Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:04 Welcome to the Clear Impact Podcast, brought to you by pg t I University. Thanks for joining us today. My name is Sherry Connor and I am your host. Good afternoon. We are here on the Clear Impact Podcast and we are in a series called Executive Updates. And today I am sitting with Eric Kolowski. Did I say that right?
Speaker 2 00:00:29 You said that right.
Speaker 1 00:00:30 Kolowski and Eric, I don't even exactly know what your title is. So why don't you do some introductions, tell us your title, a little bit of your background and your current role and responsibilities here.
Speaker 2 00:00:41 Okay. I'm been with PG T I for about a year and a half now. I am our president of our Florida operations, so I'm responsible for effectively our southeast segment and all the operations that go along with that. My background, I've been in manufacturing now for Wow, 30 years. Spanned everything from pharmaceuticals, defense contracting, but really the last 15, 17 years or so, I've been in the building product space. And previous to this I've been in everything from insulation, siding, windows, indoors and pipe and fittings. And so a number of different applications. Had the opportunity. We've lived all over the world with this, so we've spent time in Europe. We've spent some time living in Hong Kong, but now we're back here in the States. We're back here in Florida.
Speaker 1 00:01:31 Nice. What's your favorite spot in Europe?
Speaker 2 00:01:33 Probably Barcelona or Munich would be two of my favorite cities or uh, OV Poland.
Speaker 1 00:01:38 None of those are on my radar, so <laugh>, <laugh>, I'll have to check back next time. So you're responsible for all the Florida operations, so that's from the manufacturing standpoint, so making sure that everything's humming along and getting built the way it's supposed to be, right,
Speaker 2 00:01:52 Yeah, basically our job is, once the order's placed, is to make sure that the customer gets the right product at the right time in the right place. And it's a quality product that they can use.
Speaker 1 00:02:05 Sounds simple enough. <laugh>
Speaker 2 00:02:07 Usually sounds, simple's. The execution side, they can be tough.
Speaker 1 00:02:10 Exactly. So one of the things I get to do as part of my role is I get to do plant tours and so specifically around P G T, I know that there are just a ton of things happening and you've really had a large part in improving some of those things. And so can you tell us a little bit about what's happening in that regard as far as the manufacturing processes?
Speaker 2 00:02:32 Absolutely. We've spent a lot of time, um, especially here at our Venice facility, really focusing on service and quality and from a manufacturing standpoint, getting back to what I consider the basics, blocking and tackling service is really around, we spend a lot of time both improving our planning of the plant, really stabilizing our production, ensuring that we have repeatable operations every single day. You know, coming out of covid there was all kinds of disruption. It was a learning opportunity for us as an organization and then us specifically as a manufacturing group, one of the other things we looked at to stabilize production is we had to stabilize our supply chain, which was really around de-risking in some cases insourcing more product, but it was about doing what we could to control our own destiny by improving our position with both raw materials and just with a lot of our components that we utilize.
Speaker 2 00:03:28 And then the other area that we're really focused on is really the quality system. We hired a new director of quality for the overall organization, a gentleman named Chris T, who's been here now probably, oh, about six, seven months. His focus is really bringing the quality systems in place. In other words, we had a great team and we still do, the team is really focused on producing quality product, but it wasn't as systemic in its approach. So it was all about building the processes that no matter who we have, you know, when we went through Covid, all of a sudden we had so many new employees, employees leaving, coming and going. It made it more difficult with tribal knowledge to produce to that level. So it's really been focused on, you know, how do we get the systems and processes in place that we produce the exact same quality level, quality window every single time. You know, when you look at that plant, we're producing almost 4,000 different windows and doors every day. So it's just a lot of chance, a lot of opportunity for failure in that process. So it's how do we basically design that out of the system?
Speaker 1 00:04:27 Well, one of the things that I get to brag about is that everyone is responsible for quality. And so at any point on the line, if someone sees something that's not quite right, they have permission to stop the line and evaluate and bring over leadership and say, Hey, I don't think this is right. I don't know what's happening. And then they can isolate it and try to solve it instead of just passing it along and pretending you didn't see it or ignoring it. And so I love that everyone has an ownership on that. That's about as much as I know about the quality <laugh> <laugh>.
