Open-enrollment Training
The SiMT is a one-stop shop for all your training needs. We offer training in a variety of manufacturing areas (including quality, machining, rapid prototyping, fluid power, robotics, electronics, maintenance and programmable logic controls), health, safety, computing, networking, environment, business, management, supervision and more.

On-Site Training
Our SiMT personnel will deliver many of our training courses to your facility or to a location of your choice.

Customized Training
Our personnel continuously partner with businesses and industries to meet training schedules and to customize training materials. We are excited to work
with you to ensure that our training meets your individual needs.

Manufacturing Technology Services
We offer a variety of manufacturing technology services. We have options to assist your company in developing advanced manufacturing processes, automated manufacturing technology, manufacturing simulations, rapid prototyping and in linking engineering design with manufacturing technology.

Manufacturing Start-up Assistance
Through the SiMT’s Manufacturing Incubator
Center (MIC), qualified start-up manufacturers receive
assistance in commercializing their ideas.

Consulting Services
Our expert personnel offer consulting services in many areas to assist you in improving the quality, productivity and profitability of your company. All of our personnel have real-world manufacturing experience working for Fortune 500 (ISO certified) companies at plant and corporate locations. We can design turnkey systems and processes for virtually every functional area of your business.

Southeastern Institute of Manufacturing and Technology
1951 Pisgah Road, P.O. Box 100549
Florence, SC 29502
(866) 304-7468 or (843) 673-7468
www.simt.com

Imagine going out to recruit a new generation of industry to your community with a secret weapon like Florence’s Southeastern Institute of Manufacturing and Technology in your back pocket.

That’s what Joe King, executive director of the Florence County Economic Development Partnership, calls a dis­tinct advantage.

“This center offers so much to industry in the way of business solutions – not just local or regional companies, but to industry across the eastern United States,” King says. “Once companies come here and see the center, they immediately get it. They see the potential for support on many different fronts for years to come.”

Many businesses that consider putting new operations in Florence County at first mistakenly assume that the $40 million SiMT center is primarily a training facility of lorence-Darlington Technical College, the school that created it.

But the institute is a multi-tiered industrial services venture that consults with companies, executes R&D functions, builds product prototypes, designs and engineers products, trains the workforce, orchestrates sales presentations, and hosts technical events.

Big-name businesses are taking notice.

In September, H.J. Heinz Co. kicked off a $105 million investment in frozen food processing in Florence County that will employ 350 people. SiMT’s ability to offer support services was a key factor in the location decision.

The Internet job-search firm Monster.com is putting a 750-employee customer service center in the area. Monster.com has already tapped SiMT’s conference space to host a large-scale luncheon for company managers, and its workforce is being trained in SiMT’s computer lab.

Pharmaceutical giant Hoffman-La Roche Inc. used the SiMT auditorium’s 3D/VR capabilities to announce its plans to expand its presence in Florence County and recently hosted its global engineering staff at SiMT.

Honda of South Carolina Manufacturing Inc., which builds all-terrain vehicles and watercraft in Timmonsville, S.C., used the center in 2008 to conduct its global best-practices meeting. Honda associates gathered from plants in nine countries to use the center’s advanced audio-visual and virtual reality systems.

SiMT plans to add more resources over the next few years. Projects on the drawing board include:

An industrial R&D center to provide companies space where new equipment, processes and machines can be evaluated and de-bugged for production
A safety training center, which will give companies a leg up on industrial-safety practices
An environmental management training center, where companies will learn best practices on issues such as waste water treatment and landfill waste reduction
A business excellence center that will provide leadership management education

The Southeastern Institute of Manufacturing and Technology goes beyond offering computer-aided manufacturing and virtual reality services. The Florence County showplace is also a pre-eminent new venue for business conferences, symposiums and meetings.

In the midst of the institute’s Hugh K. Leatherman Sr. Advanced Manufacturing Center is a state-of-the-art conference and meeting facility. So broad is its menu of meeting functions that facilities director Kathy Rogers best sums it up with one word: multipurpose.

“We can accommodate almost any need businesses might have,” Rogers says. “We can serve a banquet for 800 people, set up a 3D marketing presentation, host an executive board meeting or arrange for a video conference.”

With 177,000 square feet of space, the facility offers classrooms, auditoriums and reception areas. A recent gathering of real estate agents used the facility to host a luncheon with presentations. Another corporate meeting had hundreds of guests in 3D glasses watching a presentation on factory-efficiency ideas.

The SiMT facility offers a range of tools for events.

