Mar. 29—JAMESTOWN — Champ Industries USA has about 30 employees at its Jamestown location and hopes to be at 50 employees by the end of the year, says President and General Manager Kevin Medwick.

"We're investing in Jamestown and we're really hoping that we're able to find the folks that want to grow with us," he said. "That's our main challenge, is finding people to do work in the skilled trades."

Champ Industries USA is a third-party metal manufacturer supplying tier 1 original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), Medwick said.

"We support all the tier 1 manufacturers in North America," he said.

A tier 1 company supplies a product to the market, he said.

"We're a North American company so we have customers in Colorado, we have customers in Nebraska, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota," Medwick said.

Champ Industries USA provides sheet metal and tube weldments used by other companies in their products. A weldment is a part created from smaller components that are welded together.

Ideally, Medick said, they are looking for customers that want parts to be laser cut, formed, welded and painted.

"Typically our customers are either transportation, agriculture or construction," Medwick said.

He said those customers are two types: customers that aren't large enough so they don't have the type of equipment that Champ Industries USA has, and customers that are getting too large and don't have enough of the equipment or people to do it themselves.

The types of products they make include bracketry, battery boxes and suspension parts.

"You name it, if it's made out of metal on a tractor or on a bulldozer or on a bus, then we may make it or we've looked at making it in the past," Medwick said.

Champ Industries was founded in the 1950s in Winnipeg, where its plant there now employs 100 people, Medwick said. The Jamestown location opened in 2005.

"The laws started to change in the (United) States as far as how manufacturing was performed when the 'Buy American' laws were brought into place," he said. "So a lot of our customers now needed us to be able to provide U.S. content and thus Jamestown was born."

Large sheets of steel, aluminum or stainless steel are loaded into the laser machine, where they are quickly cut for a specific job.

"It really all depends on the type of material and the thickness of the material," Medwick said, "but you're looking at a part every 3 seconds to every 15 seconds."

Depending on the job, said Shannon Scholz, production manager at Champ Industries USA, pieces cut by the laser may then move to another machine called the brake where they are "broke" (bent) into the needed product shape.

"A lot of stuff that gets cut comes through the brake," Scholz said.

The factory/plant recently added a tube laser machine at the Jamestown plant that uses the same technology as the flat sheet laser machine but instead will cut tube, Medwick said. It's expected to be in use around the end of March and will provide another component to Champ Industries' production.

"Typically the weldments that we do have two different types of materials in them," Medwick said. "They have flat sheet (metal) that we cut and break into parts and they have tube (metal) that we cut and weld into the weldments. So instead of paying other companies to cut the tube for us, we can now cut the tube for ourselves which opens a whole bunch of different doors. In North Dakota, we're not aware of anybody else right now that's offering laser cutting, welding and powder coating all out of the same facility when it comes to tube, so that's why the investment was made."

The company has also added laser welding technology, another investment in the Jamestown plant, Medwick said.

There are multiple jobs occurring at the same time in the plant and they vary according to the individual company's needs.

"Typically, I would say at any given time there's 30 to 50 jobs on the go ...," Medwick said.

He said the equipment is only running at about 50 percent capacity right now. He said sales are expected to grow and they are looking at multiple avenues to find workers.

Medwick noted that Champ Industries USA's need for workers is similar to other companies.

"Everybody is struggling to find people so our customers typically, what they'll do, is they'll transition their people out of the types of things that we do into assembly and completion roles and farm this type of work out to other companies that are being a little bit more successful finding people," he said. "That's where the majority of our growth is coming from. You can tie that back to supply chain issues that everybody in North America has been having for the last three years. ..."

Champ Industries USA has three shifts for employees and is currently looking for welders and people to operate machinery.

"On the welding side, we'd like to see some type of education, even if it's just through the high school or through the technical colleges," Medwick said. "We are willing to train from scratch, though. On the machine side, ... all we're looking for are people with mechanical aptitude. So maybe they worked for dad in the garage for a year when they were a kid or they like to play in their own garage, take things apart and put them back together. That's really all we're looking for. We're 100 percent willing to train specific on our equipment."

Medwick said the workforce at the Jamestown plant is "diverse," noting there are people with many years of employment as well as those who have fewer years with the company.

"Once people are here and get to know the company, they tend to stay," he said.

He said the company's benefit package and overall remuneration are "very competitive."

"Our culture is very much family oriented," he added. "... We're very willing to work with people to make sure their schedules match their bus schedules for their children and all that different kind of stuff. People work to support their family, they don't support their family so they can work ... so that's very important to us."

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https://champmetalfabrication.ca/home

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