Speaker 2 00:05:01 Well, and that was a big part of it, you know, our employees, they are first and last opportunity on quality. You know, they are the cornerstone that make us who we are today and really their commitment to quality. And we've seen an improved commitment to quality over the last several months. You know, just getting back to who we've always been in the past.
Speaker 1 00:05:23 Yeah, it's hard when you have a major disruption like Covid. I mean that's when I started, I came in and it was just whackadoo around here and lead times were crazy and people couldn't get parts and we couldn't get glass and we couldn't get inner layer and there was just, it was nuts. So I'm glad that that's streamlined a little bit. Things are returning back to the PPG T that everybody knows and loves, but outside of just P G T, as part of the training team, we've been hearing a lot about the theory of constraints and so what is this and how does it affect our operations?
Speaker 2 00:05:56 So there's a couple things we're working on in operations and again as we call it, getting back to the basics. One of them is the theory of constraints. So the theory's been around a manufacturing, theory's been around for God over 50 years now. It was originally published in a book by um, a gentleman named em Gold. He wrote the goal. You can also hit movie on that. But it really, the basics goes back to when you think about the old statement, the old adage, you know, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Well the theory constraints puts a little twist on that. A manufacturing twist on that, which is manufacturing process is only as fast as a slowest link. In other words, yes, if you have 10 machines that are needed to produce a single window, there's always going to be one of those 10 machines that are going just a little slower than the others.
Speaker 2 00:06:47 So your line can only go as fast as the slowest machine, uh, available. Even when you just take a step back and you look at the whole plant, you know, when you take the Venice facility, we have 17 lines available, there's gonna be one of those lines that runs slower than all the others or is more over capacity in others. We've sold more than we can make in that particular area that will slow down the entire plant. So it's really a focus, it's a hyper-focus of the manufacturing team to just go fix that one problem, whatever that one problem is. And really as you walk through it, it's all about you identify what the constraint is, is really your first step. The second step about is call. You know, it's really around exploiting that constraint, which just means is there a quick fix? Is there something I can do without spending a ton of money or time to solve it or at least improve it some.
Speaker 2 00:07:37 Then you normally step back and officially I think they call it subordinate review, but effectively all that means is you take a look and you say, okay, if I scheduled everything to make sure that constraint has, we've done everything we can to schedule out that constraint. So we always have material available for that line. We always have people available. If we're short that line, that particular line's never short, then we've done things to make sure that happens. If all of that, it's still our constraint. We look at elevating it. You know, when we take a look at elevation, that means basically we have to elevate it up to a higher level. This is where we start spending money on it, capital expense, ordering equipment if need be. And then real you go back through and you repeat this evaluation for the entire plant. So this is an ongoing process cuz as soon as you fix that and that one line is no longer the constraint, you then move on to the next line, whatever the next slowest line was, that's now my constraint. So it's just a conson, it's almost like continuous improvement. It ties in with lean manufacturing there in the continuous improvement and we've actually rolled those two out together. Theory of constraints and continuous and lean manufacturing here at the plant.
Speaker 1 00:08:40 Yeah, well what is that AUMs Razor, you know that the simplest solution is the best solution.
Speaker 2 00:08:45 Yes. And that's a big part of getting back to the basics and manufacturing. We don't need to overcomplicate it. It's already a complicated process. You don't have to add more complication to it.
Speaker 1 00:08:54 <laugh> it. So is it, so is I was completely overwhelmed when I first came in and being part of the training team, it was really, really to our advantage because I was able to identify it with people who were new to the space and provide some base level intro courses. You know, like I can't, we can't teach people about a 5,500 if they don't even know what vinyl is or what impact glass is or you know, what a, a constant force balance is. So it was a really an interesting thing to come in with fresh eyes.
