ELKHART — Growth and development is coming to Elkhart thanks to Welch Packaging.

Over the next two years they hope to add more than 100 jobs to their company after making a new machine called a corrugator.

It creates corrugated board – which is like heavy duty cardboard- for the company so they don’t need to order it from outside the company.

The reason its bringing in so many jobs is because this thing is gigantic!

It’s about the size of a football field, so it needs a lot of hands on deck… But Monday they still were going through training, so not everything is completely ready for the estimated 115 new employees.

Just about a week after the installation of the corrugator, production is underway…But not without its hiccups from time to time.

“The last two weeks have been pretty chaotic,” Corrugator Project Manager Chris Croker said. “Pretty interesting. A lot of different people doing different jobs.”

The staff is still working on getting up to speed, just like the machine.

“It will produce 1200 feet a minute or 11000 square feet a minute of corrugated board.” Group Vice President John Martin said.

On Monday, the corrugator still had some work to go. It was only operational 35 percent of the time it was turned on and it ran at a fraction of the speed. Thankfully, that’s not an average day.

“Not even close to being average!” Croker said. “We will have a- we should be about 95 percent up time.”

Even not at 100 percent, it’s still keeping things more efficient than ordering material.

“It is!” Operations manager Michael Kelly said. “It’s also a good opportunity for the employees to see it on a difficult day how we work through those difficulties and maintain our bearing.”

The company is expecting everything to be in full swing in December, but the new job positions won’t be filled up until 2018.

“We want to make sure we bring in the right people in to do this job and we want it to be a career,” Martin said. “We don’t want, you know, turnover is not a great thing. So we, you know, Welch is a family business and we want to hire people that have those same kind of values that we have.”

The corrugator won’t completely cut off outside orders of corrugated board. but it should significantly reduce the cost by making it in house.

To help out with all of the kinks in the system and get everyone trained up, they have people from the Corrugator’s company, Fosber, helping out with the work and training up Welch employees. This way, they can do the same for the estimated 115 new hires coming in 2018.

If you’re interested in a job, you can apply on their website at welchpkg.com/careers/opportunities.php or walk into their office in Elkhart to pick up an application

Source: WNDU