3M Plant in Camarillo to Retool for Data Storage Advance
Major upgrades in products and equipment will be made within the next year at 3M Co.’s Camarillo plant, according to the facility’s newly named manager.
The official, Charles (Chuck) Byrne, said 3M Camarillo will spearhead the worldwide introduction of a new generation of 3M’s quarter-inch data cartridges. The new products are designed to offer important improvements in both storage capacity and operating speed of computers made by Hewlett-Packard, IBM and other longstanding 3M customers.
Byrne said computers using the cartridges will be able to process hundreds of millions more bytes, or units, of information, than those using earlier cartridges.
“The market has great potential,” he said. “For instance, only 15% of personal computers being used today are equipped with quarter-inch cartridges. There’s a possibility of a dramatic increase in demand for the capacity and speed these cartridges can provide.”
Byrne is returning to 3M Camarillo after a 14-month stint at the parent company’s headquarters in St. Paul, Minn. He worked at the Camarillo plant as a business development manager from 1985 to June, 1993. He replaces former plant manager Kevin Rubey, who has been transferred to a 3M unit in White City, Ore.
The Camarillo facility, which opened in 1964, is 3M’s largest manufacturing plant in California. It is also the biggest unit in the parent company’s Data Storage Tape Technology Division.
As part of the Ventura County upgrade, 3M will make significant capital investments in the plant on Lewis Road, but it’s too early to say whether new jobs will be added, Byrne said.
With a current payroll of more than 600, the plant is already one of Camarillo’s largest employers.
“Computer technology is changing so rapidly that it’s hard to say what will happen months from now,” Byrne noted. “But if these products do as well as we expect, there’s a good chance we’ll need more people.”
The hiring outlook is complicated by a fading market for computer tapes, which have been a major product of 3M Camarillo for years. Byrne said some workers may be retrained and moved from tape to cartridge production.