An 800-seat auditorium allows companies to make 3D presentations to audiences using a multi-screen visual system. The auditorium is fitted with a 2,700-watt surround audio system.

A separate, 12,000-square-foot conference center allows for banquets with up to 800 guests, and it contains a full array of audio-visual tools. The space includes six projectors, laptop connections, and touch-screen podiums with DVD and VCR players and controls.

The conference center space can be reconfigured into individual rooms or into a smaller conference floor space.

A reconfigurable executive boardroom seats up to 30, with a plasma screen presentation and capabilities for video and audio conferences. The boardroom adjoins a private executive dining room.

The facility contains a fully equipped catering kitchen, complete with multiple ovens and a walk-in freezer. Its food services are provided by a selection of local restaurants and catering services, depending on the client’s preferences.

Gather the market’s latest and most efficient factory tools in a central location. Make them available to industry across the Southeast. And offer to train production workers to use and maintain them.

That’s the mission of the Advanced Manufacturing Arena of Florence’s Southeastern Institute of Manufacturing and Technology.

Since it opened in 2007, SiMT’s manufacturing center has been the region’s one-stop shop for machining training, product development, assembly line consulting and the development of automated production techniques.

“Every space in this facility is available to outside businesses,” says Jack Roach, SiMT’s executive director. “We operate in any capacity. We can arrange for a business to come in and use the technology for a particular project, or we can do the work for you.”

Roach points out that much of the center’s equipment is already being used in the marketplace. But because it is leading edge, it is not yet in wide use by many manufacturers in the region. At the same time, the center reaches out to start-up manufacturers who have not invested in any technology.

“They face the prospect of investing millions of dollars in new equipment, versus using us as a temporary manufacturing solution until their needs outgrow us,” he says.

The center’s available services include the following:

CNC Centers: The arena has 18 CNC centers for machining, milling or turning, including four centers made available to SiMT by equipment manufacturer EMCO Maier of Hallein, Austria. The systems provide a selection of vertical, horizontal and multi-axle processes to meet different specifications and needs.

WaterJet Technology: In precision part cutting, WaterJet represents an innovation over traditional plasma torch cutting. The process uses high-pressure water streams and abrasive material to cut virtually any material without raising its temperature.

Electric Discharge Machines: The center’s electric discharge machines are effective in performing delicate or intricate work on difficult materials, including titanium, carbide and tool steel. SiMT has both wire and ram EDM machines.

Metrology Lab: The SiMT has many types of dimensional measurement equipment. These include a coordinate measurement machine (CMM) that can inspect work to tolerances of 0.0005 millimeter on pieces weighing up to 200 kilograms and a laser scanner arm to do both dimensional inspection and reverse engineering.

Consulting: The center’s personnel will guide manu­facturers in setting up automated processes, or manage and implement the tooling for a client.

Training: The center will customize and manage advanced machining training programs for a workforce at the client’s facility, in the SiMT manufacturing center, or at a third-party location.

In the old world of manufacturing, designing and producing a product prototype was expensive and time-consuming.

In the new world of advanced man­ufacturing at SiMT, the solution is “rapid prototyping.”

What traditionally required months of work and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars in upfront invest­ment can now be turned around in as little as a day or two.

“The old way was an enormous barrier to manufacturers – especially start-up firms,” says Jack Roach, SiMT’s executive director. “Rapid prototyping enables you to get your product concept into a customer’s hands much faster, while conserving your capital. We can turn out a prototype in a day.”

The institute’s Rapid Prototyping Center represents an investment in machinery and skills.

Design: The center begins its involvement with product design and development support, if a client needs it. SiMT personnel can take a concept and translate it into a computer model. The specifications can be perfected before the prototype is produced.

Key Tools: Three technologies are at the heart of rapid prototyping: Selective Laser Sintering (SLS), 3D Modeling and Stereolithography (SLA). The machines convert a computer model into an object made out of plastic, nylon or other synthetics – or metal – depending on the desired characteristics.

The center’s Stereolithography system can produce smooth-edged prototypes as large as 25 inches wide by 29 inches deep and 21 inches high, or roughly 2 feet cubed.

The Selective Laser Sintering equip­ment will yield functional parts, tooling and casting patterns out of nylon or metal.

Cost: Because of the relatively low cost of prototyping on these systems, clients can order as few prototypes as they want – even a single piece. In the old method of prototyping, products had to be made using metal molds, where most of the cost occurred. When product specifications changed, new molds had to be cut.

