A New Factory For A New Age

If you own a manufacturing business, you might want to pay a visit to West Lebanon, N.H. Odds are you've never been to West Lebanon. You may not even have heard of it. But you will. What's going on there may forever change the way you do business--or perhaps put you out of it altogether.

Tucked away in an unremarkable industrial building on the outskirts of town is a little machine about the size of a three-drawer filing cabinet. There's a curious Willy Wonka look to it. Feed a bit of metal powder into its maw, and after a moment of whirring and digesting, it spits out, say, a valve for a diesel engine or a gear for a car transmission or a pump component for a hot tub. It's an odd bit of industrial alchemy to watch--mere dust transforming itself into highly refined hardware.

The little machine in West Lebanon is known as a powder metallurgy press, and to most manufacturers, there ought to be nothing especially new about it. Powder presses have been around for 70 years, stamping out everything from truck-motor parts to medical equipment. Remarkably common though they are, these machines are remarkably crude. Most powder presses are great, loud, chugging things, about the size and shape of a tractor trailer and demanding the ministrations of at least 200 people to keep them running through a workweek. Retooling the presses to switch from making one component to another can take days. And any parts the machines do produce are coarse things at best, requiring up to a dozen refinements and improvements before they're ready for use.

The West Lebanon machine, developed by Mii Technologies LLC, is a whole different industrial beast. It's part of a new manufacturing system that is fast, portable and computerized. It can be shipped wherever it's needed and easily reconfigured to make just about any part for just about any manufacturer.

A machine this elegant ought to have come from the R.-and-D. wing of a Honeywell or a John Deere or an IBM. Instead, it sprang from the imagination of a team of local inventors who might be among the most important industrial visionaries since Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak first took to their workbenches. While the machine the West Lebanon inventors are giving the world is not quite the personal computer, it could become to 21st century manufacturers what the cotton gin was to the farmer or the loom to the miller. "If these guys have the materials and can automate the manufacturing process," says Kevin Prouty, an industry analyst with AMR Research in Boston, "that's moving toward a new level--toward a manufacturing renaissance."

By any measure, a renaissance in manufacturing is long overdue. Traditional powder presses are not the only low-tech way parts have been built over the years; stamping machines, casting machines and forging machines are used to melt or muscle metal into shape. Not only are these machines imprecise, they are also fantastically expensive and hard to come by. A start-up company that wants to manufacture parts for a new product may have to wait two years for a press to be built and delivered. Not exactly the quick turnaround time we've come to expect in the age of silicon.

Mii's powder press may change all that, turning American industry on its head. That, as it happens, is exactly what company CEO Alan Beane, 52, has wanted to do for most of his professional career. Born in Laconia, N.H., Beane, like so many New England natives, developed an admiration for the rugged factory culture that defines this corner of the country. He had manufacturing in his blood; in his youth he spent Sunday mornings poking about his grandfather's Dartmouth Woolen Mills, which produced green blankets for the U.S. military. "My image of factories came from those mornings in the mill with Grandfather," he says. "He was fearsome, but he knew the name of every worker and respected them deeply."

Beane was ambitious--or at least ambitious enough to leave Laconia when he turned 18 and go study economics and industrial R. and D. at the University of Pennsylvania. He returned in 1970--a Wharton graduate in a land of lunch buckets--and became a partner in his father's C.P.A. firm, servicing the high-tech companies that were slowly replacing the smokestack factories he had grown up with. After a few years of totting up the profits of other people's businesses, he decided he'd rather be doing some of that manufacturing on his own.

Beane bought a technology company that made components for motherboards and other PC hardware for the burgeoning computer industry. By the mid-1980s, his company was flourishing, and he had begun making the kind of silicon-driven millions so many other high-tech entrepreneurs were piling up. All the while, though, what really fascinated Beane was reinventing not just products and components but the factory itself--creating a digital manufacturing system for the New Economy. One thing that caught his attention was the problem of the powder press. He wondered if it was possible to update the Industrial Age brute. Before he could venture onto this alien turf, however, he knew he needed help--and realized he could get it from his younger brother Glenn.