Speaker 2 00:09:22 No, I will say when you look at that plant, you take Venice, we, you know, I mentioned we make 4,000 windows in doors a day. You know, the average window has 30 to 40 pieces to it. That means we've got to make sure and everything we make is custom here. So this isn't just, we don't make a thousand of these, a thousand of that. Every single thing we manufacturer is meant for one specific hole somewhere in Florida and somebody's house. So when you think about it, you have 4,000 things you're making a day. It means we're upwards in the neighborhood of 150,000 pieces. Parts have to show up at the exact right time every single day on every single line to manufacture the window and get it out the door. Just that level of complexity, everything you can do to simplify that level of complexity just makes you that much stronger and that much better.
Speaker 1 00:10:07 Be sure to tune in for upcoming episodes to help you understand the fest station industry, what you need to know when buying windows and doors and other related topics. You can find out more about us at pg t i university.com. You can also find us on Facebook and LinkedIn.
Speaker 1 00:10:25 Sir, when I see the glass carts lining up to marry into the frames, I'm like, how do they know which one goes with which one? Like it's all just a seamless process. It all has to line up. Exactly. So I'm impressed that anything gets built. <laugh>, <laugh>, like how do we do that? So I'm grateful for a lot of smart people that work here that figure all that out and I don't have to. So am I. Yeah, <laugh> good teams are the secret, right? So as I mentioned, one of the things I get to do is we walk the mezzanine and literally three weeks ago I was doing one group and they had a tour in the morning and another tour in the afternoon. It was too large of a group to do all in one shot and one of the biggy C N C machines literally was moved from one spot to the next between the two tours. And I was like, okay <laugh>, I dunno, how am I supposed to keep up with what's happening around here? So I know you had thrown out a number in one of our meetings around percentages of being reinvested back into the company and it was something like double what normal manufacturers do. I don't remember what those numbers are, but I know.
Speaker 2 00:11:30 Yeah, so we reinvest as a company, you know, we like to invest in ourselves. We think one of the best investments out there is us. So one of the ways we do that is through our capital expenditures right now as an organization we are really running right in that three to almost sometimes up to 4% of revenue we invest back into the business, which is quite a bit more than most organizations do. You know, a couple of our big projects right now you mentioned, you know, things are moving around and uh, we've really got a few things that we're working on. One of them is our vinyl capacity. You know, vinyl is become more prevalent here in Florida, um, especially say north of Orlando than five 10 years ago. So part of it is making sure that we keep up with the demand is make sure that as an operational team, that we have enough capacity available for our sales team.
Speaker 2 00:12:23 So we had approval, um, gosh probably about six, eight months ago we started this project. You know, the board approved 22 million to go invest into our Venice facility and we're in the process of spending that 22 million to put all of that is in vinyl equipment with the goal at the end of it is that we've doubled our capacity in vinyl so we can continue to drive that our um, lead time's down and continue as we add a lot of automation around that continue to drive the quality and the service side of that also. But to fit 22 million worth of equipment into that facility, it's really taking a lot of, we're relaying out a lot of the lines In some cases we're reorganizing what's between this plant and Fort Myers. So there's just a lot of work going on in the background and all of this has to happen at the same time that we don't have any disruption to our current customer base or to any of the flow of material, whether that's vinyl or aluminum. So it's been a lot of coordination and you know, Dave McCutchin and the team and uh, our engineering groups have really been focused with our operational teams on how to make sure that happens and go seamlessly. But it looks great. I mean we have a 22 million investment in vinyl just to make sure that we're ahead of the market and where we need to be and we can support sales and the way they need. Right.
