International Trade Agreements Are Vital to Wisconsin Firm’s Continued Growth
Guest Blog Post by Jim Corkery, President of ACS
Recently I had the opportunity to meet Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker and several US Senators and Representatives to talk about global trade. I strongly support the Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) legislation and want to share my views on how ACS has directly benefited from global trade.
We are an organization offering engineering, equipment fabrication and construction management solutions to companies who develop and test engines and vehicles for worldwide distribution. Our office employees are highly skilled college graduates, most with engineering and advanced engineering degrees, and our manufacturing employees have specialized skilled trades expertise. Although we have fewer than 150 employees, the global nature of business today means we have offices in Wisconsin, Michigan and South Carolina as well as in the UK and China. Getting the rules of international trade right is not just theory for my company; it will help accelerate our growth.
The first way we benefit from global trade is when our US-based clients develop products for sale globally – we benefit through contracts to design and construct our clients’ R&D/Manufacturing centers here in the U.S. These opportunities allow ACS to hire more engineering, manufacturing and support employees to accomplish this work. For example, we recently contracted with Cummins to design and build their R&D and Manufacturing test facilities for a new High Horsepower engine to be designed and manufactured in Seymour, Indiana. This facility serves as the global headquarters for the design and manufacture of this new engine with exports forecasted to be 80% of overall sales.
We have also had opportunities to design and construct international R&D/Manufacturing centers for our US-based clients. Typically we provide preliminary design in the US and then travel to the project countries to oversee final design and construction by local designers and contractors. We have designed and built laboratories for Caterpillar in the US, England, Northern Ireland and China, for Whirlpool in the US, Mexico, Poland and China, for John Deere in the US and Mexico, and for Cummins in the US, England, Romania and China.