By Ben Rand
I’m proud to announce that Insyte has surpassed $2 billion in client impact in Western New York since 2000, more than $1 billion of which has come since the beginning of 2013, a clear indication that the pace of WNY manufacturing improvement in our area is accelerating. Manufacturing GDP for WNY now exceeds $8 billion per year while direct manufacturing employment exceeds 60,000. More than one in 10 jobs in WNY is in manufacturing and that is only the beginning. Important new assets like Buffalo Manufacturing Works and the nascent Workforce Training Center are poised to offer new opportunities for WNY manufacturers to secure real competitive advantage.
At Insyte, we’re particularly excited about creating or saving more than 10,500 jobs as part of our work. This is the real human impact of what we do, since every one of those jobs comes with an individual story of a friend, a neighbor or even a relative. Keeping and growing high-paying manufacturing jobs is what we do. Insyte’s average cost per job created or saved is less than $1,200.
WNY’s manufacturing performance has made Insyte the top-performing entity in the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP), a federal program comprised of more than 60 centers across the country, which provides some of our funding. Together with our manufacturing clients, Insyte has generated the most impact per federal dollar invested of any MEP center in the nation since 2013.
It is important to understand that these impact figures are not our own guesstimates, but come from our clients via an independent survey process conducted on behalf of the U.S. Department of Commerce, which runs the MEP program. Here is the breakdown of WNY impacts, as reported by our clients:
| New and Retained Sales | $ 1,131,631,465 |
| Capital Investments | $ 292,032,597 |
| Savings and Cost Avoidance | $ 105,732,487 |
| Jobs Created or Saved (10,587)* | $ 512,273,169 |
| TOTAL | $2,041,669,718 |
*Each job estimated at $48,387 in annual compensation
Two billion dollars is a big number and difficult to grasp, so here’s another way to picture it: if you stacked $2 billion in $1 bills on top of each other, they’d be 717,020 feet, or 125.8 miles, tall—high enough to reach low earth orbit. Two billion dollars is big, but the potential of WNY manufacturing is even bigger. For manufacturers committed to growing and improving their business, the sky is the limit, now that important and powerful new assets have been created here specifically to help you succeed. At Insyte, we look forward to many more jobs created and saved and many more positive impacts for WNY manufacturers.
