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Depending on who you ask, American manufacturing is either: the way out of our financial mess, or it’s dead. Whatever you think, there’s no denying that manufacturing has changed. That’s the story of Thogus Products in Avon Lake, Ohio.

One thing I kept hearing over and over again reporting this story is that there’s this big misperception about manufacturing. The popular image is of dirty smokestacks and factories filled with workers repeatedly pulling the same lever. Matt Hlavin has a very different idea for the company he runs.

“I wanted to create a Google of manufacturing environment so it’s young and vibrant and balanced between youth and experience,” Hlavin says.

Walk around the factory floor at Thogus Products, and you begin to see what Hlavin means. It’s clean and organized. Young staff use iPads and computers to keep an eye on each product line. Robots do most of the labor, churning out highly engineered plastic parts for medical devices and the food and beverage industry.

“I don’t consider us a manufacturing company anymore,” Hlavin says. “We’re a technology and services company.”

This has been a big transformation for Thogus. It used to be companies would come to them and say: “we need 20,000 switches made, can you do it?” And, Thogus would quote a price and make them. It was a volume business. Then, at the end of 2008, Matt Hlavin took over the company from his late mother.

“Worst time to take over a manufacturing company,” he says. “The economy is in shambles. The stock market is crashing. Banks are a mess.”

But Hlavin saw this as a time to reinvent the company. Volume was no longer the answer. It was now about skill and technology. Hlavin cut half Thogus’s staff. Those remaining were deemed on board with the company’s mission, and were given ten percent pay hikes. He invested $5 million in new equipment.  But most importantly, the jobs changed.

“We hired our first engineer right out of school,” Hlavin says as he walks around the factory floor. “James was a plastics processing engineer. I brought him in to be the first of my new engineering team.”

In just two years, Thogus went from having no engineers on staff to 15. Instead of just making whatever part a client wants, Thogus now helps design the product. The engineers range from biomedical to civil. Hlavin sees the company now as more of a full service consultant.

“It’s a Burger King economy,” he says. “It’s have it your way, right away, mass customization, not mass production. India and China are built for mass production.”

If you’ve ever looked at a graph of manufacturing employment in the US over the past few decades, it’s scary. It points straight down. As I walked around Thogus, I kept wondering: is this the future?

“I’d like to see it be the future of manufacturing  in America. I don’t think it’s automatic,” says Sue Helper, an economics professor at Case Western Reserve University. She says it would be great if more factories went this way, instead of cutting wages, but it’s hard.

“And it’s particularly hard for individual companies to do it,” she says. “I salute this company. I think it’s a very brave and skilled entrepreneur who was able to make these coordinated investments. He did a number of things all at once.”

She says it’s only a small minority of firms that are undergoing this kind of change.

But it’s working for Thogus. In just the two years of its transformation, its revenues have more than doubled, but it’s done so with a smaller staff.

“Transactional labor is going away,” Matt Hlavin says. “You don’t walk out of high school or wherever you went to school and walk into a factory and get a job. You’re going to have to work on a skill set.”

And for those who don’t? “There’s always food service,” he says.

By the way, Hlavin says his company is installing equipment to let the factory run overnight unattended. Look for a story about “lights out manufacturing” next week from Changing Gears reporter Kate Davidson.

Three stories making news across the Midwest today:

1. Job insecurity for Ohio’s teachers. Entering the school year, Cleveland Metropolitan Schools officials thought they had a $23 million surplus. But that was before the district accounted for the loss of 2,000 students from seven closed schools. Our partner station Ideastream reports that means a decrease in state funding and an increase in unpredictability for the district’s teachers, some of whom have faced layoffs multiple times in the past six months.

2. Illinois manufacturers are upbeat. Manufacturers in Illinois are more optimistic about the state of their industry than counterparts nationwide, according to a survey released Monday. Crain’s Chicago Business reports that 52 percent of Illinois companies polled were thriving or growing compared to 44 percent nationwide.  Sixty-four percent in Illinois said they planned to add to their workforce in the coming year, but 60 percent also fear a weak economy will slow their business.

