Two years of discussion and work through a public-private partnership saw the Boeing Virtual Manufacturing Center become a reality. With an audience of Boeing executives and federal, state, and local officials donning 3-D glasses, the new high-tech tool made its public debut.

The VMC was called a 3-D prototyping center, a lean manufacturing tool, a workload transition enabler, a training spark, and a process improvement capability. Participants in the ceremony witnessed a virtual ribbon cutting and a virtual fly-in to The Base from 3,000 feet above the Boeing facility, through the front door, and into the room that serves as the guts of this new tool.

Boeing's C3 Network VP Nan Bouchard and Heath Center Director Mike Emmelhainz set the tone for the day with a focus on the already-strong public-private partnership that today signaled was going to be even stronger in the future. State Representative Jay Hottinger, a person instrumental from start to finish in helping the state take notice and help fund the project, remarked about the uniqueness of the state-local-company partnership that made the day possible.

Port Authority CEO Rick Platt expressed his hope of seeing the VMC become a mecca for the Boeing supplier network in Ohio and surrounding states. Boeing does over $6 billion worth of business in this region through nearly 2,000 suppliers.

It was noted that the talent to ramp up and run the VMC for Boeing will come from a combination of people persuaded to move to Ohio from Boeing's already-existent center in California and home-grown talent from the local area. Both positive signs that Licking County can both attract outside talent to relocate and also sustain and grow its own.

The VMC will make Boeing-Heath more competitive by expanding its capabilities to inject technical and engineering data in to the manufacturing process in a very cutting edge way. Among its applications, the VMC can display engineering designs in virtual reality while technicians consider ways to improve the manufacturing process. In this system, one can have a real-time visual experience with prototype products that have not yet been produced.

Background Info
Governor Visits
October 2007 Announcement
On Target e-Newsletter
OBDC News Release