore

Design 2 Part Reshore Article March 2013 – Manufacturing and Engineering Services Company Offers Incentive to Reshore by Rebecca Carnes

Is your company battling the numerous offshoring issues of soaring costs, inferior products, loss of intellectual property, and longer time to market?

This is the question Enser Corp. poses on the homepage of its website (www.enser.com), enticing customers with a 20 percent discount on their first order to reshore their engineering services to Enser, an engineering services company headquartered in New Jersey that also offers staffing and manufacturing solutions.

Bringing operations back to the U.S. is not just about a company’s business; it’s also about growing American jobs, rebuilding our communities, and ultimately making America a better place, the website states.

Back in 2007, much of the work Enser does to support manufacturing left the country, but during the past two years, it has started to come back, said Harold Doty, Enser’s regional sales manager. “We’ve seen a lot of customers starting to bring the work back and actually this year, we’ve seen a huge resurgence in updating factories and updating equipment and improving the manufacturing processes here in the U.S.,” Doty said. “We’re at a point where we’re seeing a lot of the work that left here about eight years ago coming back and coming back quickly.”

What’s bringing it back? The increasing cost of labor and high turnover in offshore personnel, Doty said. “A lot of our customers, what they’re seeing is even companies they were working for are getting bought out and going out of business. A company could spend months or years developing a relationship with a company and their personnel, only to find out the personnel are leaving.”

Time, distance, and a language barrier are also factors, said Maria Catalano, Enser’s marketing coordinator. “The time difference is big. You can’t just call someone over there to check on the work. And a lot of things get lost in translation,” she said. “What we’re trying to do is let companies know that it’s not complicated to bring work back to the U.S. Keeping it here is, economically, the right decision for your company to make.”

Many companies are adding robotics into their assembly lines, which cuts back on costs, Doty said. “We’ll work with a company to improve their internal manufacturing processes, like with using more automation, more robotics. Work that traditionally was done by two to three people can be done by one with automation,” he said. “They’ve already got an existing, educated workforce and they are adding automation without adding to their workforce. That seems to be the direction everyone is going.”

Enser is providing much reverse engineering on equipment for companies who bought their equipment out of China, and those companies who produced the equipment are now out of business, Doty said. “There’s no information on the equipment,” he said. “All they have is this equipment sitting in their plant and they need help.”

Catalano stressed that Enser, even though it is a large company, still assigns only one or two people to a project so that companies are not dealing with ten people on the same project. “From beginning to end, you’re dealing with the same people at Enser,” she said.

And being a manufacturing and engineering servicing company, “our service is our people,” Doty explained. “When the economy took the downturn a couple of years ago, we held on to our employees,” he said. “We knew that the economy would eventually turn around and we knew that the people we invested time and money with into their training, we couldn’t replace. We opted to hold onto people even though we might not have had enough work to justify keeping a full staff, but we kept that full staff.”

Having such an educated, experienced staff is encouraging for companies looking to reshore to Enser. “It ended up paying off for us because we have all these senior people working for us who have the experience,” Doty said.

Headquartered in Cinnaminson, N.J., Enser also has facilities in Charlotte, N.C., and Orlando, Florida. The company offers 66 years of technology and engineering experience in implementing strategies for mechanical engineering; tooling and fixture design and build services; turnkey systems and process engineering; manufacturing process engineering; and product development.

Offering manufacturing resources as well, Enser’s project managers and network of domestically-based manufacturing partners enables fabrication of parts or building of complex machinery for both Enser-designed and customer-designed projects. Enser also provides staffing services, finding highly qualified professionals with a recruiting system that is said to have more than 100,000 technical resumes.

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