< PreviousUPST A TE SC | INTELLIGENCE REPORT10 MAY 2019 SI T E S E L E C T IO NFUTURE OF MOBILITYIn January, Sprint announced that Greenville, South Carolina, was its choice to be a smart city, where the company will build out 5G and internet-of-things (IoT) technology to drive a new era in economic development.“We are proud to be supporting the fourth fastest growing city in the country,” said Ivo Rook, senior vice president, IoT & product development at Sprint, “to develop the infrastructure of the future.”The Upstate’s infrastructure of the recent past and present is pulling its weight in the world of mobility, from major highway and interchange upgrades to handle the growing area’s increasing traffic congestion to the inland port in Greer.Forward-thinking mobility R&D and manufacturing is already in the Upstate too, whether it’s the latest BMW expansion; the $2.7 million, 23-job expansion by composites maker Material Sciences Corporation; or the April 2019 lease renewal in Duncan by Röchling Automotive. Sprint’s investment simply adds a new and necessary layer that makes an already thriving ecosystem that much more robust.“Cities used to invest in roads, rails and airports,” said Greenville Mayor Knox White. “The infrastructure of the future to attract investment is digital.”Refocus and RefineThe Sprint IoT projects may land at South Carolina Technology & Aviation Center (SC-TAC), the former Army and Air Force Base that today is a unique 2,600-acre industrial park home to companies such as Lockheed Martin and Material Sciences. SC-TAC also is home to the International Transportation Innovation Center (iTiC), which among its assets for mobility testing includes a one-mile, 300-ft.-wide straightaway that was once a backup runway. Another major asset for SC-TAC is President and CEO Jody Bryson, a longtime economic developer, who says his team is in early discussions with Sprint, and calls his park’s mix of assets “the perfect microcosm for a 5G rollout.”In the meantime, plenty of companies are rolling in to take advantage of the park’s OEM-neutral test bed and consulting services, including ZF Transmissions, which operates a large manufacturing facility in Laurens County.Consulting projects include partnering with Cisco, Duke Energy, Toyota and Clemson The Ultimate Test BedThe International Transportation Innovation Center at South Carolina Technology & Aviation Center has worked for several years with Clemson University International Center for Automotive Research (CU-ICAR) to provide track time for the Clemson team’s Deep Orange concept car. Pictured is Deep Orange 9.Photo by Ken Scar courtesy of CU-ICARUPST A TE SC | INTELLIGENCE REPORT S I T E S E L E C T I O N MAY 2019 11University International Center for Automotive Research (CU-ICAR) to test and validate dynamic wireless charging for vehicles, as well as vehicle-in-the-loop technologies.The first institution to offer a PhD in automotive engineering, CU-ICAR is just 10 minutes down the road from SC-TAC, directly on I-85. CU-ICAR has longstanding partnerships with big names such as BMW, Honda, Proterra and Samsung, part of why it’s one of the few universities in the nation to attract $100 million a year in R&D without having a medical school. A new Center for Advanced Manufacturing is on the horizon.David Clayton, assistant vice president for the Clemson University Office of Corporate Partnerships and Strategic Initiatives, says there has been a refocusing by Clemson on corporate partnerships, as the university looks to continue developing its 250-acre specialty campus across five “technology neighborhoods.” The university is “de-layering” some of its approval processes and programs, so projects and partnerships can get to the action and help the region’s knowledge economy grow even faster.“We’re more open to development, and at the same time we’ve streamlined some of our processes,” Clayton says. “Over the next 10 years we will develop the next phase of the campus, and expand beyond automotive to include mobility in all its forms.”That means other academic disciplines finding a place at CU-ICAR, as well as other types of companies than OEMs or Tier 1 suppliers. “I think there’s a lot of room for growth in the IT and software sector in Greenville,” Clayton says, in addition to budding activity in medical equipment and life sciences.If the institutions supporting mobility in the Upstate are even half as streamlined as the vehicles it turns out, the next stage of mobility may be closer than we think.UPST A TE SC |INTELLIGENCE REPORT12 MAY 2019 SI T E S E L E C T IO NREDEVELOPMENTMills Into MillionsSpartanburg is a model of resilience and fl exibility.If you think Greenville-Spartanburg-Anderson is a mouthful, what if your company’s name were Keurig Green Mountain Dr Pepper Snapple Group?Th ankfully, when a merger was completed last summer, the new beverage giant’s name was shortened to Keurig Dr Pepper. As far as Spartanburg County and the Upstate are concerned, you can call yourself whatever you want if you’re bringing $350 million and 500 new jobs.Th at’s what happened in May 2018 (before the merger), when Keurig Green Mountain announced its new roasting and packaging facility in the Tyger River Industrial Park in Moore. Keurig Green Mountain Chief Supply Chain Offi cer Richard Jones said, “We view the region’s talented employee base and attractive business environment as the right place to invest.”More than 130 food-related companies call the Upstate home, and the industry has grown by 8.2% over the past fi ve years.Pacolet Milliken Enterprises sold the 213 acres of