President of Harmony Marketing Group Tim Harmon and CCI employee Sandy (Photo provided)

WARSAW — “There is a whole social dynamic in going on break and buying a soda,” said Jay Tate, CCI general manager.

People with intellectual disabilities enjoy the same things everyone else does and want the same opportunities to work and make money, like everyone else, and CCI Manufacturing, an extension of Cardinal Services, helps make that happen by providing employment for the adults they serve.

CCI supplies work to 111 people with developmental disabilities and gives them the opportunity to make money to supplement their income. While Medicaid and/or Medicare provide for most of their day-to-day needs, neither provide the “pocket money” to buy a soda or a candy bar when they go on break.

Tate said he’s always promoted CCI by telling potential business clients, “I tell them what our capabilities are just like I would if I didn’t work here and worked for a for-profit manufacturing operation.” When given a test job Tate said, “We show them what we can do.”

Tate said CCI provides quality, pricing and delivery. These are three important things a company looks at. When you have all three “It sets you apart to allow a better price,” Tate stated. He continued with, “just because we are nonprofit we still have overhead just like a for-profit does. So, we have to make money. It’s more than just giving these guys a paycheck. It’s promoting what you do so you can take your profit out on this side and put it on the program side, which is underfunded.”

Tim Harmon, President of Harmony Marketing Group, has been a CCI partner for 11 years and is very happy with the service CCI provides. “We want to establish that customer service is a premiere service from our partners to us and from us to our customers and CCI has echoed those sentiments. They do an awesome job.”

Harmon has a line of calendars they produce for one of their customers that ends up in stores like Walmart or Kmart. Each calendar is individually shrink wrapped. Harmon creates the product, then sends it to CCI, where the assembly of shrinking, packaging, skid packing and getting the calendars ready to deliver to the customer is done. “It’s a very specialized product and there are few companies that would be able to handle that type of a product,” said Harmon.

The shrink-wrap machine is automated, but still provides many jobs, as it requires someone feeding the calendars into the machine, someone who is feeding in the piece of cardboard, then there are four of five people who box them up.

Some of CCI’s customers:

• Chore-Time Brock: The workers assemble more than 11 million units for CTB’s poultry watering system each year.
• Donnelley: Cardinal clients who work at Donnelley’s sort cardboard, then send it to CCI to be cut down to a specific size and sent back to be reused. It saves Donnelley’s money and helps CCI make money.
• Medtronic: Medtronic carrier trays are metal so to prevent the metal on metal contact, CCI wraps them with Teflon tape. After the tape begins to fray the trays are sent back to CCI to be unwrapped, re-wrapped and sent back.

For more information visit CCI Manufacturing.