Nelson & Small Group Names Bill Weigel President of Manufacturing Management Company

The Nelson & Small Group has appointed William K. Weigel of Yarmouth, Maine, as president of Nelson & Small Manufacturing Management, LLC, a company formed to assure coordinated, focused leadership for the growing group of Nelson & Small sponsored manufacturing businesses, including Rockwood Swendeman Valve Manufacturing Company of Scarborough, Maine; G & G Machine Technologies of Seabrook, New Hampshire; and New England Castings of Hiram, Maine.

Weigel, who formerly served as engineering manager of Lanco Assembly Systems in Westbrook and as a manager at Bath Iron Works, also is the current chief operating officer at Rockwood Swendeman, a position he will retain.

Weigel has 13 years of experience in engineering, management and manufacturing. He earned a master's in business administration in 1994 from Northeastern University in Boston and is a 1984 graduate of the University of Vermont in Burlington. In 1986, he did post-graduate study with the General Electric Advanced Course in Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

A resident of Yarmouth, Weigel is a member of the Yarmouth Community Services Committee. Originally from Wilton, Maine, he is a 1980 graduate of Mt. Blue High School.

In his new role, Weigel will have overall responsibility for leading the profitable operation and expansion of all manufacturing businesses owned by the Nelson & Small Groupand assuring effective integration of each company's management. Weigel also serves as chief executive officer of both G&G Machine Technologies and New England Castings.

"We named Bill Weigel head of the management team to vest sharply focused overall executive responsibility for these manufacturing activities in one person who is the essence of engineering, marketing and team building excellence," said Kenneth M. Nelson, president of Nelson & Small.

"By placing with Bill the broad, overall responsibility for the manufacturers as a unit, the other talented leaders will have more time to concentrate their efforts on important, specific initiatives. For example, G&G Company founder and president, Gregory Chorebanian, a salesman without peer, will now have time to focus all his energy on the vital sales job of building the G&G sales base in volume and diversity so that G&G can flourish less dependent on a couple of dominant customers," added Nelson. "Chief Operating Officer Brian Deveaux, a Bowdoin College graduate and also a BIW "alumnus" with Weigel, can devote all his energy to continuously enhancing the administrative operations at G&G."

At New England Castings, President John Hildebran can focus his attention on expanding and building the company's investment castings production capacity, Nelson said.

"One of Bill Weigel's jobs will to be to work with John Hildebran at Castings to leverage G&G's growing platform of precision machining customers to take advantage of the opportunity to combine Casting's low-cost, high-value investment castings technology with G&G's spectacular machining know-how, in products where that combination is beneficial to G&G customers," added Nelson. "For many, many customers, this will mean having one manufacturer doing the whole coordinated manufacturing job - designing, machining and casting. This combination of technologies can be a great cost saver and quality assurer."

Rockwood is a brand name producer of its own high-value, low-cost cryogenic pressure relief valves. Weigel's chief responsibilities there will continue. He will be supervising the development of all new Rockwood products in close collaboration with Rockwood's very technical customer base; engineering continuous quality improvement into existing Rockwood valves; and shepherding certifications for all Rockwood valve products world-wide. He recently directed the modernization of the Rockwood Scarborough factory into an American Society of Mechanical Engineers approved computer controlled production site.

Weigel, who has considerable "hands on" computer manufacturing know-how, is currently expanding Rockwood's supervisory manufacturing personnel. Rockwood's partner Peter Anania continues to head up Rockwood's national and international sales and financial oversight efforts. Anania hired Richard J. McNamara, a full-time sales person at Rockwood with global customer development responsibility. He will eventually be trained to sell on behalf of all of the businesses while on foreign travel, providing there are no conflicting relationships.

"Bill Weigel is a rare combination of inventive engineer, business organization leader and colleague with an ear finely attuned to hearing customer opportunities. Since nearly all of the customers of our G&G, Castings and Valve businesses have specialized and substantial engineering needs, and since our primary job as their manufacturer is to meet and exceed those needs, we know that Bill Weigel is an excellent person to lead Greg, Brian, John and the others in our wonderfully talented management group," Nelson said. "He speaks both the customer's language and his colleagues' language. And with individual leaders such as Greg, Brian, John and Peter Anania, we know that the customer's needs for true value and excellence will always come first."

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