By Lydia Dishman
Contributing Writer

Carmen Geschke is sitting at the conference table in her office organizing a stack of papers. The president of ProTec Enterprises LLC looks up briefly as the volume of proceedings on the other side of the wall increases.

Laughter rings through the sound of industrial equipment as a group of her employees assemble hydraulic hoses for one of their automotive clients. “I have a great team,” Geschke says, smiling.

ProTec is a Tier 2 supplier, meaning they create parts to distribute to a larger business who in turn supplies an original equipment manufacturer, or OEM, such as BMW. With just 10 employees, ProTec certainly qualifies as a small business, but their services, which include logistics and equipment testing, are ISO certified, just like the big guys. And they are poised for growth.

Like many of the industrial suppliers sprinkled throughout the Upstate, Geschke is doing what she can to be proactive and meet the demand that is sure to come when BMW’s $750 million expansion is complete.

BMW’s second plant in Greer is expected to require 500 full-time jobs as their production increases, pushing their suppliers, too. The new facility will build the next generation X3 sports activity vehicle while production of the Z4 roadster, originally built in Greer, will move to Germany.

BMW draws from 194 suppliers in the United States, 52 of which are located in South Carolina. Do they expect the number to increase?

Doug Woodward, research director at the University of South Carolina’s Moore School of Business, estimated that one job could be added to the supplier network for every job created at BMW.

Creating alliances
What motivated Geschke to make the leap from accountant to owner of an industrial supply company was anticipating a need for minority- and woman-owned businesses, she says. She and her husband moved to South Carolina from that other automotive epicenter, Michigan, to found ProTec in 2004. Since then, they count Haweka-USA, Weiss Umwelttechnik Germany and CU-ICAR among their clients. They also worked on a 15-month project for BMW.

Right now, ProTec is working on building up the maintenance testing equipment side of its business, as well as forming an alliance with other small minority- and woman-owned businesses to provide clients such as BMW a complete range of products and services from logistics and janitorial to assembly and graphic design. Geschke explained that BMW is trying to promote diversity among its suppliers and is calling for 5% of that business to come from certified minority- and woman-owned businesses.

“BMW’s diversity managers have given us a lot of support and helped us look at strategies to increase our business,” she says.

Support for growth has come from other sources too, most notably from the Greer Development Corp. Geschke gives credit to Executive Director Reno Deaton who assisted in their relocation from Duncan to Greer’s Gateway International Business complex just down the road from BMW and by “showing us how we can take advantage of tax incentives as we grow.”

Deaton is optimistic about the area’s readiness for the expansion and Greer Development Corp.’s role in it. “We can provide so many opportunities for suppliers, from Tier 1 on down,” he says. “We have a number of sites available in close proximity to the plant, great infrastructure and a community that is willing to develop.”