CI Newsletter December 2024 #53 12.19..2024

December 19, 2024

Posted By: Harold King in Newsletters, CI News,

The Monthly Newsletter of the Council of Industry

December 19, 2024

Council of Industry Updates

What's Happening in Your Association

Council to Introduce ‘Insight Exchange’ On-Demand Expertise for Manufacturers

The Council of Industry is thrilled to announce the launch of the Insight Exchange, a new video series designed to provide manufacturers with expert insights and actionable strategies—all on demand. This initiative is part of our ongoing effort to offer flexible, valuable resources to the manufacturing community, ensuring members can access critical information when it’s most convenient for them.

The Insight Exchange represents a unique collaboration with our Associate Members, who bring decades of expertise in fields that directly impact the manufacturing sector. Topics will range from workforce development and operational efficiency to emerging technologies and compliance. By offering these resources in a pre-recorded, easily accessible format, we aim to help manufacturers stay informed, competitive, and prepared for the challenges ahead.

We’re currently recording sessions for the first season of the series, which will launch early in 2025.

To discuss how you can participate, please reach out to Johnnieanne Hansen at info@councilofindustry.org

New York State Legislative Session Kicks off January 8th, Manufacturing Advocacy Day Set for February 26th

The New York State Legislature has unveiled the 2025 Session Calendar and it can be viewed here. The first day of the 2025 Legislative Session will be on Wednesday, January 8th and the last day of session is scheduled for Thursday, June 12th. The Manufacturing Alliance of New York with hold its annual Advocacy Day February 26 in Albany. The day will include meetings with key legislators and administration officials on issues of concern to the State’s manufactures.

Those issues of concern include ‘Tax Parity’ (the elimination of the corporate franchise tax for pass-through manufacturing entities). Smart implementation of the CLCPA and other energy related regulations and legislation including the NY HEAT act. And the continued support of manufacturing workforce development efforts including the Manufacturing Intermediary Apprentice Program (MIAP) and P-TECH schools.

Save your spot at Advocacy Day

Council Teams Up With ASME and SUNY New Paltz on Engineers Day Event February 19

The Council of Industry, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and SUNY New Paltz’ School of Science and Engineering will be teaming up on an National Engineers Week event February 19th at SUNY New Paltz. The event will run from 4:30 – 7:30.

While program details are still being worked out they will include: tours of facilities including labs and the Hudson Valley Advanced Manufacturing Center (3D Printing), Networking between students, faculty and industry professionals, and a panel discussion highlighting manufacturing engineering careers. A light dinner will be served.

Save your spot at the Engineers Week dinner

Energy Croner: Saving Money with Energy Capacity Markets

- By Dylan Haas, NRGAccount Executive for NRG/Direct Energy Business and active member of the Council of Industry (CI). Through his articles, Dylan shares practical strategies, market trends, and solutions to help CI members discover ways to reduce energy costs and mitigate risks. His contributions align with the Council’s mission to promote the success of manufacturers and support the economic vitality of the Hudson Valley.

Electricity must be supplied to match demand almost perfectly. In New York, this delicate balance is overseen by the New York Independent Service Operator (NYISO). One of NYISO’s critical tools is the capacity market, which ensures that enough energy is always available — even during times of high demand or when renewable energy sources, like solar and wind, experience fluctuations.

The Role of the Capacity Market

The capacity market ensures grid reliability by paying energy generators to be on standby, ready to supply power when needed. For example, if an upstate New York hydropower facility undergoes maintenance, a natural gas generator might step in to provide electricity to offset the hydropower facility’s downtime. This system is designed to prevent power outages and keep energy prices stable for all electricity users.

Without the capacity market, generators that run only occasionally — like the natural gas generator — might struggle to stay financially viable. The capacity market provides payments to these standby resources, ensuring they remain available when the grid needs them most. NYISO collects payments from electricity suppliers and distributes those payments to generation units. While the system is way more complicated, the bottom line is that the capacity market is designed to help prevent high energy costs and reduces the likelihood of blackouts in New York.

How Your Business Can Benefit

Although capacity markets add costs to electricity bills, that does not mean your business cannot take steps to manage and even reduce these expenses. One of the most effective strategies is to lower energy usage during peak demand periods — times when the grid is under the greatest strain.

Looking Ahead

Managing energy usage during peak times is just one way your business can save while supporting grid reliability. Next month, we'll explore other strategies that businesses across the country are using to get paid by their states while lowering their energy costs. Stay tuned for more insights!