Speaker 1 00:13:42 Well and as we expand north, obviously that's a bigger vinyl territory and so we wanna continue being able to meet those needs as we continue to reach and grow. I think it's just cool that we have robotic things happening. Do I get to brag about how just the G e D machines on the vinyl window side, that was a $5 million investment maybe a little over a year ago, but it took us a year to get 'em in. Like it took forever <laugh> to get those pieces of equipment. Well
Speaker 2 00:14:09 That is a big thing. I will tell you with, you know, since Covid kind of disrupted the world and I think we're still on the tail end of that, you don't see labor coming back as fast as some of the other areas. Lead times on equipment went from you know, where you could in the past buy a piece of equipment sometimes say two to six month lead time on it. That's now 12 to 18 months. So you're always trying to make, you know, part of the operational team is trying to look out in that future and say, not what do we need today, but what do we think we're gonna need two years from now because I'm two years behind if I wait for sales to catch up. So that's been a big part of it is trying to get that crystal ball and, and make those decisions really as a group on what we're gonna do and what is this gonna look like and what do we want a company to look like as we go
Speaker 1 00:14:50 Forward. Well one of the best things I think about that in having automation in that space is this is as it was explained to me is that not only did those robotic cleaners on the thermal welds for the vinyl windows, those corners, not only did that robotic equipment help improve our lead times and improve our capacity, but it repurposed 24 jobs that were highly repetitive and potentially dangerous of having to manually scrape off those excess welds. And so I'm a big fan of people and I'm happy that they have a better job and it's not as dangerous and repetitive. And so with the new lines that are coming in, will we see more of that same kind of thing?
Speaker 2 00:15:33 Definitely. And actually we have the one line that we're putting in for our sliding glass door is going to have the first silicone application that is fully automated. So that will allow us to actually, that's basically, we'll call it the glue to hold the glass in the frame and to keep the water from penetrating. But we're working on the first design of that so that all of that's done automatically and that helps us both to reduce cleaning after the fact so it improves quality, improves our use of the silicone and then will eliminate a very tedious job that happens again and again. It helps us to make a much safer and a much more consistent plant. And right now with the level of work that we have, we're not expecting displacing any of our people outside of the company. It's allowing us just to better utilize the people that we have Right.
Speaker 1 00:16:21 And give them a better job. That
Speaker 2 00:16:22 Is the goal. Give them opportunities that are more on the technical side than less on the manuals we move forward.
Speaker 1 00:16:29 Yeah cuz nobody wants to do manual labor anymore.
Speaker 2 00:16:31 No, it is, it's hard to find <laugh>. It is hard to find people that want to do manual labor, you know? Yeah, yeah. I think we've all been, even looking at my kids, you know, they're all brought up with doing everything on their phone or on a computer sitting at a desk. Manual labor has kind of gone out the window I think for a lot of people.
Speaker 1 00:16:48 Although sometimes it is good just to get up and go get sweaty and do something and see the result of it. But 40 hours a week, 50 hours a week, not so much.
Speaker 2 00:16:55 No, I still, I like getting down on the floor. I still do it regularly. I mean it was one of the first things I did when I got here, you know, trying to understand the business, trying to understand opportunities for improvement, was thrown on a t-shirt, thrown on my work boots and just go down on the floor, you know, almost can't remember the show but where they didn't know who the boss was.
Speaker 1 00:17:14 Mm. Undercover boss.
Speaker 2 00:17:15 Undercover boss. I was able to go down there my first month cuz no one knew who I was. Right. So I just showed up and started working in the warehouse, actually helped ship with some of the people and uh, learned a lot from that. Really enjoyed and it was great getting back to those and just, you can learn so much more doing that than you ever could sitting in an office or in a meeting. So
Speaker 1 00:17:34 Here's a question that's not on script, but it reminded me of something that I had a conversation with Christie about this. I wanted to talk a little bit about the R F I D system because that's new to our customers, right? It's new to us.
Speaker 2 00:17:47 Well it's definitely new to us and it's new to really our customers and then it's not widely used in the building product space, but it is widely used in other areas. So R ffi D Base is a radio frequency tag that you put on each one of your pieces of equipment or in this case and each window that we manufacture. And each tag is kinda like a license plate. It's very unique to that very specific window. We then have readers that are able to sense or it's able to read that tag from a distance so your reader, depending on which one it is up to 30 feet can read that tag and know exactly what it is. What that allows us to do is we can quickly identify exactly where every single window is in our entire warehouse. And then we've actually set up now R F I D sensors called Halos at each truck dock.
