He knows the secret to manufacturing profitably in America

President Donald Trump, as everyone knows by now, wants to make America great again by bringing back manufacturing work. Visit the factory floor of a sparsely populated shop like Aimtron and you'll see a force that may stop that from ever happening: automation.

Started with three employees and an investment of $250,000 in the throes of the Great Recession in 2009 by Indian immigrant Mukesh Vasani, Aimtron produces printed circuit boards, which make their way into General Dynamics F-16 Falcon fighter jets as well as cancer-treating lasers in hospitals and slot machines in casinos.

On the main floor of Aimtron's 47,000-square-foot plant in Palatine are what look like long pizza ovens. Bare boards go in one end and conveyors glide them through super-heated chambers that melt, solder and place circuits automatically into pre-drilled positions. A $1 million machine line, made in South Korea, can pick and place 42,000 parts by each machine onto boards per hour with amazing accuracy—to within 25 microns. (A human hair is 50 to 100 microns in diameter.)

The machine is often tended by two technicians, who do little more than stare into computer screens confirming the accuracy of the work. There are no tools or paperwork anywhere; the machines even oil their moving parts themselves. Altogether, the factory employs just 100 people. "Today in a facility like ours, two people do the work that took 20 people two decades ago," says Vasani, Aimtron's CEO. "The Chinese can't do it much more cheaply than we can."

Aimtron is profitable on sales that hit a record $16 million last year and could top $24 million this year. Vasani says he has no immediate plans to increase headcount.

Printed circuit board makers once were ubiquitous in suburbs around O'Hare International Airport, with work forces that etched the boards by hand. But they were undercut by low-wage factories in Mexico and China in the 1980s and 1990s. Now, thanks to ever-more productive computerized machines, some of the work—if not the jobs—is returning.

Vasani, 51, got a civil engineering degree in India and owned a construction business there before emigrating 22 years ago to work in a variety of high-technology settings, including a short tour of duty at Aimtron rival SigmaTron International, one of the last remaining printed circuit board makers of note left in Elk Grove Village.

While large-volume manufacturers in Asia still are lower-cost than Aimtron, U.S. companies intent on reducing inventories have other priorities that can tip in favor of an American supplier. Pentair in Minneapolis, for instance, produces motors that turn basement sump pumps on and off. Those motors are controlled by printed circuit boards from Aimtron. "When there is a lot of rain and our customers need new sump pumps in a week or two, sourcing locally to a supplier like Aimtron gives us an advantage," says Tejas Patel, senior global supply manager at Pentair. "We don't have the same flexibility getting PCBs from overseas."