Read the Full Article

Reach out to the Council of Industry and NRG today to develop a winter energy strategy tailored to your business needs.

Reminder: Tax Credits Available for Companies With Registered Apprentices

The Council of Industry and the New York State Department of Labor (NYSDOL) Office of Apprenticeship would like to remind you of the Empire State Apprenticeship Tax Credit Program (ESATC) for New York State (NYS) Registered Apprenticeship (RA) program sponsors and/or signatory employers.

This year 14 Council of Industry member firms with 38 apprentices are eligible for more that $100,000 in credits.

The ESATC provides tax incentives to eligible NYS signatory employers for hiring new qualified apprentices after January 1, 2018. The ESATC provides tax credits beginning at $2,000 for each qualified apprentice who is employed full-time (a minimum of 35 hours per week) for at least six months during the tax year. Enhanced credits are available for employers that hire disadvantaged youth and/or provide apprentices with the support of a mentor for a full calendar year. For each year an apprentice remains in the apprenticeship program, additional credits are available.

To be eligible for this credit for the year 2024, apprentices must have been registered in your apprenticeship program and working by July 1, 2024, to meet the six-months of full-time employment requirement for this year.

For further information, please see the following link: https://dol.ny.gov/apprenticeship/options-apprenticeship-program-sponsors or email Johnnieanne Hansen

Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Info Session January 23rd, Training Begins February

Join us for a free information session with Vinnie Buonomo, Senior Program Manager & Instructor at RIT CQAS. This session will cover the objectives, expectations, FAQs, and benefits of the Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Certification.

Program Overview and Benefits.

The Green Belt Certification enhances your process improvement skills, whether you're in manufacturing, service, sales, marketing, finance, or support roles. Starting in Spring 2024, Dutchess Community College and the Council of Industry are partnering to offer this program in the Hudson Valley.

Green Belt training provides participants with the tools necessary to:

Clearly define a problem
Gather and analyze data effectively
Implement lasting improvements

Participants will learn these skills by working on an actual challenge your company faces. They will return to your business with the skills necessary to implement meaningful positive change.

Measurable results include:

Improved customer satisfaction
Significant financial benefits
Reduced operating costs

Click here to register for the info session

For information on advertising in this and other CI publications contact Harold King (hking@councilofindustry.org )

Manufacturing Industry News

Tips for Manufacturers to Prepare for President Trump's Trade Policies

President-elect Trump talked about a lot of different aspects of trade policy. Although he can initiate actions unilaterally on “Day One,” others may take time and require congressional interaction. As policies start to solidify, companies should consider assessing their current position, risks, future opportunities, and develop a comprehensive cross-functional plan to respond to the impending change.

Some of these can be executed as what is commonly referred to as “day one actions” (e.g., IEEPA, executive orders); while others require some level of congressional involvement (e.g., trade agreement negotiation, fast track authority) and could take significantly longer to implement. Companies are exploring or already taking active steps in preparation for the new administration’s potential tariffs and trade policies. Each option has pros and con and not all options are available to all companies. A few options being considered for immediate action include: Increasing or ‘pre-loading inventory, relocating production and how to best pass on costs.

What is Your Business Worth? Roadmap to Help Determine Value of a Privately Owned Business

-By Alberto Sinesi – Director | Robert Murphy – Senior Managing Director, PKF Investment Banking

The sale of a business is an emotional, life-changing event and determining the true value of a company is a crucial first step in any sale process. Also, business owners may have a preconceived idea of what their business is worth and their value expectations may vastly differ from those of prospective acquirers. So, business owners need to be prepared and know their next move if approached by a potential buyer or have a plan if they are contemplating exiting their business in the near future. The bottom line is that the notion of “value” is fluid in nature and demands an understanding of what the business is worth to a potential acquirer as opposed to what it is worth to the owner. Let’s proceed with the steps to determine value.

Three Generally Accepted Methodologies for Valuing a Company

When working with a trusted investment banking partner, the deal team will utilize a subset – or all – of the following valuation methodologies to determine company value, all having benefits and challenges:

1. Precedent Transactions Analysis – This method estimates the implied value of a business by analyzing recent acquisition multiples paid in comparable transactions.

2. Comparable Company (Comps) Analysis – This approach leverages valuation multiples of publicly traded companies to derive the valuation of a privately owned business in the same or similar sector.

3. Discounted Cash Flow (‘DCF’) Analysis – This method values a business by forecasting its future underlying free cash flows and discounting them to their present value.

