Bodycote’s facility in Elgin, Illinois, replaces an aging Melrose Park facility. The site will support manufacturing supply chains in the Midwest, and the Melrose Park facility will close once the transfer of customers’ work has been completed.

Classical Heat Treatment North America President Tom Gibbons says, “Our investment in the new facility enables us to expand our capacity and improve our ability to deliver high-quality heat treatment capabilities to our customers.”

Bodycote has more than 70 locations in North America. https://www.bodycote.com

Job Changes, Promotions

Doug Brannies has joined Speedgrip Chuck Co. as vice president of sales & marketing. Previously, Brannies spent 10 years as regional business manager for Royal Products and has been part of the machining industry for almost 20 years, holding a CMTSE designation from AMT – The Association For Manufacturing Technology. Brannies brings a background in CNC machine tools, workholding, and machining optimization.
https://www.speedgrip.com

Bill Taylor has joined Mahr Inc. as general manager, sales for the U.S. and Canada. In addition to field sales, he will oversee marketing, product management, application engineering, service, distribution teams, and the customer resource center. Taylor has more than 20 years of industrial experience and has held leadership positions with Kistler Instrument, Kokusia Inc., and Wellman Thermal Systems.
https://www.mahr.com

Chris Blaine has joined Platinum Tooling Technologies Inc. and will oversee all sales activities related to four Platinum Tooling rep groups across the U.S., including machine tool accessory sales throughout Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. Additionally, the territory includes Evergreen Tool Group Tool in Michigan, McGill Sales in Ohio and Western Pennsylvania, and CMI covering Indiana and Kentucky. Before joining Platinum Tooling, Blaine worked at Morris Group Inc./Velocity Products. https://platinumtooling.com

2020 is the year of the virtual meeting. COVID has changed our lives and taught us how to navigate without a script. How we interact with friends and family; how we shop, how we go to school... the changes are countless.

In medtech, depending on your market segment and geography, there are usually a core set of important conferences and trade shows to attend. These meetings provide continuous clinical education, customer engagement, and professional networking.

Major international meetings include:

Medica: Held in November in Duesseldorf, Germany, one of the world’s largest medtech exhibitions annually hosts more than 5,000 exhibitors and 120,000 visitors in 18 halls. It’s now virtual.

RSNA: Held in Chicago’s McCormack Place each year the week after Thanksgiving, it’s the world’s largest imaging show. It’s now virtual.

MedTech Conference (AdvaMed): Held in North America each fall, it’s the leading meeting for executives of the Fortune 500 medtech companies. It’s now virtual.

Dozens of other major industry events have now gone virtual. The good news is that it does keep us all safer during these unpredictable times. It also lowers the travel and conference budgets for many companies. These are the right decisions, but we are becoming weary of the virtual world. Going from one online meeting to the next is almost as draining as traveling to these events in person.

There is a certain level of efficiency we can appreciate about this virtual solution for the short-term and we remain grateful for the opportunity to stay connected to our peers.

However, we look forward to the return of the personal interaction that we have all come to expect from these events. The energy derived from meeting new business contacts, renewing old acquaintances, and connecting with long-time industry friends is always well worth the airline and hotel travel experiences.

Let’s push through this fall’s virtual experiences as we hope for a renewal of re-connecting in person in 2021. We believe it’s worth the virtual trip in 2020 to get there! We hope to see you soon at an event relative to your market segment!

MedWorld Advisors
https://medworldadvisors.com

About the authors: CEO Florence Joffroy-Black is a long-time MedTech M&A and marketing expert. She can be reached at florencejblack@medworldadvisors.com. Managing Director Dave Sheppard is a former medical OEM Fortune 500 executive and an experienced MedTech M&A professional. He can be reached at davesheppard@medworldadvisors.com.

Population

• 2.4 million
• Manufacturing workforce 250,000+
• High concentrations of talent in engineering, sciences

Education

• 3 major research universities
• 4 comprehensive 4-year institutions
• 7 independent community colleges
• 3 cooperative education sites
• Specialized learning facilities – 50 locations
• 133,000 students enrolled in public higher education institutions
• 40,000 full-time students enrolled in top-tier research universities

Pro-business

• 22% reduction in corporate income tax (overall tax cut for all industries)
• Optional single-weighted sales factor for HQs, manufacturing operations
• No gross receipts taxes on manufacturing consumables
• Among the lowest property taxes in the nation
• Zero inventory tax

Location

• Equidistant to ports of Los Angeles/Long Beach, California; Houston and Galveston, Texas
• Linkages to Canada; three border crossings to Mexico
• 2-day delivery time to 75% of the U.S
• 60+ airports; 3 international airports
• Highway, rail systems connect ports in Mexico to Santa Teresa port-of-entry

Innovation

• Build With Robots partnered with Sandia National Labs to create robots that convert spray disinfectant into a fog-like mist to kill bacteria and viruses.
• Respira Therapeutics’ drug/device combo combines its AOS dry powder inhaler device with innovative drug formulation technologies to selectively lung-target an inhaled drug, delivering 60% higher dose to improve the quality of life of more than 35,000 patients diagnosed with pulmonary arterial hypertension.
• WaveFront Dynamics’ diagnostic technology measures the eye dynamically, like a movie; the technology identifies regular refractive errors and irregularities that can lead to a potentially significant reduction in visual function.

Source: https://nmpartnership.com

The QR145 optical rotary encoder/IP66 is fully enclosed and overcomes cost and performance limitations of other fully enclosed encoders.

It uses a conductive carbon fiber turtle housing that completely encloses the encoder and provides environmental and electromagnetic interference (EMI) protection. It protects the encoder from dust, oil, and water as well as metallic chips, wood dust, or other debris, making it suitable for pharmaceutical and medical production and packaging, CNCs, robotics, and other motion control applications.

The unit can be mounted on motor shafts up to 0.375" in diameter, and bolts to any motor frame. The bearing construction provides extra protection and reliability in applications that produce shock and vibration.

Quantum Devices
https://www.quantumdev.com

Motion Industries acquires AMMC

Motion Industries (MI), distributor of maintenance, repair, and operation replacement parts and a Genuine Parts Co. subsidiary, has acquired Applied Machine and Motion Control Inc. (AMMC), a Kentucky-based supplier of motion control and automation products and services.

“As a premier supplier to the Ohio River Valley area and beyond, AMMC and its talented people will be instrumental in furthering our growth strategy geographically and in the automation arena,” says Motion Industries President Randy Breaux. “In addition to broadening our offerings to customers, their go-to-market approach and line card are very similar to our other MI Automation Solutions Group divisions, to which AMMC will be a nice complement. We are pleased to welcome them to the Motion family.”

MI Automation Solutions Group provides control panels, conveyors, machine vision, motion control, network connectivity, pneumatics, robotics, aluminum extrusion, sensing I/O, and other automation solutions.

Motion Industries Inc.
https://www.motionindustries.com