land for the project with the assistance of Colliers International’s Garrett Scott, John Montgomery and Brockton Hall, after several years of planning and infrastructure investment. Now that the sale is complete and construction under way, Pacolet will have an additional 10 sites in the park that can accommodate 3.7 million sq. ft. of development.At the textile industry’s pre-NAFTA peak in the mid-1990s, there were 33 operating mills in the area. Th en the region lost more than 30,000 jobs over a few years. Today, the mill villages are being redeveloped one by one. Montgomery says South Carolina did a great thing by following North Carolina’s lead and instituting mill redevelopment tax credits via the South Carolina Textile Revitalization Act. “A lot of these mills had fallen into disrepair, and been abandoned,” he says, but now are turning into residential or commercial space. “I was involved in a very large mill conversion called Drayton Mill, which was shuttered for 30 years, and converted to apartments,” he says. Another former mill site has been transformed by Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine (VCOM-Carolinas) into a four-year institution with around 500 students. Beaumont Mill, Keurig Dr Pepper will house coffee roasting and packaging for its single-serve pods at its new location in Spartanburg County, where distribution and warehousing may take place in the future.Photo courtesy of Keurig Dr Pepper S I T E S E L E C T I O N MAY 2019 13near downtown, sat vacant for a number of years, says Carter Smith, the veteran economic developer who serves as executive vice president of Spartanburg Economic Futures Group. Now it’s home to Spartanburg Regional Health headquarters and around 600 employees, and it’s “bursting at the seams,” he says.The land where Keurig Dr Pepper located is part of 3,500 acres Roger Milliken purchased in the 1970s for future manufacturing sites. It already landed a huge investment from Boeing carbon fiber supplier Toray. Montgomery at the time worked for the company that owned the land, and had done substantial certification so that “When Toray happened to show up that day, we could hand them a stack of information 12 inches tall with geotechnical, archaeological, utility commitments and endangered species details.”Those details also included the county’s existing large sewer trunk lines — an asset which proved crucial to Toray’s requirement of 6 million gallons a day in and out. The county’s position at the top of the regional watershed and past investment in reservoirs paid off. “Textiles were very wet industries,” Smith explains. “We have 30-inch water lines where you normally wouldn’t think of them.”For Keurig Dr Pepper, Pacolet Milliken spent $2 million to get sewer to the site, part of $12 million overall invested in roads, power and other infrastructure, explains Garrett Scott. The company also needed a contiguous parcel, but roads were getting in the way. “We were able to work with the county, the landowner, Carter and his team to close two roads and relocate a road, which allowed 280 acres to be available in the best configuration it could,” he says, and execute the work fast enough to meet the timeline of “Project Cedar.”“Being able to deliver their site to keep them on their timeline was crucial,” Smith says. “I’m proud of how we pull together to understand the challenge and get it done.”UPST A TE SC |INTELLIGENCE REPORT14 MAY 2019 SI T E S E L E C T IO NLOCKHEED MARTIN Q&ALockheed Martin’s Greenville GM and site manager describes why the Upstate makes sense for a major production boost.The future is bright, and it begins right here in Greenville, South Carolina — the new home of F-16 production.”Th at’s what Michele Evans, executive vice president of Lockheed Martin Aeronautics, said on April 23, 2019, as the company celebrated the move of F-16 tooling and equipment to a newly refurbished hangar at its site in South Carolina Technology & Aviation Center, where the company will begin manufacturing F-16 Block 70 aircraft later this year after initial aircraft orders from Bahrain and Slovakia, and pending orders from Bulgaria and Morocco. Th e 16-aircraft order will immediately bump up the payroll by 150 positions, with an eventual target of up to 400 new jobs as more orders come in.Th e nearly 500-person operation provides nose-to-tail aircraft sustainment, modifi cation and production. Th e facility comprises 276 acres with 16 hangars, support shops and warehouse space. “We serve a lot of diff erent customers from commercial and defense,” says Mike Fox, general manager and site manager, noting that the company has delivered nearly 3,000 aircraft off its runway since opening in 1984. Th e list of aircraft ranges across nearly 30 models, including fi ve Boeing lines and two from Airbus, as well as the strong military portfolio.Proving itself in the MRO and sustainment realm has earned the site the right to be a production center for the F-16 line — among the company’s crown jewels — even as the site narrowly lost out in on ‘PrimeLocation’Lockheed Martin’s Greenville GM and ‘Prime‘PrimeLocation’Lockheed Martin’s 35-year-old Greenville site will now produce the F-16 Block 70 aircraft — the newest and most advanced F-16 production confi guration.Photos courtesy of Lockheed Martina separate bid to build a new-generation training aircraft. Even if a major 100-plane order comes in from India and requires some F-16 production and sustainment in that country, long-term goals call for Greenville to still be a production location of choice for the company.Just last year, Mike Fox, a 