Read the full article From PKF Investment Banking

Your Company’s Vision: One Slide, Four Sentences

A mission statement answers the question, why do we exist? It’s the guiding light for the business. Forever pursued but likely never achieved, it should be relevant in 100 years. Your company vision answers the question, where are we going? It maps the steps or milestones you must achieve to get closer to your mission. A vision statement is how you see the future for the company and its customers. Vision equals the company outcomes you want to see in 3, 5, 10, and 20 years. This can act as directional guidance for the team. It’s the journey to your North Star.

Your mission statement is the North Star, and the vision is your star chart — mapping out your points along the way.

How to Create Your Inspiring Vision? Use the 1-4 Method: one slide, four sentences. This method gives you a powerful slide that’ll help your team know where they’re headed, what comes next, and how to spend their time. The 1-4 Method has a sequence to it and communicates an overarching strategy. You’ll create 4 power sentences describing your vision in 3, 5, 10, and 20 years, where each sentence builds off the next. Remember, keep it simple, stupid!

PFAS In Manufacturing: Auditing Your Supply Chain For Forever Chemicals

The presence of PFAS in a product is often the result of its existence in components or raw materials far up the supply chain. But for companies that lack visibility into tier 2 and tier 3 suppliers and beyond, it can be difficult to know if the item they ultimately sell contains one of the thousands of variations of PFAS. “You can’t do anything about PFAS in your products if you haven’t looked and identified where they are,” said Neil Smith, global compliance and sustainability director at computer and electronics manufacturer Noco.

Taking on such an endeavor can be hefty, with coordination needed between multiple levels of product designers, manufacturers and suppliers. The audit process is a multi-step strategy that begins with setting chemical use standards, said Aditya Vedantam, associate professor of operations management and strategy at the University of Buffalo. The first thing any manufacturer should do is create a PFAS policy outlining the company’s stance on forever chemicals and their allowable use, Vedantam added.

Supplier Diversification, AI Readiness, And Circularity Top Supply Chain Priorities For 2025

One effect of the global pandemic was the elevation of supply chain management from a back-office business function to a C-level strategic priority. As we approach 2025, all indicators suggest that for most industries optimizing the supply chain to meet the needs of a post-pandemic world is more than ever a priority. A recent Bain & Company survey of CEO priorities highlights the need for leaders to balance traditional supply chain priorities with newer ones, such as increasing resilience, improving sustainability and responsiveness to customer expectations.

TradeBeyond’s new “Retail Sourcing Report: 2025 Supply Chain Trends” highlights the concerns and priorities that are most top of mind for supply chain leaders going into 2025. These include diversifying and derisking global sourcing and manufacturing, preparing for the long-awaited broad adoption of AI in supply chain operations, and advancing sustainability initiatives beyond compliance.

Report Reveals ‘Grind’ Of Digital Transformation, Slow Road To Success

An annual and far-ranging survey by Gartner of 3,100 chief information officers and technology leaders and more than 1,100 executives outside IT worldwide shows that only 48% of digital transformation initiatives meet or exceed business outcome targets. However, the survey also identifies a “digital vanguard,” a cohort of CIOs and CxOs, who have a higher digital achievement rate where 71% of their initiatives meet or exceed outcome targets.

The Gartner findings could be viewed another way. Held up against a 3-year-old McKinsey report that pegged the digitalization success rate at 31%, the Gartner findings that see about a 50% increase in success can be interpreted as sizable progress in manufacturing technology transformations. More than 80% of EMEA CIOs polled said they expect to increase their investments in cybersecurity, AI/GenAI, and business intelligence and data analytics in 2025.

How Leaders Can Help Employees Embrace Change

In the business world, the track record for successful change management is mixed at best. When it comes to navigating change, we know a great deal about what doesn’t work:

Failing to develop a clear picture of the organization’s future state.

Failing to engage people across the organization in co-owning a future-state vision.

Failing to develop a deliberate road map between the current environment and future state.
Failing to communicate frequently about progress and challenges in the journey.
Failing to regularly re-engage the organization in the future state vision.
Failing to adjust the road map as conditions evolve.

Even with a well-documented body of knowledge about what doesn’t work, there is a dearth of success stories when it comes to change management victories. Still, every organization is faced with navigating a continually changing operating environment.

