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"Jagler: Briggs & Stratton defies herd by bringing jobs back to U.S."

Briggs & Stratton Corp. CEO Todd Teske inspects a new Ferris commercial lawn mower at the company's headquarters in Wauwatosa. Briggs and Teske are bringing manufacturing production jobs back to the United States.(Photo: Steve Jagler / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

Briggs & Stratton Corp. and CEO Todd Teske are foiling two widely held contemporary memes involving American manufacturing:
(1)  U.S. companies are shifting jobs overseas.
(2)  U.S. manufacturing jobs are being replaced by robotics and automation.
Instead, the Wauwatosa-based company is moving jobs back to the United States from overseas.

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Furthermore, Briggs is using robotics and automation in advanced manufacturing to reduce the hours needed to manufacture its products — thereby negating the costs of the higher hourly wages paid to American workers and reducing the need to shift jobs to countries with lower wages.
“It’s the U.S. workforce. If you give them the tools, the amount of labor (hours) in the product goes down,” Teske said.
Briggs will expand its production of Vanguard commercial lawn cutting engines at its plants in Statesboro, Ga., and Auburn, Ala. The production — and a yet-to-be-specified number of new jobs — will be shifted to the U.S. plants from southeast Asia.
Among other applications, the Vanguard engines will be installed in the company’s Ferris line of commercial mowers. As a result of the company's commercial market growth, Briggs will move production of its Ferris and Snapper Pro brand mowers from its plant in Munnsville, N.Y., down the road to a newly leased plant that is twice as big in Sherrill, N.Y., initially resulting in approximately 50 new production jobs.
The Briggs & Stratton plan to use robotics and automation to bring jobs back to the U.S. makes sense to Rockwell Automation CEO Blake Moret, who spoke about that seemingly counterintuitive trend in a C-Level column this year.
RELATED: Jagler: Rockwell CEO touts 7 virtues of automation
Moret acknowledges that many American jobs can be lost with industrial automation.
“But I think it’s a net creator of jobs. By becoming more productive, those manufacturers are more competitive, and in turn, they need more people. It’s going to require a great set of skills,” Moret said. “Manufacturing is very important to the American economy. We are a U.S. company, and we’re proud of that.”
What's in a name?
As Teske prepared to file his company’s most recent quarterly report with the Securities and Exchange Commission, he realized he needed to account for a plethora of moving parts.
“We just said, ‘Wow! This is a lot of cool stuff we’ve got going. But we need a name for it,'” Teske said.
Teske needed a name to package the changes that are in motion for Briggs — a name to bring clarity for the company’s management team, employees and shareholders, as well as the media and the public.
Enter Mark Schwertfeger, chief financial officer.
“He suggested we call it our ‘Business Optimization Program,’” Teske said.
And so it is.
“First, we wanted to make sure we kept what we had,” Teske said. “We’ve had this in motion for about a year or so.”
Briggs, which already commands more than half of the U.S. lawn and garden residential engine market, is enacting the new plan designed to expand its production and sales of commercial lawn and garden engines and equipment.
“We have successfully grown commercial sales by $180 million, or more than 70%, over the last five years,” Teske said. “Our launch of this business optimization program will lay the foundation for continued profitable growth. These actions are expected to enable the highly dedicated and skilled teams at our U.S. plants to more effectively produce our commercial offerings.” 
Teske says the commercial line targets “people who use the equipment to make a living.”
Teske said the execution of the Business Optimization Program is expected to cost $50 million to $55 million, of which $24 million to $28 million is expected to occur in fiscal 2018. But on the other end, Teske expects the changes to generate $30 million to $35 million in annual pre-tax savings.
Combining skills and workers
Recruiting and training a workforce to ramp up production will be crucial to execute the Briggs plan. Teske said the company is using a variety of proactive internships and apprenticeships to attract new talent.
That approach is being deployed at the company’s sprawling Wauwatosa campus, where Briggs has about 1,500 employees, including the engineers in its research and development department.
For fiscal 2018, Teske expects Briggs’ annual net sales to be in a range of $1.87 billion to $1.92 billion for growth of 4.5% to 7.5%.
“We need the right training programs so we can get workers with the skills we need,” Teske said. “I think the future here (in Wisconsin) is bright.”
Steve Jagler is the business editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. C-Level stands for high-ranking executives, typically those with “chief” in their titles. Send C-Level column ideas to him at steve.jagler@journalsentinel.com.
Todd Teske
Title: Chairman, president & CEO
Company: Briggs & Stratton Corp., Wauwatosa
Expertise: Accounting and finance
Hometown: Green Bay
Education: Master’s degree in business administration, Northwestern University; bachelor’s degree in business administration and accounting, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh
Family: Wife, Kim; daughter, Taylor; and son, Connor
Best advice ever received: “You learn more from listening than talking.”
Favorite movie: “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”
Favorite band: OneRepublic
Favorite Wisconsin restaurant: Fishbone’s Cajun and Creole Restaurant, Delafield
Personal: “My first job was selling programs at Lambeau Field for Packers games.”

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