Capacity: The Rapid Prototyping Center is not limited to start-up firms, Roach says. Large corporations also turn to SiMT simply because their own operations are tied up.

“There is a real demand for rapid prototype capacity around the United States,” he says. “There simply isn’t enough.”

The 3D/Virtual Reality Center at the Southeastern Institute of Manufacturing and Technology allows designers, engineers, inventors, consultants and their customers to bring unfinished ideas to three-dimen­sional life. SiMT has one of just a dozen or so virtual reality “CAVEs” (Computer Augmented Virtual Environment) that operate around the world.

The CAVE allows clients wearing stereo glasses and sensors to see, experience and manipulate designs that still exist only as computer data.

But the CAVE is just one aspect of the center’s offerings, says Mike Mazen, SiMT assistant director.

Presentation Choices: Clients can choose from four different levels of 3D presentations, varying by cost and client need. Presentations can be made in active stereo, passive stereo, autostereoscopic and color-coded projection. The display options include life-size virtual reality experiences for highly technical clients, such as airplane manufacturers and commercial architects; vivid high-def­inition auditorium presentations; school classroom tools that allow students to see images on an ordinary laptop; and more.

Content Development: More than a 3D showroom, the center employs a programming staff that can create the content and software programs that make client presentations happen.

Virtual Prototyping: SiMT clients can contract with the center’s on-site content creators to convert a new prod­uct idea into life-like, three-dimensional computer illustrations. Computer-based prototyping can shorten a product development schedule by months and can save hundreds of thousands of dollars in some cases.

TouchLight Interaction: The center creates systems that enable surgeons to use TouchLight programs in sterile medical environments. In the operat­ing room, physicians can devise solutions to delicate surgeries using hand gestures to manipulate 3D images instead of touching a keyboard or computer mouse.

Research: Office space is available to clients from outside the area who may need to conduct additional work on a project that is under way.

Combining services and facil­ities: SiMT’s staff can marry the institute’s various services with its 3D capabilities and technologies in any number of combinations. 3D tech­nologies can be used in large-scale marketing events, workforce training programs, factory simulations or studies of manufacturing proposals.

Executive Briefing Center: A more private, 10-seat executive pres­entation room features a large 3D screen where clients can browse CAD images for discussions or video conferences.

Training: Part of the facility has been set aside for 19 fully equipped develop­ment work stations where SiMT provides training to both clients and schools.

A transformation is taking place in America. Businesses, jobs, technologies and markets are evolving into a new economy. And the business survivors of the 21st century will be those capable of responding quickly and with adequate skills and capital.

That is the motivation behind the Southeastern Institute of Manufacturing and Technology (SiMT), the modern 146-acre complex next to Florence-Darlington Technical College.
“We are not an industrial training school,” emphasizes Jack Roach, the institute’s executive director, “although we do offer training services. We are a tech­nology and services support facility, created to help the region develop and sustain a strong manufacturing base. We believe that manu­facturing will remain a critical part of the U.S. economy. But low-skill, low-wage jobs are going away. What’s replacing them is an economy based on high-tech skills that require advanced training and tools.”

SiMT offers a diverse lineup of services and tools to the region’s manufacturers, corporations and entrepreneurs.

Rapid Prototyping Center: SiMT is in the business of rapid prototyping, a cutting-edge process of creating finished product prototypes from computer designs in as little as 24 hours. The RPC at SiMT is capable of producing prototypes as large as 2-foot cubes.

3D/Virtual Reality Center: Offering one of the few complete-immersion virtual reality facilities in the southern United States, SiMT enables clients to work with three-dimensional images and holograms to move projects from design to completion. The center develops 3D projects for industry, hosts clients who want to work with their own customers on site, and also provide facilities for vivid 3D presentation experiences of marketing or engineering concepts for groups of up to 800.

Advanced Machining Center: Inside the institute’s large Manufacturing Arena is an 18,000-square-foot machining center that has two primary functions: handling industrial development projects for outside firms that do not have the equipment or capacity to do it internally, and training workforces to operate some of the newest technologies in use today.

Its arsenal includes WaterJet precision part cutting, electric discharge machining (EDM), coor­dinate measuring machine (CMM) inspection equipment, and computer numeric control (CNC) machining, turning and milling tools.

Start-Up Incubator:  With its soon-to-be completed manufacturing incubator facility, the SiMT will provide office and industrial space to manufacturing entrepreneurs who are at the critical point of moving ideas into commercialization. The assistance includes access to advanced technologies and capital-saving rapid prototyping, as well as business consulting, design and training services.