Five fundamental factors are needed to overcome the inertia that stifles change programs — a clear future state vision, engagement, communication, actualization and reinforcement. Every venture, be it a start-up or an ongoing enterprise, begins with a vision of what success looks like — what an organization wants to demonstrate. From there, engagement with key stakeholders — employees, partners and owners — gives the change endeavor traction and sustainability. Frequent, regular communication with stakeholders about where the organization is going and about progress and accomplishments toward the vision creates transparency. Actualization brings specific results to life and highlights progress for the organization to observe. Reinforcement means frequent re-articulation of the vision, the road map to fulfill it and progress.

Employers Prioritize Productivity Amidst Rising Health Care Cost

Workplace productivity is growing at an annualized rate of 1.6%, which is below the long-term rate of 2.1%, according to HUB International 2025 employee benefits outlook. Employers are looking to align total rewards incentives to drive productivity gains and provide training and upskilling efforts in their benefits offerings as artificial intelligence and automation change workplace dynamics.

Many organizations continue to struggle to fill open jobs and retain top talent. Employers are increasingly offering benefits that are relevant to employees, such as assistance with financial wellbeing or help with caring for an elderly relative or a growing family. Understanding which benefits can help specific employees requires data analytics, said HUB. Meanwhile, employers are facing the largest increase in medical cost trend in 13 years going into 2025. Costs are expected to increase 8% driven primarily by pharmacy drug prices. High utilization and the cost of behavioral care also are contributing to increased medical costs, according to HUB International 2025 employee benefits outlook.

‘Long Thinking,’ AI’s Next Leap Forward

“Long thinking” didn’t make it into the zeitgeist when OpenAI’s ChatGPT first stunned the world two years ago with rapid replies to questions about almost anything. But it has the potential to reduce or eliminate the errors that frequently peppered those responses. The idea is just what it sounds like, at least at the highest level: Long-thinking AI models are designed to take more time to “think over” the results they generate for us. They will be intelligent enough to give us updates on their progress and ask us for feedback along the way.

OpenAI’s long-thinking capabilities advanced in September with the launch of its o-series models, which it said are designed to spend more time thinking before they respond, reasoning through complex tasks and solving “harder problems than previous models in science, coding, and math.” Catherine Brownstein, an assistant professor at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School who researches extremely rare diseases, said OpenAI’s new reasoning capabilities are accelerating her work. “I use it frequently to dramatically cut down on the not-so-fun parts of my work, like summarizing yet another study that might or might not be relevant to the question I’m asking,” Brownstein said. “I’ve also been able to make connections I probably wouldn’t have been able to do, due to o1’s ability to distill complex genetic concepts into accessible explanations.”

IBM Brings the Speed of Light to the Generative AI Era with Optics Breakthrough

IBM has unveiled breakthrough research in optics technology that could dramatically improve how data centers train and run generative AI models. Researchers have pioneered a new process for co-packaged optics (CPO), the next generation of optics technology, to enable connectivity within data centers at the speed of light through optics to complement existing short reach electrical wires. IBM researchers have shown how CPO will redefine the way the computing industry transmits high-bandwidth data between chips, circuit boards, and servers.

Today, fiber optic technology carries data at high speeds across long distances, managing nearly all the world's commerce and communications traffic with light instead of electricity. Although data centers use fiber optics for their external communications networks, racks in data centers still predominantly run communications on copper-based electrical wires. These wires connect GPU accelerators that may spend more than half of their time idle, waiting for data from other devices in a large, distributed training process which can incur significant expense and energy. IBM researchers have demonstrated a way to bring optics’ speed and capacity inside data centers.

Ant-Like Robot Swarms Lift Heavy Objects And Throw Themselves Over Obstacles

South Korean researchers have created tiny magnetic robots that collaborate like ants, accomplishing impressive tasks such as moving and lifting objects far larger than themselves. The team at Hanyang University in Seoul, South Korea, suggests their microrobot swarms, powered by a rotating magnetic field, could tackle challenging tasks in difficult environments. These tasks include offering minimally invasive treatments for clogged arteries and precisely guiding organisms.

Scientists are increasingly studying how robot swarms can collectively achieve goals, drawing inspiration from ants that work together to bridge gaps or form rafts to survive floods. The cooperative approach makes robots more resilient to failure, as even if some fall short, the others continue their programmed actions until enough succeed. Previous research in swarm robotics focused on spherical robots that connect via point-to-point contact. In this study, the researchers designed a swarm of cube-shaped microrobots, which have stronger magnetic attraction due to the larger surface areas of their faces coming into contact.