Word: kirila
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...runs Genmar Holdings, a remnant of his buccaneering days and a company whose principal business is building pleasure boats. Boatbuilding is messy, environmentally hazardous and so unpleasant a job that Genmar has a hard time getting workers to do it. Pyramid built a few test hulls for Genmar, but Kirila's system wasn't refined enough for Jacobs' engineers. "They were 90% there, and we needed 100%," says Jacobs. "So it represented a multimillion-dollar leap of faith...
Jacobs saw the potential--he hadn't forgotten everything he learned in the '80s--and offered an all-or-nothing deal to buy out Pyramid. It sounded like a deal with the devil. But Kirila knew he needed someone with deep pockets and a commitment to make VEC bigger...
...quiet. Three technicians in smart yellow shirts and blue jeans supervise two VEC cells. One man watches a monitor that shows injection flow, temperature and pressure levels. If something goes wrong, an alarm rings in Little Falls and at the VEC solutions center, 1,400 miles south. Kirila's experts regularly tap into the Little Falls plant via the Internet to adjust production settings and troubleshoot problems...
...unveil the world's first automated boat plant at Little Falls, a sprawling 100,000-sq.-ft. facility that will turn out 10,000 boats a year. Jacobs has invested more than $30 million so far, but no matter. Says he: "This is game-changing technology, period." He and Kirila have been inundated with inquiries from competitors wanting a piece of the VEC action. Other calls have come from the likes of Ford, Volvo, Owens-Corning and Gulfstream. Household-products and construction-materials companies want in too. Elsewhere, advanced manufacturers like Rockwell are experimenting with remote engineering. Honeywell already offers...
Although technically he works for Genmar, Kirila figures that at some point his company, now called VEC Technology Inc., will go public. For the present he has a mandate to spread the gospel of digital manufacturing and fund start-up companies that aim, as he puts it, "to raise the clock speed of manufacturing culture." Jacobs is planning to do what Kirila originally intended: to lease the patented VEC system in the same way that Pitney Bowes used to lease stamp machines. "We're proving we can do it better, kinder, cleaner," says Jacobs, who has lost none...