CPP Builds a Skilled Aerospace Workforce in Mazatlán

Overview

Consolidated Precision Products makes precision castings for the aerospace, defense and power generation industries, the kind of mission-critical parts that carry some of the strictest quality requirements in manufacturing. As demand from its customers accelerated, CPP ran into the one limit it could not engineer around: people. Skilled talent, not orders or equipment, had become the ceiling on how much the company could produce.

CPP already ran two operations in Mexico: a standalone plant in Ensenada, and a plant on Tetakawi’s Roca Fuerte Campus in Guaymas that has grown there for years. Both continue. When it came time to add a third site and a new capability, CPP again partnered with Tetakawi and selected Mazatlán. Today that site performs highly technical non-destructive testing and repair on aerospace and defense castings, staffed by a team trained for it from the ground up.

The Challenge

The aerospace and defense business is growing dramatically. CPP’s customers were knocking on the door, asking how much the company could produce. The work CPP needed done in Mexico, non-destructive testing and repair of aerospace castings, takes years to learn and cannot be rushed.

The company had struggled to fill every job opening across its U.S. operations, Jeremy Main, CPP’s senior vice president, says, and in the border cities, Main says, labor is crowded, with high competition for workers and a higher risk of losing them. To keep pace with its customers, the company needed a new source of skilled, stable talent, and it needed the specialized capability to perform non-destructive testing on critical aerospace and defense castings.

The Questions CPP Had Not Thought to Ask Yet

Expanding into an unfamiliar country carries a quieter risk than anything on a capital plan. A company can be certain it needs to be in Mexico and still not know how, or where, or what will surface once it commits. Things come up that no plan accounted for.

In aerospace, choosing the wrong location or underestimating the work of standing up an operation in a new country is not a small mistake. CPP needed more than a building. It needed a partner that already knew the answers to the questions CPP had not yet thought to ask.

The Solution

CPP’s confidence in the Manufacturing Campus model came from experience. Years of success at its Roca Fuerte Campus in Guaymas made partnering with Tetakawi again straightforward. CPP evaluated locations across Mexico with Tetakawi and selected Mazatlán, for reasons that went well beyond real estate.

Mazatlán offered labor availability with far less competition than the border cities, and a workforce at lower risk of leaving. It offered depth of technical talent: nine technical schools and universities within thirty miles of the Campus, which together graduate about two thousand students a year, many with degrees in operations close to CPP’s work. And it offered quality of life, which is a large part of why people who take the job stay in it. The Campus supplied the rest: CPP came in as an anchor client, so its building was specified around its process on our standard footprint rather than taken off the shelf, and it kept control of production, process and quality throughout.

A Workforce That Now Trains Itself

Because the work is so technical, CPP invested in training before it invested in volume. It brought its first Mazatlán hires to Guaymas, Ensenada and Minneapolis for eight months of hands-on work on the parts and processes. Those employees have since become the trainers. CPP’s current round of hiring is being taught by the people who learned the work first.

• A way into the talent base: Tetakawi connected CPP with the technical schools and universities that feed the Campus’s recruiting.
• Support staffed from day one: human resources and operational support were on site in Mazatlán from the start.
• Expertise on demand: specialists who take the shipping, hiring, filings and regulatory work off CPP’s desk.

Outcomes

More than a year into the ramp-up, the pattern has held. Turnover, Main says, has come down to family moves; no one has left because the job was not the right fit. The team has built a strong safety culture around unfamiliar equipment, Main says, and even logistics, the stretch to the border that CPP expected to be the difficult part, went more smoothly than planned.

What surprised CPP most was the caliber of the people. The Mazatlán workforce is dedicated, motivated and engaged, arriving with ideas about how to do the work better and building real careers in aerospace and defense. The only downside Main names is that customers are growing faster than any site can: CPP is hiring, adding equipment to the building it has, and already sketching the next expansion with the Tetakawi team.