3. One company’s trash, another’s treasure? Two Cleveland-based firms are using green technology to improve the efficiency of garbage trucks, and hopefully their profits. The Wall Street Journal reports today that Eaton Corp. and Parker Hannifin Corp. have designed rival hydraulic systems that could save on fuel, reduce pollution and brake wear. The technologies can be applied to other vehicles. The Journal also reports the two firms have engaged in some, ahem, trash talking, about their rival’s product.

Three stories making news across the Midwest today:

1. Agriculture potential expands in Michigan. U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow met in Western Michigan on Monday to discuss ways to grow Michigan’s agriculture industry. Vilsack anticipated this will be the best year for farm income in U.S. history, and Stabenow said Michigan can grow its second-largest industry into biotechnology, reports our partner station Michigan Radio. As a farmer told them at their meeting, “agriculture is doing things,” in Michigan, he said. “Industry is not.”

2. President plans Detroit visit. In what will be his eighth visit to Michigan since becoming president, Barack Obama will join union members during Labor Day festivities in Detroit next week. Organizers do not believe the President will walk in the city’s annual parade, but expect he will make a speech at a to-be-determined site afterward, according to the Detroit Free Press. Obama may use the visit as an opportunity to highlight the government’s intervention in the auto industry in 2009.

3. Rock Hall shows some Respect. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum will honor Aretha Franklin this November, during the venue’s 16^th annual American Music Masters this November. Franklin was the first woman inducted into the Hall in 1987, and wrote in a statement that she is “thrilled and delighted to be honored.” The exhibit, “Lady Soul: The Life and Music of Aretha Franklin” will be a week-long celebration and work in conjunction with the museum’s ongoing “Women Who Rock” series.

Three stories making news across the Midwest today:

1. Milwaukee’s employee-benefit conundrum. Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett and the city’s Common Council are unsure whether the city is exempt from a new state law that requires public employees contribute more toward benefit costs. The city’s attorney says Milwaukee should not comply. The governor’s chief counsel says yes. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports the disagreement centers around the state constitution’s home-rule provisions and terms of a decade-old legal settlement. Following the new law could save the city $8.2 million annually, but risks a lawsuit.

2. Chicago schools’ financial trouble. An 82-page analysis of Chicago Public Schools’ 2012 budget says that a “fiscal calamity” lies in the district’s near future if cuts are not implemented, according to the Civic Federation, which released the report Monday. The organization endorsed decisions like denying teachers a 4 percent cost-of-living increase and raising property taxes, according to our partner station WBEZ. The Federation said those decisions will look small if other remedies are not implemented to the $5.9 billion annual budget by 2014.

3. Urban garden potential. Two Ohio State researchers say as much as $115 million in produce could be grown on vacant land in Cleveland, enough to meet 22 to 100 percent of the city’s fresh food demands. “We were definitely shocked it was really possible to be self-reliant,” Parwinder S. Grewal, co-author of the study, told the Columbus Dispatch. Cleveland holds 5.3 square miles of vacant lots, and the city has recently loosened regulations to make urban gardening more palatable.

Our Changing Gears team has been looking at how the Midwest is adapting to new economic realities. But that can mean sticking to what you know best. From Cleveland, David C. Barnett takes us to Pierre’s Ice Cream Company, where a mix of old family values and new technology has helped it stay in business for 80 years.

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America was ice-cream crazy in 1927. It was the Roaring ‘20s, and a high-calorie dessert fit in with the age of excess so well that band leader Fred Waring celebrated with a hit song with “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream” lyrics still familiar today.

Ray Kralik of Pierre's

Five years later, the music of Depression-era America was much more somber. But a Cleveland businessman named Alex Basset figured it was the perfect time to open a business that catered to the public’s need for an indulgence, albeit an affordable one. It would be something to help them forget hard times, an ice cream shop.

He called it “Pierre’s.”

“I am told it was a fabricated, dreamed-up name to go along with the reputation that the original founder wanted, which was for French ice cream and real high-quality, gourmet ice cream,” said Shelley Roth, whose father, Sol, bought the business from Basset in 1960.

Roth says Pierre’s stuck to that founding philosophy, selling a high-class product that didn’t put too much strain on working-class wallets. But Pierre’s hasn’t been afraid to be flexible and innovate.

