Episode Transcript
[00:00:09] Speaker A: Welcome to the Clear Impact Podcast brought to you by PGTI University. Thanks for joining us today. My name is Sherry Connor and I am your host.
Good morning. We are here on the Clear Impact Podcast and we are in a series called windows and doors 301. And a large portion of our products involve glass. And so sitting with me today is the plant manager of our glass operation, Chris Triana. Welcome, Chris.
[00:00:42] Speaker B: Good morning. Thank you for having me.
[00:00:44] Speaker A: Yeah, glad to have you. Thanks for coming over. You took the scenic route, but, you know, you're here.
[00:00:49] Speaker B: I did. I made it eventually.
[00:00:51] Speaker A: So one of the things that I think is so fascinating is the glass operation that we have and just all the different facets that go on over there. And I have, you know, a few different people from your operation are coming in and have come in to talk about specifics. But I wanted to do like a broad overview of the glass facility and the operations there, especially since we're just on the cusp of our expansion.
[00:01:21] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:01:21] Speaker A: It was weird today when I walked by because there's normal been like tons of work trucks and concrete and electric and plumbing. There's been all these trucks like parked out in front of the building for months and there's like hardly anything now.
[00:01:38] Speaker B: Yeah, they're wrapping up. I think we are a week, maybe two weeks out.
[00:01:41] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:01:42] Speaker B: Most of the work left is on the inside in the office space. But yeah, there are a whole lot of folks dedicating a whole lot of time and effort to get us up and running. And it's a much needed space. Real estate is at a premium across this entire campus and probably even more so in the glass plant.
[00:01:59] Speaker A: Yeah. So before we get into too many of the details, because I am excited to hear about these, tell us a little bit about yourself.
[00:02:06] Speaker B: Well, my name is Chris Triana. I am the director of operations specifically for glass operations here in Venice. I've been with the company going on eight years now. I came out of the consulting industry after about 20 years and landed here in Venice and wouldn't trade it for anything in the world. You know, traded travel for being home and more stable. Nothing beats it. So, yeah, eight years here. Came in as an area leader was a position they called it. It was right under the plant manager at the time and spent about maybe four years there. Helped out at Windorn Orlando for a little bit in our assembly plant here in Venice. But for about the last three and a half years, been running the glass operations.
[00:02:46] Speaker A: Nice. Well, it's a fun space and I so appreciate your team and the cooperation that they have lent to us, you know, with the sales efforts of doing customer tours and such. And so give us just kind of an overview. What are the different operating segments within our glass plant?
[00:03:05] Speaker B: Yeah, so we do it all. We have four main departments. There's a cutting department. They do just what it sounds like they cut. So we get glass shipped to us daily, five, six truckloads a day. Huge sheets of glass that we have to cut down based on the product and orders. Then it can go to either our tempering department, which will temper or heat, strengthen the glass based on the orders and the customer desires. Then there's the lamination. What we're really known for, laminating department is that impact resistant process.
[00:03:36] Speaker A: Right.
[00:03:37] Speaker B: So that's key to our success over the years. And then we have an IG department, which is insulated glass. And that's where you put that laminated piece, marry it up with a cap we call cap. There's a little space in between and that gives you an IG unit. So those are our four key departments.
[00:03:52] Speaker A: Okay. And then I know just one thing that's kind of cool. And I don't think I have anybody coming in to talk about this, but when the glass is laminated, there's actually a clean room. And I got to go into it. And so you're actually like wearing surgical stuff.
And there's like sticky pads when you walk in that take all the lint off the bottom of your shoes and you gotta have your hair tied back and your beard covered and all that because they don't even want like the slightest piece of lint or hair coming in between those panes of glass when they're making that grilled cheese sandwich. Right?
[00:04:32] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. That process, it's very meticulous. The clean room is just that, it's a clean environment. It has to be. Based on what you just described, there cannot be any kind of debris or foreign material. You're putting two pieces of glass around a strip of vinyl, lots of surface for things to fall in. And so we have to be pretty careful not to let that happen. So, yeah, you know, ideally I'd love to hire a bunch of ex swimmers that are used to having no body hair whatsoever.
[00:04:57] Speaker A: Right.
