Cory Rager Joins Compass Operating Company
Many Compass Precision employees find a lot of satisfaction in taking a bar of material and machining it into a useful part or component.
For Cory Rager, Compass’ newest operating company, Bergeron Machine, is sort of a bar of blank material. And his boss, Bergeron’s President Dave Giampa, says so, too.
“Bergeron is a great company filled with smart, hard-working people,” explained Dave. “But more than anything else, we want to take ourselves to the next level. That’s why we recruited someone like Cory who possesses excellent Swiss machining experience we don’t have and gives us another great Swiss CNC programming resource.”
“It’s amazing,” Cory said of Bergeron Machine. “Just the techniques we can really add. It makes the future bright. It really does.
“These guys are looking at the future and all the potential that they have.”
Bergeron Machine hired Cory as its new manufacturing engineer on June 10. He brings 17 years of Swiss machining experience to the operating company.
With that experience, Cory will first aim to help modernize the machining process at Bergeron.
“One of the major opportunities here is taking this place from the analogy age to the digital age. That’s really, almost the scope of what I see here,” Cory said. “A lot of stuff is done on cards and physical paper.
“But I’ve seen a lot of shops, and I believe that’s one of the reasons they really liked me when I interviewed. I’ve seen 4-5 very good shops that are in the area, and I’ve spent about four years at each one, and I really got to see how they were doing things.
“Every time I went to another place, I’ve taken all of those little pieces of each one. That’s what I want to bring here, all while trying to transform it into a more digital form.”
Most recently, Cory Rager spent about three years as a manufacturing engineer at Micromatics Machine.
Cory will draw on that experience and the rest of his career to help Bergeron get its machines running as efficiently as possible. Cory said after accomplishing that, he will then aim to help transition the company to the newest technology to make even more complicated and better parts.
His overall goal is to get Bergeron competing on a global scale. Cory sees the Compass operating company already possessing an advantage to reaching that level.
“Every other shop that I’ve been in usually runs away screaming from the types of materials that Bergeron runs. A lot of them will basically ‘no quote’ it,” Cory said. “So the fact that these guys are in that market, to me, is a very rare thing in this industry, and I think grabbing on to that, utilizing that, and really taking it to the next level is what excited me when I saw all the things around here.
“If we can get to very high efficient rates of our machining and the things that we do, we can really lock in the market with these types of parts around here. I think that’s definitely a huge advantage that Bergeron has, and I saw that right away.”
Cory’s day-to-day at Bergeron will include tasks he has previously done at other machine shops. But at Bergeron, he will also help with machine maintenance.
That’s rather ironic. Even though Cory has never really maintained machines previously, machine maintenance is what introduced him to the industry.
Cory’s father worked in machine maintenance at a machine shop. When Cory was a child, he would sometimes watch his father work.
Then at 16, as a summer job, Cory cleaned the machine shop where his dad worked. Cory began working in Swiss machining straight out of high school just a couple years later.
He will utilize his nearly two decades of machining experience to prove every day that Compass made the right choice in adding him to the team at Bergeron.
“What I’m really looking forward to is really showing Compass what they’ve gotten in their investment in me,” Cory said. “That to me is one of the real things that I want to demonstrate.”