“Advanced manufacturing” is becoming an increasingly popular expression as public officials and business leaders try to replace traditional manufacturing jobs lost to increased productivity and overseas competition.

It’s hard to find agreement, though, on just what “advanced manufacturing” means.

To some, it’s a departure from the assembly-line jobs that have employed regional workers for generations. To others, it’s any manufacturing business that uses some advanced processes.

And to the leader of one local firm that is indisputably an advanced manufacturer, it’s any business that’s a leader in its field.

As financial markets melted down in November 2008 and area RV makers were laying off workers by the hundreds, Carol D’Amico spoke at a regional manufacturing summit at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne. D’Amico, CEO of the industry-development group Conexus Indiana, said the RV production jobs were gone and that Indiana didn’t want them back.

But in a column that appeared in The Journal Gazette in December 2008, D’Amico tempered her remarks. She noted that unemployment was soaring and said “any job” was a good job. But her point was that the future of Indiana manufacturing lay in “advanced manufacturing” such as that done at Fort Wayne Metals Research Products Corp., whose president, Scott Glaze, spoke at the same conference.

Fort Wayne Metals employed no more than 40 people in 1985 when it was still an industrial wire maker, Glaze said in an interview in March.

Since then, it has started making wire for medical devices and surgical procedures. For example, Fort Wayne Metals makes wire leads for pacemakers.

Its workforce gets a lot of technical training, many workers have college degrees and production workers mostly operate machines instead of assembling things by hand.

“We want them to know why we’re doing what we are,” Glaze said. “Our motto is we’re saving lives.”

Starting pay at Fort Wayne Metals is about $20 an hour and employment at the company has grown to 520, Glaze said.

Fort Wayne Metals has shown solid growth, but can such jobs replace other manufacturing jobs that are being lost in the region?

Northeast Indiana lost 36 percent of its manufacturing jobs between 2001 and 2009, said John Stafford, director of IPFW’s Community Research Institute.

And it’s hard to get a fix on how much of today’s manufacturing workforce consists of advanced-manufacturing jobs.

Conexus’ website says more than 500,000 Indiana residents are employed in advanced manufacturing. But the National Association of Manufacturers, an industry group, says 522,000 Hoosiers worked for manufacturers of some kind in 2008, the most recent year for which statistics are available.

David Holt, a spokesman for Conexus, at first struggled to define “advanced manufacturing,” saying it might apply to any manufacturer that uses some robotics or any other automated process.

After some research, Holt gave this definition: “methods of manufacturing products using robotics, intelligent systems, efficient processes and management techniques, coupled with support from highly skilled and educated people.”

By that definition, most northeast Indiana manufacturers are becoming advanced manufacturers, Holt said.

But by any definition, “advanced manufacturing” means higher productivity, or that it takes fewer workers to make the same amount of product. That’s a trend that must continue if U.S. manufacturers are to compete in the global marketplace, said Mac Parker, president of the Greater Fort Wayne Chamber of Commerce Foundation Inc.

“In order to compete with the lower wages overseas, you have to have higher productivity,” Parker said. “And to have higher productivity, you have to have automation.”

The percentage of northeast Indiana residents who are employed in factories likely will continue to shrink, and the region must find ways to diversify its economy, said Stafford, of the Community Research Institute. But it will be tough.

“Manufacturing is so much of who we are,” Stafford said. “It’s still the dominant engine of our economy.”

mschladen@jg.net