Tempel’s Director of Engineering, Gary Latkow, has earned the CWIEME Global Award for Outstanding Contribution – A Lifelong Commitment to Industry at CWIEME Berlin 2018. The award recognizes an exceptional individual who has demonstrated excellence in technical design skills, problem solving and project delivery.

The winner must also have a passion for the industry and have contributed to the wider electrical engineering community in a variety of ways such as through increasing product sales, cost reductions, efficient design, quicker routes to market, improved brand awareness, opening new routes to market and/or re-positioning their company as electrical design market leader. The winner may also have used innovative material applications to improve product efficiency and have a proven ability to find solutions and take design engineering to the next level.

For 41 years Gary Latkow has demonstrated a long-term commitment to the electrical industries by engineering innovative tooling processes to elevate the industry’s tool and die capabilities, better serve customers, reduce costs and shorten project lead times. During his career at Tempel, Gary has engaged nearly 700 new tools for lamination Stampings, which have yielded approximately $10 million in production value. Gary has modernized the industry’s data collection and data mining process for managing customer tooling records by creating a Global Electronic System that collects and records tool maintenance activity. He revolutionized the grain-oriented stacking process by eliminating the costly step of laser welding during production. Gary designed Helical Wound strip and coin dies to enable Tempel’s first mass production of the Automotive Helical Wound Alternator and created a United States Patent for the high volume, cost-effective manufacture of a pencil-type ignition core.

Furthermore, Gary has introduced future generations to the industry by volunteering his time at numerous high school and college career job fairs along with mentoring industry newcomers. Among the key highlights of Gary’s contribution to the industry:

• Modernized the industry’s data collection and data mining process for managing customer tooling records by creating a Global Electronic System. The system provides instant accessibility to customer tool history and saves approximately 40 working hours per year and assists with quality as data is no longer hand written on note cards and filed away without cross verification.
• Revolutionized the grain-oriented stacking process by eliminating the need for laser welding during production. Through the creation of an innovative tool and die process he engineered in 1990, Gary enabled Tempel to be one of the first companies in the world to speed the grain-oriented stacking process, which reduced project lead time by three days and saved customers an average of $50,000-300,000 per project.
• Developed specific Helical Wound strip and coin die designs that enabled Tempel’s first mass production of the Automotive Helical Wound Alternator Stator. This increased production lead times and product availability while reducing design scrap for alternator stator production by 92 percent.
• Created a United States Patent Number 6,092,278 for inventing a method for manufacturing a pencil-shaped core. The invention allows for the high volume, cost-effective manufacture of a pencil-type ignition core.