Connecticut’s Chief Manufacturing Officer Aims For Growth, Reshoring

Paul Lavoie, whose long manufacturing career included stints in engineering services, hardware and electronics, is now applying his skills to help grow Connecticut’s already vigorous manufacturing base in his unique role as the state’s Chief Manufacturing Officer.

In 2019, with a strong desire to build on the state’s manufacturing base, Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont created this unique state government leadership role with the responsibility of coordinating state and private-sector efforts to promote growth in the state’s manufacturing sector. After a three-year tenure by aerospace industry veteran Colin Cooper, Lavoie took the reins in early 2022.

While the Connecticut might fly under the radar somewhat when it comes to manufacturing due to its small size in both physical area and its population of just 3.6 million people, it often punches above its weight. It hosts such world-beaters as General Dynamics Electric Boat, the submarine builders in Groton, and Pratt and Whitney, the aerospace and defense manufacturer headquartered in East Hartford.

Now Lavoie, whose office is part of the state’s Department of Economic and Community Development, has developed a plan to deliver on the state’s objectives to grow its industrial base.

“I’m the author of Connecticut’s manufacturing strategic plan, and the strategic plan is a was written in response to feedback from the manufacturing sector,” he told me in an interview. “I’m leaning in, listening to what their challenges are, learning about their businesses and linking them to resources.”

Developing talent

The strategic plan consists of four main components. The first of those is developing talent. “Our developing talent program really is around three areas,” said Lavoie. “First is inspiring the next generation of manufacturing leaders–the makers, the doers, the creators. We do things like, we fund a statewide robotics program. We’ve made a $2.6 million, two-year investment to level the playing field for robotics across Connecticut.”

Career roadshows are also an important inspiration tool. “We bring in middle school kids and high school kids to meet with manufacturing companies,” Lavoie explained. “Last year, we brought in over 7,500 kids to meet with over 130 companies. And it’s really just exposing them to what manufacturing is.”

Finally, the state’s “I Got It Made” campaign features a downloadable lookbook that serves as a complete guide to manufacturers and industrial careers in Connecticut.

“The second part of developing talent is all around underserved groups,” Lavoie continued. “So second-chance workers, veterans, women, neurodiverse individuals, people of color, tapping into groups of people the manufacturing sector may not even be aware of.”

Upskilling and reskilling the existing workforce are the final elements of talent development. “We provide every manufacturing company in the state of Connecticut under 1,000 employees with $100,000 in matching grant funds to train their employees,” added Lavoie. “The state of Connecticut wants to be the partner in training for all of our manufacturing companies.” To date, the Office of Manufacturing reports that over 29,000 workers have been retrained under the program.

Mush Khan, co-founder and CEO at Alchemy Industrial, an advanced manufacturing consultancy, agreed with that approach. “One of the most important aspects of driving manufacturing re-shoring is finding talent in places and in ways that aren’t necessarily traditional,” he told me via email. “Connecticut’s focus on finding hidden talent pools is a creative and critical part of driving the state’s re-shoring efforts.”

Business development and cost reduction

The second component of the strategic plan focuses on business development, cost reduction and energy efficiency. “How can we help companies grow, and how can we bring to them business development opportunities?” Lavoie asked himself. “We’ve invested in a supply chain database that’s for manufacturers only, where they can find each other and they can find work from each other, and they can connect with each other.” With respect to cost reduction and energy efficiency, meanwhile, he said, “You’re a business that wants to come to Connecticut, you’re looking at opening up a new building, and it’s not energy efficient. The state of Connecticut is willing to give you some incentives to drive energy efficient equipment to be able to reduce consumption.”

“Energy is a significant contributor to manufacturing costs,” said Khan. “Implementing creative energy reduction methods like building energy efficiency and leveraging behind-the-meter microgrids can drive down energy costs.”

Driving innovation

The next part of the strategy involves driving innovation. “The four areas that we’re focused on in Connecticut are the digital transformation, so model-based definition, the model basis of engineering, and digital twins; additive manufacturing and introducing additive into the aerospace, shipbuilding and medical device industries, which are our three largest industries; robotics and automation–how do we get machines to do the work for people we’re never going to hire anyway? And then AI… it’s pretty clear with AI, because all of our large OEMs are using it already. We’re not really concerned with it replacing a workforce in the manufacturing sector, but we do know that a production person who is AI-enabled is going to replace one that isn’t AI enabled.”

“Innovation in terms of manufacturing methods and product development are incredibly powerful ways to establish entirely new ways to create value for customers,” added Khan. “Innovation allows manufacturing companies to create an entirely new competitive position besides costs.”

Improving collaboration

The final element of the plan is improved collaboration, which Lavoie has assigned to his own office for primary ownership. “We’re going to be communicating to manufacturers on a regular basis. We’ve created a manufacturing ambassador program, which now has over 875 registered ambassadors who get regular communication from my office on what’s happening in the manufacturing sector.”

Khan agreed with that as well. “The manufacturing supply chain is actually a ‘long tail’ of dozens or even hundreds of companies working together to create products for the market,” he said. “Typically, this long tail is organically created over time but there are ways to accelerate this system through thoughtful and intentional connections.”

While the strategic plan is still in its infancy, Lavoie is adamant that it delivers measurable positive changes. “We’re on the third revision,” he explained. “I launched it in February of 2023, so now it’s two years in. I’m on the third revision, and it has become a North Star for the state of Connecticut… You know, if it’s strategically aligned, it drives impacts that scale with a measurable ROI, those are our four criteria that we evaluate programs with. So if I can’t measure it… we don’t do it. We don’t just do things to do things.”

The goals of the strategic plan are straightforward: to increase the state’s manufacturing employment to 235,000 by 2033, which would represent a 4% per year growth, and to increase the manufacturing share of Connecticut’s GDP to 20% by 2029.

“I think any state regardless of its size can be competitive when it comes to 21^st-century manufacturing,” Khan concluded. “We are entering a system of highly distributed and highly connected manufacturing companies working together to compete on a global scale.”

“Connecticut is a great example of how a state government that understands a business sector and puts resources into a business sector can drive significant impact for a state’s economy and the state’s GDP,” Lavoie said. “I talk to states all across America about the role that I play and the impact that we have. When I took this job, manufacturing was 10% of the state’s GDP. That was in February of 2022. Today, we stand at 12.9% and my goal is to get to 20%… When you take such an important sector and you put a champion in place, and you then apply resources to that, you have a really dramatic effect on growing that economy.”