[00:04:58] Speaker B: That would be great. But yeah, we take a lot of precautions. And they are robed up and they're wearing hair nets and beard nets if they need them. And the sticky pads you mentioned, we gotta get things off their clothing when they walk in. Yeah, there's a changing room. Yeah. It's vital any Foreign material in that product. After we've spent so much time and effort and money putting that piece together. Makes it scrap.
[00:05:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:05:20] Speaker B: And so a lot of cost impact if we didn't take the measures we take.
[00:05:24] Speaker A: Yeah. Alison helped me get suited up when I went through there with Francisco a few months ago. And I was like, I want these for my house. Can I get sticky pads for my sticky pads? This would be great. I'd never have to clean my floors again, you know? Anyway, so with the latest expansion, which we've already talked about, has been months in process, what are we looking at now in terms of square feet and head count and, like, operating hours? Like, has that changed? Like, I know, square footage and headcount. Maybe not.
[00:05:55] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, square footage. Square footage definitely definitely changed. Like I said, real estate is at a premium over there. We added, I believe, 25,000 square feet to the manufacturing floor and another 20,000 square feet in the office space. I'll tell you why both of those are important. On the manufacturing floor, we're trying to move away from what we call manual seaming. So this is all this expansion is really outside of our cutting department. We cut the glass, and then we do a process called seaming. And seaming really is sanding the edges of the glass. It takes that sharpness off. It makes it safer to work with throughout the rest of the process. It also gets rid of little microfissures that can lead to cracks and stress cracks and damage throughout the subsequent processes. But today, we can only seam 90 to 95% of our product because some pieces are just so big that it's actually dangerous to try to get them on a seaming table. This expansion is allowing us to put auto seamers in so our folks don't have to touch it. They cut it, they break it out, and they slide it onto these auto seamers. And these auto seamers are going in that added space.
[00:06:59] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:06:59] Speaker B: And so these auto seamers will do 100% of our product.
[00:07:02] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:07:03] Speaker B: So now, instead of 90 to 95%, we'll have it all seamed. Safer for everybody involved. And in terms of headcount, we will reduce a need for some of these manual seamers. We have probably across four shifts. I have maybe 20 folks that do that process. We do it in front of some of the other processes, like right before it goes into tempering or right before it goes into lamination. But even though I'll lose some of the need for that, I'll have to place those people on the back of the cutting process. And some of the other folks I will just allocate throughout the plant. We try to staff to run to capacity. Today we are probably 70 to 80 folks short of being able to do that.
[00:07:42] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:07:42] Speaker B: So we cover with a lot of overtime. And right now we're not having the demand from all of our other our plants as well as the one here in Venice to force us into capacity. So we're getting away with it. But I'll be able to allocate those other folks elsewhere.
[00:07:56] Speaker A: Right. So nobody's being laid off, Nobody is displaced.
[00:07:59] Speaker B: In fact, I still need the other 60 or so.
[00:08:02] Speaker A: Right.
[00:08:03] Speaker B: At some point because future plans for this plant is to run it to capacity.
[00:08:07] Speaker A: Right.
[00:08:07] Speaker B: You had talked about the hours. The hours. We already run 24 7. So we are seven days a week.
[00:08:13] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:08:14] Speaker B: Four shifts, A, B, C and D. And divvied up amongst those seven days. A little bit of gap on the weekdays between shifts. But our Weekend shifts are 12 hours and 12 hours. So they butt up right against each other. So everything is constantly moving.
[00:08:28] Speaker A: We are sharing our expertise around all topics relating to the window indoor industry. Whether you are a customer selling our products or a homeowner doing research, the Clear Impact podcast provides helpful content that makes an impact. Subscribe today. Wherever you listen to podcasts, it's so impressive to watch everybody just working over there because you have to stay super focused. Like, you can't be lollygagging or daydreaming when you're handling glass. No, there is none of that.
[00:08:57] Speaker B: And something we take great pride in. We are having one of our best years in terms of injuries. You would think, okay, glass plant sounds dangerous to me. And it is by its own right. But all the precautions and safety measures we have in place, I think this year, best year ever year to date, we only have four what you would call recordable injuries. Those are the most serious ones. None of them are from cuts from glass. They're just ergonomic in nature and things. We could do better to help our folks move some of that heavy stuff around.
