Industry Week Article Touts Fort Wayne

Industry Week has published an article favorably reviewing northeast Indiana's attractiveness for manufacturers. 

IW's Josh Cable writes of value-added manufacturing and processing in the automotive and food-processing industries. However, the article begins by emphasizing the medical device industry keying off proximity to Warsaw.

Mr. Cable features Bruce Emerick of Whitley County's Micropulse:

Just a bit east of Warsaw, Ind., manufacturers are finding the Fort Wayne area to be a hospitable place to serve the medical-device industry.

In 2003, tool-and-die maker Brian Emerick decided to focus his Columbia City, Ind., contract-manufacturing company exclusively on the medical-device industry, after business in other sectors had dried up. Looking back, he says it was "the absolute best thing we ever did." "We went from being a diversified job shop with 150 customers to a very narrowly focused orthopedic-device manufacturer, and have been nothing but that since," Emerick says. "And we wouldn't even consider another opportunity outside of medical. I don't care what it is -- aerospace, you name it -- we wouldn't even listen to it."

His privately held company, Micropulse Inc., has experienced "good, solid growth since then," Emerick says. Micropulse today has more than 200 employees and operates out of a 100,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Columbia City -- next door to his farmhouse where he first launched the business in 1988.

In Northeast Indiana, Emerick says he's found an ideal location to design and manufacture surgical instruments, implants and delivery systems for the orthopedic industry.

Micropulse is about 30 minutes from Warsaw -- the orthopedic-device manufacturing capital of the world -- where medical-device titans such as Biomet, Symmetry Medical and Zimmer are headquartered. But it's far enough away from Warsaw that Micropulse doesn't have trouble finding talented help, Emerick says. In fact, some of the high school students hired as interns during the company's early years remain on the payroll today.