First new Boeing Auburn building in 25 years

Boeing Auburn will set aside its first new building in nearly 25 years mainly to sharpening the skills of the 5,300 employees who work there.

On Dec. 1, Boeing officials broke ground on the 71,000-square-foot Workforce Readiness Center, which is to be the site’s center for making parts for Boeing Commercial Airplanes production.

Among the guests were Boeing members from all its business units and functions, unions, state elected officials and business and community partners.

“We are a facility that builds 15,000 parts a day, with 5,300 people,” said Jack Meehan, Boeing Auburn’s site leader. “We celebrate this wonderful commitment by our company to build this facility on behalf of those 5,300 people. We’re a site with unparalleled fabrication capability; there is really not much we can’t do at this facility. In addition to those wonderful parts we build every day, we provide services throughout the entire enterprise, tooling and cutting tools and paint and other great products and services.

“… At a time Boeing is watching its spending very carefully to improve our competitiveness, this investment is significant. Our employees, and the wider community in Auburn and across the South Puget Sound (area) should see this as both a recognition of the important, outstanding work we do here and a vote of confidence in our future,” Meehan said.

“We are embarking on our 50th year, and we are building the foundation for the next 50 years in Auburn,” said Jim Ockerman, vice president of manufacturing and safety for Boeing fabrication. “This Workforce Readiness Center is going to be the foundation of how we develop and train the greatest capability in aerospace manufacturing for the next 50 years.”

As a centerpiece of Boeing’s strategy, the multi-use building is to provide room for:

• Craft College, a Boeing program tooled to train employees supporting a range of sites company-wide.

• A robotics lab.

• Refresher and introductory classes for a program called Incident and Injury-Free, which fundamentally reshaping the site’s safety culture.

• Training for the Fabrication Production System (FPS), an overarching management system, supported by a culture of continuous improvement.

• Apprentice programs operated by a partnership between Boeing and the International Association of Machinists (IAM, which represents about 3,300 Auburn employees). The partnership is called IAM/Boeing Joint Programs, and its purpose will be to improve the health, safety and education of IAM- represented employees in the Puget Sound area and Portland.

The building will also be the new home for the site’s medical clinic and headquarters for IAM/Boeing Joint Programs in the South Puget Sound region.

That old clinic building will be torn down after it moves to make room for a second new building, to be called the Operations Readiness Center. The Operations Center will become the focal point for maintaining the Auburn site and a warehouse for critical spare parts. The two new buildings will replace a World War II-era structure that will be torn down after the new buildings open. Construction is scheduled to begin on the second building in 2018.

The entire project represents a significant investment by Boeing in Auburn and the South Puget Sound area.

A rendering of Boeing’s Workforce Readiness Center.