Becky Robbins introduced our speaker Lee Gilmore, General Manager for Electrovaya here in the Greater Jamestown Area.
Lee is a lifelong Chautauqua County resident, married with three adult children, and an active community member. He spent 20 years coaching high school wrestling, football, and girls’ soccer at Chautauqua Lake. He is currently the General Manager at Electrovaya Jamestown, located in the former Acurite building. Before Electrovaya, Lee spent 5 years working for an Aerospace company in Lake City, PA. Before those 7 years, he worked for MD electronics, which was located in the same building where Electrovaya sits today.
For the past 20+ years, Lee has had the opportunity to learn firsthand what it takes to run and manage a successful business, team, and department. He has led quality and production departments ranging from 5-person teams to 300. In his career, he has audited more than 50 companies and applied his experience to help improve them.
Lee is a certified IATF16949/ISO 9001 Lead Auditor, VDA licensed Auditor, and Product Safety Representative. He also holds a certification in Lead Manufacturing from the University of Buffalo.
Lee helped to successfully set up and organize new facilities in Leon Mexico and twice in Jamestown. He served as the project coordinator for implementing the quality management system, which was successfully certified to ISO/TS 16949. Lee has and continues to build strong relationships with companies located across North America and Europe.
Lee provided an update on the project from the purchase of the Acurite building. He has been working on the project for two years. MD Electronics moved their operation to Mexico. Electrovaya is located in the Toronto Canada area. They mainly do R&D in that area. Jamestown was chosen because there is plenty of space for manufacturing. He gave a brief overview of Electrovaya’s history and it’s evolving products within the ion lithium battery space.
Their battery’s separator is what differentiate Electrovaya battery from the competition. The full ceramic case does not breakdown like others. Their battery can do at least 14,000 starts before. They concentrate on machines that material movement such as forklifts, etc. They are safer than other lithium batteries and don’t have any battery explosion.
The plant is being prepared for 6 tractor trailers worth of equipment. These will allow the production of dry rooms needed to produce their batteries. Once the facility is available the plan is to start one shift with 100 new hires, eventually moving to 3 shifts with the 300 employees. They plan on expanding their footprint in the Jamestown so they can warehouse materials onsite. They anticipate production to ramp up in about one year.
Jamestown is centrally located to Toronto, Greene NY (a major customer), and Columbus, Indiana (another major customer).
Lee invited anyone who wants to tour the building to reach out to him (maybe we could make it an offsite meeting like we did with New Flyer).
