Sandvik Coromant Opens Newly Renovated U.S. Headquarters

An event yesterday at Sandvik Coromant's U.S. headquarters in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, celebrated the opening of a new Productivity Center (photo above), part of a now-completed 2-year renovation of this site.

The layout, architecture and offerings of the site now match other, more modern Sandvik locations both in North America and around the world. The company's original Fair Lawn site was built in 1955 and significantly expanded in 1966. Since then, priorities have shifted.

One of the priorities today is collaboration. An open design encourages movement through the facility and interaction among both employees and guests at the site. Within the Productivity Center (Sandvik's term for its training and process-development facilities), spacious machining areas equipped with sophisticated CNC machines provide capacity for company personnel to be working with various customers on various different projects at any given time. A machining area that is not so open (the ITAR-certified shop can be closed off, and frosted glass blocks the view) provides machining capacity for customer projects that are sensitive or secret.

Another priority, as company president Klas Forsström stressed in his remarks at the event, is outreach. This latest investment in the company's U.S. presence is coupled with an awareness that it needs to support manufacturing here by attracting talented people into this field. As it also does at its Chicago-area Productivity Center, for example, the company will routinely seek opportunities to bring groups of young people and their parents and teachers into the new New Jersey site in order to provide an up-to-date view of manufacturing technology, as well as an appealing glimpse at what a modern manufacturing career could look like for those who might thrive in this field.