Sep 13, 9:16 PM

Firms to train for efficiency

State grant offers help to high-tech companies

By Scott Blake
FLORIDA TODAY

TITUSVILLE -- Several Brevard County companies and many workers at those companies are expected to receive training from a $594,000 state grant intended to make high-technology businesses more innovative and efficient.

The Boeing Co. and some of its subcontractors at Kennedy Space Center are expected to participate in the training, said officials handling the Target Industry Challenge Grant, which was approved this week.

Other local companies eventually may join the program, which will be spread across Central Florida's so-called high-tech corridor from the Space Coast to the Tampa area.

Overall, the grant is expected to benefit about 2,000 workers, up to a third of which could come from Brevard County, said Frank Kinney, executive director of Technological Research and Development Authority, or TRDA, in Titusville.

"For 15 years, the TRDA has been working aggressively to focus on technological commercial uses (that foster economic development), especially as it relates to NASA and the Space Center," Kinney said.

"This (grant) is a great opportunity to broaden that work and focus on work-force-related issues," he said.

The TRDA will receive the grant, and partner with the Florida Manufacturing Extension Partnership in Cocoa and the Rockledge-based Brevard Workforce Development Board to carry out and complete the training by June 30.

The training is broken into two categories: innovation and improvement.

Part of the innovation training will be instruction for managers and executives on how to market their products, tap into venture capital, negotiate contracts and write business plans, said Claudia Follet, program manager for the Manufacturing Extension Partnership.

"We're not talking about soldering skills on the (manufacturing) floor," Follet said.

But the improvement training is geared more to rank-and-file workers. It will include instruction on how to share responsibility for the overall functioning of a business and making production-floor work and manufacturing "flow better," Follet said.

Paravant, a maker of rugged computers in Palm Bay, was among local companies that received similar training under a grant last year. Topics included software training for engineers, negotiation skills and writing business proposals.

"It's increased productivity in the engineering department. . . . It also helped the business-development people write high-tech proposals," said Marion Sarrica, Paravant's human-resources director in Palm Bay.

The new grant will be supplemented by matching contributions from participating companies to help pay for the training, bringing the total estimated value of the program to about $980,000.

Companies that don't have the money to contribute may not be worth the training investment, Follet said.

"If they don't put some 'skin' in the game, you have to wonder where they're at," she said.

The improvement training will involve 18 companies around Central Florida that were pre-selected. That includes Boeing and several of its subcontractors that work under the new Checkout Assembly and Payload Processing Service, or CAPPS, contract with NASA. The contract involves space shuttle and unmanned rocket payload processing.

In addition, about 160 companies around Central Florida will receive the innovation training, with many of the slots still open. Program officials are looking to firms to express an interest in the training, Follet said.

The training programs are expected to start in about two weeks.

The grant -- originally federal money -- comes from Workforce Florida, a state public-private agency that promotes economic growth in Florida through work-force development.

The TRDA is another economic-development agency that focuses bringing developing technologies, such as those in the aerospace industry, to schools and small businesses in Florida.

The Manufacturing Extension Partnership is a nationwide network of nonprofit centers set up to provide small and midsized businesses with the help and solutions they need to succeed.

The Workforce Development Board, also a nonprofit agency, administers work-force development programs in Brevard.