RCBI rebrands to Marshall Advanced Manufacturing Center, announces plans to expand services "tenfold"

“(Smith) would like ... the Marshall Advanced Manufacturing Center to scale what it does even more to promote advanced manufacturing and secure a strong manufacturing base here at home,” Friel said. “The pandemic really reinforced the importance of having a strong manufacturing base at home because of the very disruptive supply chain issues that manufacturers faced during the pandemic and continue to face.”

While the RCBI has always been a part of Marshall, Friel said the new name immediately brands the organization as such and more accurately promotes that the center does.

For more than 30 years, the center has promoted manufacturing and provided training to roughly 26,000 people since its 1990 inception in fields such as computer-controlled machining, welding technology, quality implementation and additive manufacturing.

In 2022 alone, the center served 306 different companies and provided workforce training to 764 individuals.

In a press release last month, Smith said he wants to scale the center’s efforts tenfold, and Friel said the center is already in the process of expanding, with a new advanced manufacturing training center opening in South Charleston in June.

The center is also renovating a former industrial building in Huntington, Friel said, which is set to be the home of an advanced welding and robotics training center within the next two years.

“It’s more of an effort to expand our workforce training initiatives because we engage with big manufacturers every single day,” Friel said. “A lot of manufacturers continue to have problems finding the skilled labor force that they need, and we hope to grow and create new jobs. We want to redouble our efforts to produce the highly skilled workers that they need so we can create jobs here in West Virginia.”

Friel said the planned expansion is a testament to the center’s success and hard work. He said that when the center was founded in 1990, there was a national effort to create such centers across the country called “factories of the future.”

However, 33 years later, the Marshall Advanced Manufacturing Center is the only one still standing.

“We’re the only one that remains, and we continue to expand the types of services we offer,” Friel said. “The secret to what we do is we’re a one-stop shop for entrepreneurs and manufacturers. We not only provide access to technology, expertise and workforce development, but we assist with the development of new products. …

“We provide early stage funding to help people develop ideas and bring those to market. We’re very agile. We know and constantly gather feedback from our existing manufacturers and manufacturers looking to expand to the region. We don’t wait for people to come to us needing our services. We go out and ask people what they need, then figure out how we can provide that quickly and affordably.”

Friel said that just this year, the center has begun expanding its National Advanced Manufacturing Apprentice Program, which operates in 21 states across the country, a growth that he believes will continue.

“I think you’ll see us continue to roll out new programs to better serve manufacturers, particularly here in West Virginia,” Friel said. “There is such a wide variety of things that we do, like supply chain connections. We host a series of events with some of our strategic partners in which we try to help small businesses in the state become part of the supply chain to major manufacturers. …

“It allows not only the small businesses to secure contracting opportunities with major companies, but it helps those companies find suppliers closer to home and, in the process, keep those dollars here in West Virginia.”

For more information on the Marshall Advanced Manufacturing Center, visit www.rcbi.org.