“When you focus on what has helped us survive through good and bad times, I think, in many ways it’s because we keep up with technology,” she said.

The (fake) spilled sherbet that greets Pierre's visitors

Blobs of mint ice cream with the unlikely name “Moose Tracks” plop into a line of pint containers in Pierre’s new 35,000 square-foot facility, which allows the company to produce eight times its previous capacity. In the midst of computer-controlled machinery stands Ray Kralik, the company’s decidedly old-school supervisor.

He started working at Pierre’s when he was 16. That was 39 years ago. He’s kind of link that guy at the hardware store who mixes customized gallons of paint, adding gallons of flavors to stainless-steel tanks of churning cream while following long-established guidelines that he long ago committed to memory.

Last Christmas, Pierre’s named a flavor in honor of Ray Kralik – “Ray’s Rootbeer Float” – to celebrate his nearly forty years of institutional memory.

“Ever since I started, I was treated good by Sol Roth, Shelley Roth,” Kralik said. “It’s like a family.”

But some “family” members left last year. Eight full-time and three part-time workers were cut, trimming the company workforce to 85. Sometimes, as Pierre’s learned, job loss is the price of greater technological efficiency. That and a lousy economy.

Between population loss and the rising costs of ingredients, Shelley Roth said Pierre’s local profit

Shelley Roth, whose family owns Pierre's

margins have been battered in recent years. The company is counting on the new facility to expand capacity and reach outside the region, which means going up against the big boys.

“This past recession has been the most difficult,” she said. “Because we compete with many of the global conglomerates that now really own most of the brands in the supermarkets, it’s very competitive. But, we still persevere, because we stick to our values.”

Even in the modern era, when the competition is between companies that are featuring new concoctions with flavors such as “French Toast,” “Strawberry Basil” and “Riesling Poached Pear,” Pierre’s “bread and butter” is good old French Vanilla. Roth says the company is currently in discussions with food industry officials in other countries who are interested in importing American ice cream – American ice cream, with a French name.

Three stories making news across the Midwest today:

1. Cleveland hosts wind manufacturing summit. The Midwest is well-positioned to become a leader in manufacturing components for the burgeoning wind energy industry, but the region has had trouble gaining market share. In hopes of changing that dynamic, Cleveland will host a summit of more than 200 wind-industry leaders this week, according to our partner station Ideastream. Because the Midwest is already a hub for automotive and aviation manufacturers, many officials view the region as an ideal local for wind-component production.

2. Governor tweaks Michigan film incentives. The Michigan Film Office can now negotiate the size of credits offered to movie and television producers after Gov. Rick Snyder signed a bill that allows for more flexibility. Currently, projects approved for credits automatically receive a 42 percent subsidy, according to partner station Michigan Radio. The new law does nothing to change a controversial $25 million cap that Snyder placed on the film-credit program for the upcoming fiscal year.

3. Illinois labor rule again under scrutiny. Illinois governor Pat Quinn would like lawmakers to reexamine the state’s labor rules for workers at McCormick Place in Chicago rather than wait for a ruling from a federal appeals court. “I don’t really want to wait on another court to make decisions,” Quinn told partner station WBEZ. “I think that often times just delays things.” The General Assembly passed legislation that allowed exhibitors to do more of their own set-ups for conventions instead of hiring union employees. Labor groups sued.

Three stories making news across the Midwest today:

1. Ohio exec develops “anti-poaching” policy. Concerned about the number of communities luring businesses away from other Cleveland-area locations, Cuyahoga County Executive Ed FitzGerald has created a non-compete policy he believes will stimulate overall regional harmony, and possibly growth. Under his “Fourth Frontier” program, local governments under his jurisdiction would be eligible for part of $100 million in development funds, so long as they agree not to provide incentives to lure companies away from other participating cities.

2. Summer outlook: Job openings flat. The number of job openings posted across the nation in May stayed stagnant, an indication hiring is unlikely to trend upward this summer, the Associated Press reported today. The Labor Department said that employers advertised approximately 3 million openings, the same total as April. The department said 4.7 unemployed people competed for each available job in May. The AP writes, “In a healthy economy, the ratio is about 2 to 1.”