[00:09:25] Speaker A: I know. I always appreciate getting to go over and I think getting suited up and putting on the jacket and wearing my. My steel toes and having the eyes and the ears and all of that, I think is just kind of a cool experience. But also those jackets, I mean, let's just take a second. You have how many people working for you?
[00:09:44] Speaker B: We count all areas that report to me across the four shifts. About 450. Okay.
[00:09:50] Speaker A: So 450 people that come in and most of them are working with glass, directly or indirectly. They're all wearing a kevlar jacket, which those things are like 500 bucks.
[00:10:00] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:10:02] Speaker A: And then you have your guys that are on the cutting line. So it's a diamond bit that scores the glass.
[00:10:07] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:10:08] Speaker A: And then they break it. And so they're wearing like double gloves.
[00:10:11] Speaker B: That's right. They have a liner and their outer.
[00:10:14] Speaker A: Glove and they change those out regularly throughout the day. And.
[00:10:17] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:10:18] Speaker A: So just the PPE bill, I'm sure is not small.
[00:10:21] Speaker B: It's enormous. Yeah. Our safety budget is huge every year.
[00:10:24] Speaker A: Yeah, it has to be.
[00:10:26] Speaker B: But we have to keep them safe and the results are showing up this year for sure.
[00:10:29] Speaker A: That's awesome. I know our teams do a great job with that. So other than the auto seeming, what other expansion benefits are you going to be able to see?
[00:10:40] Speaker B: Well, I mentioned a little bit about the office space and I just want to talk about why that's important. We have a lot of support groups over there that make that place run and run smoothly and efficiently. We've got our maintenance team, we've got our engineering team, our reliability team, our quality teams, our production scheduling team. There's a lot of pieces that have to work together, what the office expansion will do. Because today we are spread out all over the plant. So each corner of the plant and somewhere in between, it'll bring us all together. And communication is key over there to make sure everything runs effectively and being able to have your support groups and at least the leadership team right there with you. Obviously, quicker communication, quicker action on the floor. So that'll benefit the teams immensely. So that's the office space. In terms of the production environment, the seamers are the biggest benefit that we're going to get. But we're also going to use that space, their storage space. Our infrastructure in that plant is huge. And when I talk about infrastructure, I'm talking about the carts and the number of carts we have to have and the different types of carts we have to have keeping them clean out of the weather today. A lot of that stuff sits outside until we pull it in to use it. And you know, South Florida weather, it takes a beating.
[00:11:54] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:11:54] Speaker B: So there's a lot of initiatives just to try to get those things refurbished and back into a condition where they're not actually causing defects. With our glass and our whip as it moves through to plant, we'll be able to bring those inside. The city of Venice is not real thrilled with anything being outside, so we'll be able to bring a lot of our finished product inside too and stage it. And at least it's in a controlled environment, especially in air conditioned environment for our team members. But so the space again is vital. A couple other things that are going in on the plant, not just because we have the expansion, but we are getting another tempering line in this year. It's already in and they're hooking it up. Should be operational by the end of this year.
[00:12:29] Speaker A: Nice.
[00:12:30] Speaker B: That's huge for us because today we operate off of one tempering line and one catastrophic event. Fingers crossed for that line going down that will affect the entire Venice campus in our operations as pgt.
[00:12:42] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:12:42] Speaker B: So having this redundancy is going to be huge. And there's other things going in place in early 2025 in our lamination department, more clavering capacity which enable us to make more of those laminated units. So a lot of things are going in. But yeah, the expansion made it all possible.
[00:12:59] Speaker A: That's amazing. I'm excited. I got to do a rough walk through last week with Julie and got to see the cutting line from the mezzanine, which is going to be amazing for customer tours. So you can get up above everything and really see what's happening without even being close to the raw glass, which.
[00:13:20] Speaker B: Is so helpful, especially in that department. Because the way we do the tours today, you bring folks into that department, you stand up in a safe spot and you know they're looking and stretching to see what's going on. That mezzanine you can see everything we talk about from up front where all the breakout's happening to the back of how our crane systems work and how it pulls in those large sheets of glass, puts it on that table, gets scored, moves through the process. You can see it all.