Speaker 2 00:18:40 So as we're loading a truck, it identifies we don't have to scan every single piece of parts, windows, et cetera, that are going on the truck cuz the system automatically does that for us. So just walking through the halo, it can count if you have 20 windows on a cart just by driving it through that halo, it automatically counts all 20 windows. So it allows us to find the window that much faster in the warehouse. So we don't have any more lost in warehouse type issues. It also means that we're able to tell exactly what's on every single truck. So we're having a lot less errors when it comes to we missed chipped. Either we put something on the wrong truck, it'll actually alarm and tell us, hey, that's going on the wrong truck, that window should go on a different one. So it prevents that and then it allows us to actually check every single window in so we know that we're getting every single window on that truck and we didn't forget to leave a cart, you know, a cart somewhere or something didn't get picked properly.
Speaker 1 00:19:35 Yeah. Is it true that sirens go off?
Speaker 2 00:19:37 Sirens go off when you take the wrong thing through the halos. Okay. Lights and noise happens. Okay. So, you know, uh oh I screwed up. And you have to stop and look to see
Speaker 1 00:19:46 And everyone turns to see <laugh>. Yes. Nice. I think that kind of covers most of the questions. Is there anything else of significance that our dealers would benefit from hearing?
Speaker 2 00:19:56 You know, the only other thing I would talk about is we were talking on the capital expenditures. You know, one area that we've been focused on in controlling our own destiny and from a supply chain standpoint is the insourcing of glass. And that's just to make sure again, that we are in control as much as we potentially can, possibly can be. But right now we have actually two projects going and total expenditures, you know, north of 15 million both for our glass plant down in Miami, our echo glass plant, and then our glass plant up here at P G T where we're looking to add cutters, add seamers, we're adding new TPSs IG equipment. So we've got a lot of new equipment going on, not only in AP one where we're doubling vinyl, but at the same time we are looking to grow our capacity and our glass plants by good 20 to 30%. It allows us to support the future growth and still manage to keep that in-house and still manage to manufacture that glass ourselves.
Speaker 1 00:20:53 Yeah, I know it's under construction over there, so it's never a dull moment. It's an amazing place to sit and watch, like just how much growth is already happening. I've been here just over two years. You've been here just under two years and acquisitions every time we turn around and expansions and new equipment and
Speaker 2 00:21:10 Oh, the evolution of this organization is tremendous. I can't believe I haven't worked for an organization that has really moved this fast. It's impressive to see and it's, it's a great to be part of that. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:21:19 Well I'm grateful that you're here. I think that things have turned around sometimes it takes, you know, a fresh set of eyes and fresh energy and all right, I'm seeing what I'm seeing and we can fix this and let's repair this and let's tighten this up. And I liked what you said about getting back to basics. Even the best athletes have coaches and go through drills and go through practice. So we shouldn't be exempt from that either to get back to the core of what makes us who we are and to do those basic functions. Show up, pay attention, care about what you're doing, reap the benefits at the end.
Speaker 2 00:21:52 No, and that has been, that's been our biggest mantra is just get back to the basics. Do the things that make us successful and do them really well. All right.
Speaker 1 00:21:59 Well Eric, I am so thankful for our time today. Uh, I appreciate you sharing with us a little bit of this insight from your perspective. And, uh, look forward to another episode later on maybe.
Speaker 2 00:22:09 Great. Thank you.
Speaker 1 00:22:10 All right, take care. PG t i University is the customer education team for an entire family of brands. We began with the original Ezb Breeze, porch and closure line, then became P G t America's leading brand of impact resistant windows and doors. We then added cgi, CGI I c Window, Western Windows Systems, new South Windows, echo windows, and doors and land, windows and doors, and our latest acquisition Martin Garage doors. We create products built to withstand major storms, keeping people safe, secure, and prepared. Our exceptional brands give you the protection you need without compromising design or functionality. PPG t i University is here to educate you, our listener, so that you can be a more informed consumer of window and door products.
