It’s been more than 10 years since Bend’s skyline was dominated by smokestacks that belched actual smoke.

But old-line manufacturing jobs – making windows, building cabinets, assembling airplanes – still account for more than 8,500 jobs in the Central Oregon economy. Most of the businesses that supply those jobs face increasing competition from world and regional markets, though.

So, in order to thrive well into the new century, they may have to transform themselves into the kinds of manufacturing operations their grandfathers would not recognize, a Portland consultant told a group of local managers Monday.

A handful of Central Oregon’s oldest and youngest companies sent their managers to a seminar at Central Oregon Community College’s Redmond campus to teach them how to build their products faster, cheaper and better, with less stress on themselves, their customers and their workers.

”Lean Manufacturing 101” was designed to inject concepts that started in the automotive and computer industries into the smaller manufacturing businesses that dominate Central Oregon’s manufacturing fields, said Charlie Martin, a Portland-based consultant for the Oregon Manufacturing Extension Partnership.

The seminar was the kickoff event in Economic Development for Central Oregon’s annual Industry Week, a series of events designed to help and highlight the region’s existing and future industries.

The week ends Friday with a daylong venture capital conference devoted to boosting the region’s newest businesses.

Monday, though, belonged to businesses that have been here, in some cases, for decades.

Some, like Dan Young, the general manager for international window builder Jeld-Wen’s local operations, came looking for ways to improve on processes his company has already started.

Others, like Brian’s Cabinets department supervisor Dan Craig, came looking for common-sense ideas to take back to his company’s manufacturing floor.

In the long term, the stakes are high for most manufacturers and, ultimately, for the local economy, said Bill Fischer, the Oregon Extension Partnership’s Central Oregon manufacturing consultant.

”It’s a world market,” Fischer said. ”If you’re going to pay your workers $15 an hour and you’re going to compete with people who pay $15 a week, you’ve got to be a lot more efficient in what you are doing. You have got to eliminate waste.”

Eliminating waste means improving management, not jettisoning employees and cutting back on paperclips.

Studies show that 95 percent of the activity in most businesses is wasted on ”nonvalue-added” time – people working inefficiently, Martin said. Lean-manufacturing concepts are designed to fix the systems that essentially force people to waste time.

Designing an ideal system takes time and experimentation, and depends on the shape of the individual business, its market and its size, Martin noted, but the basic tools are fairly universal, and can be powerful.

To drive home the point, Martin organized his seminar’s 25 attendees into a make-believe production line, building airplanes out of Lego blocks.

In the morning, he stitched them into a classic assembly line, with parts stored in a central ”warehouse” far from the workers’ hands. Their tasks were divided unevenly among a series of work groups.

While Martin barked orders to speed up, work quickly bogged down at the slowest station. Hands at other stations turned idle while the line backed up. Workers at every station pleaded with harried warehouse workers to hustle parts to their site.

The results after 15 confused minutes – 30 little plastic planes, with 18 more rejected by quality control.

Later in the morning, Martin built a new, smaller line with parts stored at the stations that needed them. The work flow came through in small pulses. The result: 65 planes in the same 15 minutes and only four rejected for quality.

After another hour of lectures, he introduced a final tool – a simple, but orderly, just-in-time manufacturing system designed to draw work through the system only in response to sales. The result, after a sedate 15 minutes on the factory floor: 120 airplanes, with only two quality rejects.

Translated into real-world terms, by Martin’s figuring, the improved productivity transformed an airplane that would have cost, say, $5 million to build with a 4 1/2-month lead time into a $1.1-million plane that could be built in two weeks.

Among the benefits: Faster manufacturing equals the ability to carry lower inventories throughout the process. Better management results in a less-frustrated work force that also is more sustainable.

The Oregon Manufacturing Extension Partnership is the state’s version of a national program that gets about two-thirds of its budget from federal and state funds and another third from the businesses who contract with its consultants to help improve their processes. The concepts involved were primarily developed by manufacturers, but can be adapted to build efficiencies into back-office operations as well.

Jeld-Wen has worked with the partnership before, but working the kinks out of the production process is an ongoing project, Young said.

”You change one thing, and something crops up somewhere else,” he said.

Still, Young said, the company views evolution as essential.

”It’s just like any sports team,” he said. ”If you’re going to compete for the Super Bowl, you’re going to have to change your offense and defense.”