[00:13:46] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:13:46] Speaker B: So it's a great, safe place to start our tours. And then we can actually see the front end of our lamination lines and our tempering line from that same mezzanine. Should people not want to go to the floor? But that'll just be the beginning. And then we'll bring them down onto the floor. Same route we use today where they get to go back and get into the weeds of. Okay, well, once you laminate it, who carves all the edges off and where does it go from there?
[00:14:09] Speaker A: Right.
[00:14:10] Speaker B: All that will stay in place.
[00:14:11] Speaker A: Yeah. I'm excited about our customers having that new experience. And now we've got the headsets over there so people can hear when they're doing the tours, which is amazing.
[00:14:19] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:14:20] Speaker A: Your team, they've really stepped out of their own comfort zones in some ways to participate in that. But we've had already in 2024, we've already surpassed what we did all of last year in terms of numbers of people coming and touring.
[00:14:33] Speaker B: So that's amazing. And my guys, they were nervous when we started tasking them out to do it. As you recall, I tried to do as many as I could. And then just because you have doubled up and tripled up on number of the population going through the plan. Yeah, I've had to rely on them. And now they love doing it. Yeah, they love showing it off.
[00:14:49] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:14:50] Speaker B: And now with the expansion, they're proud of it. I'm blessed with a great group of leaders over there and got them out of their shell a little bit. None of them are going to be public speakers as a career, but they love doing that and they love bringing people through and they feed off of the positive comments.
[00:15:05] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:15:05] Speaker B: And then your feedback's been great. When you get the feedback, you pass that on to us and it makes them feel great. So, yeah, it's really gotten them more of an ownership of. Yeah, this is our place.
[00:15:13] Speaker A: Right. Well, and it should never, no task should ever fall just to one person is my personal belief. Like the more the merrier. Like we should all be cross trained to cover whatever functions we need to be able to cover. And so knowing that there's an entire bench of people over there, so it's not a burden to one or two, it's, you know, hey, Joe, hey, Allison, hey Jason, you know, Chris, whoever. But you know, our customers, they dedicate time to travel over. They're letting their emails and their phone calls stack up while they're learning about our product. So I think it's a really beneficial thing to give them an engineer or someone who really knows the details because they're going to ask some hardcore questions and we want to be able to answer them. That's the value, I think. And so is there anything else that.
[00:16:00] Speaker B: You'D like to share in terms of the plant? You know what's exciting, talked about loading us up to capacity and really right now we support probably 90% of what I do over there supporting our Venice assembly plant. We still do some things for our Miami plants. We still do some things for our Tampa plant. And we are now, you know, you mentioned the Ilab team. The Ilab team is really bringing home the thin glass and that product is going over to our window, our window lines. So we're making more of that. Thin triples is right around the corner. And, you know, we have the assets now in our IG department to start making the thin triples. And I'm hearing we're opening that offering up to our dealers now. So we're going to start seeing some of the newer stuff that the Ilab has been playing with and working so hard at getting into market come through to plant. And the teams are excited about that just because, you know, it's not the same old anymore. It requires a little different attention. So they're excited about it.
[00:16:52] Speaker A: Yeah, it's going to be a game changer. I think I'm excited, too. Well, I'm looking forward to. I'm getting a tour next week with Jason Anderson. He's going to meet with me and a couple of others and we're going to walk through the new tour route.
[00:17:07] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:17:07] Speaker A: So I'm really excited about that.
[00:17:09] Speaker B: Awesome.
[00:17:10] Speaker A: Yeah. All right. Well, Chris, I really appreciate your time today. Thank you so much for coming over and sharing about all of this and we'll talk again soon.
[00:17:17] Speaker B: We will. Thank you for having me.
[00:17:18] Speaker A: Thanks. Bye.
[00:17:19] Speaker B: Bye.
[00:17:21] Speaker A: The Clear Impact podcast is brought to you by PGTI University. We are a part of Mitre Brands, a family of leading window and door brands united by our passion for quality and relentless pursuit of 100%. One of the missions of Mitre Brands is to unite and deliver the finest customer experience possible across the nation. Our window and door brands deliver regionalized expertise and products. Backed by a national company. PGTI University is here to educate you, our listener, so that you can be a more informed consumer of window indoor products.