22-year Air Force veteran who’s worked with Lockheed Martin since 2003, took the helm as general manager and site director in Greenville, after stints at company operations in Georgia and California. Over about 16 months before the move, he was implementing a cultural accountability program that originated at the Greenville site with 25,000 people, traveling nearly all the time from a base in Los Angeles. Fox wasn’t around when the site was originally ramped up 35 years ago, but “when you come down to it, being here, it all fits,” he says, beginning with a skilled workforce that has further proved itself with each passing year. “Quality, cost, schedule and safety — they do it better than most everybody else,” he says. “You have the infrastructure, a highly skilled workforce that is very motivated, as well as the relationships with South Carolina Technology & Aviation Center, our leaseholder here in Greenville, and with the state and local delegations.”Fox says all you have to do is take a spin around the region to see why it makes sense, beginning with proximity to McEntire Joint National Guard Base, where they fly the F-16 Block 52 (the next most advanced behind the Block 70) and Shaw Air Force Base. “So we’re surrounded by F-16 aviation,” he says, not to mention Stevens Aviation at SC-TAC. “We’re in the right state for aviation and engineering. We’ve paved the way in many ways as far as setting up here.”Only the Best Will DoAnd there’s no shortage of operations that have set up.“You drive around here and it’s very industrial-based,” he says. “You turn a corner and there is another plant. We are well positioned in the hub of growing technology. We are very focused on how we bring in that innovation” in a neighborhood that fairly bristles with it. Does that mean fighting hard for talent?“They serve as a magnet,” he says of the 3Ms and BMWs of the world, making the Upstate a globally recognized engineering and technology center. “They’ve come in standing up the tech centers and establishing the mindset of talent, and we become even more the beneficiary of that,” he says. With a range of jobs from aviation technicians and engineers to program managers and other specializations, Lockheed Martin also benefits from its heavy engagement with the state’s ReadySC and Apprenticeship Carolina training programs, working with Greenville Technical College just a couple miles down the road — a campus that has been collaborating with industry for decades.“We bring them in, explain what we have in terms of a workforce strategy, and ask them for their feedback,” Fox explains. “Clemson too,” which he describes as a Mike Fox, GM and Site Director, Lockheed Martin Greenville S I T E S E L E C T I O N MAY 2019 15bit of a shift for the research university whose graduates populate the region with a heavy swath of Clemson orange. “We brought them in, said, ‘Here’s where we’re moving, here’s what we need,’ ” says Fox, with the goal of a more robust partnership. “How do we continue to build a pool of qualified members we can select as we start to ramp up on F-16 production and we’re expecting to ramp up on the sustainment side as well?” The company is competing on several proposals on the sustainment side, for the F-16 and C-130.“My vision,” says Fox, “is you’re in high school doing a vocational program, whether painting cars or sheet metal shop. We can come in and say, ‘Here’s our course material for entry into the type of work we’re looking for.’ We issue Lockheed Martin certificates. We’re not looking for just any talent, but top talent. When you’re drilling these bulkheads, some are hand drilling. For that skill set, we’re looking for top-of-class talent. We’re not high volume. We’re low volume, very high tech.”The company’s 450 F-16 suppliers in 42 states know that well, and know the benefits of being nearby too: More than 100 Lockheed Martin–approved suppliers are in South Carolina, serving not just Greenville but a major site in Beaufort (near Hilton Head) too. “So we are very invested in the supply chain here,” Fox says, noting that I-85, other Interstates and the airport make it less stressful than a place like the company’s site in the California desert, where there is less movement of parts and supplies in the region.It’s fair to say the movement on the Lockheed Martin campus is robust, and likely to be more so soon, as the company competes for those commercial and military contracts. If all that business comes in, Fox says, “we have a long-term forecast based on what’s in our portfolio, and I can comfortably say that by 2021 we will double the workforce.”Whether that newly hired talent is from the region or from away, they’ll like living in a place where Southern hospitality is a real, daily phenomenon, says Fox, an Upstate New York native who first learned about it living in Atlanta, and now experiences it as a condo owner in downtown Greenville, and as someone just doing his daily business.“I had to run off the site and went to a UPS store to send something back to California,” he says. “The individual reached over counter, shook my hand and thanked me for my business. This is something that has never happened to me for the last four years. I sat in the car going, ‘Wow.’ My wife came here, and after the first week, she said, ‘I cannot believe how nice people are here.’“It’s pretty incredible,” he says. “I’ve known about Greenville and been here a couple times, but to have the opportunity to come live here and work here … in the aeronautics world, it’s the prime location. All my peers would want to be here. So I’m very fortunate.” Next >