3. Details emerge on Detroit help. As many as 12 federal officials will relocate to Detroit as part of the Obama administration’s Strong Cities, Strong Communities pilot program announced Monday. The Detroit Free Press reports the employees will come from HUD, Transportation, Labor and Commerce Departments, among others. They’ll help the city spend millions of federal dollars by seeking efficiencies and cutting through red tape. The pilot program includes five other U.S. cities, including Cleveland.

Three stories making news across the Midwest today:

1. Investors withhold light-rail funds. A proposed light-rail line in Detroit is in jeopardy because a group of investors in the Woodward Avenue-area rail lack confidence in the project. A group of businessmen and organizations, M1 Rail, is threatening to withhold $100 million of the project’s $528 million cost, Crain’s Detroit Business reported this morning. M1 Rail says the current nine-mile route is not the best use of funding, nor financially sustainable.

2. Commerce Department launches pilot program. Cleveland and Detroit are among six cities selected for a pilot federal program aimed at sparking urban economic growth. Federal officials will work with local governments, the private sector and others to encourage economic growth and community development, the U.S. Commerce Department said. In a competition designed to spark innovation, communities could compete for economic assistance and federal grant money.

3. Illinois Supreme Court OKs public-works program. An Illinois law that allows the state to raise $31 billion in construction costs through taxes on liquor, candy and video gambling was deemed valid by the state’s supreme court today, our partner station WBEZ reported. A liquor distributor had filed a lawsuit, claiming the legislation violated a requirement that laws must be limited to only one topic.

Three stories making news across the Midwest today:

1. Complications from Asian carp fight. A leading Indiana lawmaker says efforts to keep Asian carp out of the Great Lakes could cost thousands of workers their jobs in northwest Indiana.  Mike Pence, a U.S. Representative and possible Republican candidate for governor in 2012, wants a review of how closing Chicago-area waterways could impact industry in Indiana, reports WBEZ, our partner station.

2. Ohio study: subsidies fuel sprawl. Tax breaks intended to keep companies in Cleveland and Cincinnati instead exacerbated wealth disparities and fueled suburban sprawl, according to a new report. A study of 164 companies which received tax deals showed “they moved jobs away from areas hardest hit by plant closings and with higher rates of poverty, unemployment and people of color to more affluent and less diverse areas,” says the report, financed by the Ford Foundation.

3. Brownfield sites slated for cleanup. Six industrial sites in northeast Ohio will receive nearly $8 million for cleanup and renovation efforts. Approximately half that money will go to two brownfield sites in Cleveland that officials hope to turn into a medical office building and a senior center. “Hopefully, we can fund projects so that something new can happen on the property,” Clean Ohio spokesperson Amy Alduino tells WKSU.

Three stories making news across the Midwest today:

1. Suburban Cleveland communities study consolidation. Four communities in suburban Cleveland announced today they will begin the process of studying a merger. The mayors of Pepper Pike, Orange Village, Moreland Hills and Woodmere have agreed to be part of a pilot program. No timetable was given for reaching a decision.

The announcement comes on the heels of last week’s announcement from Ohio Governor John Kasich, who wants a committee to explore consolidation among the state’s 3,800 government entities. In a written statement issued Wednesday, Cuyahoga County executive Ed FitzGerald called the merger of the four towns a “logical outcome,” because they already share a school district, recreation program and library.

2. Emergency managers challenged in Michigan. A lawsuit was filed today in Ingham County Circuit Court, challenging a new Michigan law that gives expanded powers to emergency managers of cities and school districts in crisis. “This law violates one of the basic principles of democracy, where people get to vote and no one can impose a dictator on them,” said Bill Goodman, an attorney for the Sugar Law Center of Detroit, which filed the lawsuit on behalf of 28 plaintiffs, according to the Detroit Free Press.

3. Merit-pay-for-teachers plan gains surprising supporter. Count Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson among the unlikely supporters of a merit-pay plan for teachers similar to the some provisions proposed by Republicans in Ohio’s controversial Senate Bill 5. Jackson has previously categorized the overall bill as an attack on the rights of public workers. In a phone interview with The Plain Dealer, Jackson said the merit pay proposals give Cleveland the “greatest opportunity to educate children in the shortest period of time.”