Aisin's growth curve is the kind that Timothy Olind, senior vice president and COO of Karmann USA, would love to see his company emulate ... even down to the rooftop and Toyota connections.
      For Karmann USA, a maker of convertible tops and retractable hardtops, connecting with its German corporate headquarters is a prime everyday criterion, illustrated by its Plymouth technical center's $1-million-plus investment

Keeping Tool and Die from Dying A new Michigan law that took effect in 2004 allows tool and die and mold-making companies with fewer than 50 employees to form a collaborative entity for the purposes of state and local tax relief, provided they locate in a Renaissance Recovery Zone. While the state single business tax can be waived for up to 15 years, local communities have the say as to whether local property taxes may be similarly avoided. According to various press reports, such breaks have been voted down by citizens in Burton, Holland, Zeeland and Wyoming, but have been approved in nine other cities, including for two collaboratives in Grand Rapids.

in IT and extensive videoconferencing capability. It's also illustrated in Olind himself: He led the site selection process for the new 145,000-sq.-ft. (13,471-sq.-m.) manufacturing facility going up across the street, spent seven years working for Wilhelm Karmann GmBH in its hometown of Osnabrueck, Germany, and had just hung up from a fluent German phone conversation with his Osnabrueck colleagues before his interview with Site Selection.
      Being involved in a major facility construction project is like old home week for Olind, whose work as a structural engineer doing finite element and body structure analysis involved buildings before it ever involved cars. Of course, the MBA he's since acquired has taught him not to micro-manage, but he does manage to cross the road a couple times a day, checking everything from landscaping to what type of concrete reinforcement the contractors are using.
      Karmann's global real estate porfolio outside of Plymouth includes facilities in Osnabrueck, Rheine and Papenburg and Bramsche, Germany, as well as its roof system unit in Puebla, Mexico, fabric and seat cover production in Vendas Novas, Portugal, and complete vehicle production in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
      Logistics was the main driver for the Puebla facility, which supplies the vehicle that Karmann engineered for VW. Logistics of both the human and parts varieties played into the Michigan decision too.
      "A big driver for any decision is where you're supplying to," says Olind. "Here, we supply to GM at its Lake Orion facility and to DaimlerChrysler in Sterling Heights. With just-in-time, just-in-sequence delivery, we want to be not more than one hour away. It just depends on when we get the EDI signal, and how much time it takes to process building that order from the OEM. So that weighed heavily into the decision. We heavily investigated a lot of Southern states, and you can use sequencing firms where you build in batches, perhaps down south, and then send them to a sequencing warehouse very near the plant and deliver from there."
      A team comprising Olind, his CFO and a program manager looked at southeast Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee and Alabama, including visits to see what was available. They looked at energy and land requirements, Interstate proximity, and whether a rail connection were needed. Then the matrix of parameters went out to the various states and agencies.
      Once several sites were identified in Michigan and the other states, "we made a trip to Germany, sat down with Mr. Karmann, his finance people and some of our board members," says Olind. "The first decision was where, which was Michigan. Then we went through a process of locating the site in Michigan. The time frame was less than six months. We moved pretty quickly, because you can't go ahead and do it before you secure the contracts. We secured them, then said, "Okay guys, the contract time is pretty short," and when you're doing a greenfield development, there are a lot of requirements you have to satisfy for the OEMs. They are risk-averse."
      Mitigation of that risk was just one more reason to plant stakes in Michigan. The company crunched the numbers, then went to the Michigan Economic Development Corp.
      "We said, 'Here are the economic disadvantages of locating here in Michigan,' — perhaps some higher labor costs, higher real estate costs, whereas places in the hinterlands you can build cheaper, and can even get free land."
      They walked away with a MEGA (Michigan Economic Growth Authority) grant and tax abatements, as well as a tax abatement from Plymouth Township. That helped the economic picture for Karmann, but the strategic advantages were truly stronger.
      "There are a lot of advantages to having engineering co-located with manufacturing," says Olind. "The engineers will be able to go back and forth with no time loss other than putting on their coats and walking across the street, to see if there's an issue. They don't have to get on an airplane and go through security. It used to be easy to just jump on a plane, I know personally from working for Saturn, when I went flying back and forth to Tennessee sometimes three times a week."
      Olind actually favored a site in a Renaissance Zone in Warren that used to be a tank plant. But Germany already knew the advantages of having engineering and manufacturing literally next door to each other. Even going across town, says Olind, could cause the loss of up to a third or even half of an engineer's productivity.
      "You have to go get your hands dirty, you have to work with the product," he adds. "There's no substitute for getting these engineers away from the virtual environment. It makes their jobs more interesting. It makes the people who are stuck with really difficult problems on the manufacturing line say, 'If I could only talk to this engineer, I'd tell him what to do here.' It helps to optimize your processes.
      "That close proximity and quick resolution of problems is huge, especially these days where the ramp-up phase and executing a flawless launch is key and primary to maintaining a good customer relationship," says Olind. "We can have business meetings here, and we have a showcase high-tech manufacturing facility right here, so we can say, 'Hey, we're not just a sales office or engineering facility, we can demonstrate the whole value chain to you by just coming out to our site.'
      "Customers these days have very complex proof mechanisms, the content is quite large, and we're doing this to facilities that are building convertibles in the same lines as mass volume vehicles. If we have any hiccup with the convertible, it's going to ripple back into production of their bread-and-butter, or high-volume, vehicles. "