Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
Welcome to the Clear Impact Podcast, brought to you by PGTI University. Thanks for joining us today. My name is Sheri Connor and I am your host.
Good afternoon. We are here on the Clear Impact Podcast and we are exploring the acronym of mitre. And so M I T E R starts with the letter M, which stands for manufacturing.
So, in studio today, we have Dave Alexander. Welcome.
[00:00:40] Speaker B: Why, thank you, Sherry. It's such a pleasure to be here.
[00:00:43] Speaker A: I'm so excited that you decided to come in. And I threw out an email earlier this week and you're like, hey, I'm going to be in town in a couple of days. And I went, well, perfect. So here we are. And so, Dave, I'm going to let you introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about, you know, your education, your history, you know, short, like, overview, career path, and then we'll talk about your current role and responsibilities.
[00:01:06] Speaker B: Okay. I went to a very small engineering school in, in New York State in Troy, New York.
[00:01:12] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:01:13] Speaker B: It's called either RPI or Rensselaer. You'll hear, you'll hear it described different ways. What's unique about that is it's the oldest engineering school in the English speaking world, if you Google it.
[00:01:24] Speaker A: So. Oh, wow.
[00:01:25] Speaker B: So it goes way back to 1824.
It was founded. So I grew up in central New York, went there to college, moved out to Ohio. I've worked for several companies in kind of a circle or a cycle of engineering, like process engineering and then quality management systems, and then ultimately operations, running operations and continuous improvement, those kinds of things. So I've done that several times throughout my career. But. And I've had a phenomenal career, been mentored by some of the most incredible people ever. I'm gifted and blessed in that regard.
And so that's kind of led me through. There's, there's some expressions in the glass and window business that once you get sucked into it, you never leave.
[00:02:05] Speaker A: Yeah, I keep hearing that.
[00:02:07] Speaker B: So for the last 30 years, I've either been in the window business, the glass business, providing glass to the window business, or back in the window business, where I am today with Mitre Brands.
[00:02:20] Speaker A: Nice.
[00:02:20] Speaker B: And you asked me, you asked me about, so what's my current role? Yeah, yeah, my title is vice president Manufacturing excellence. So it has a, it's a traditional umbrella of quality. And again, we're all in a continuous improvement, improvement business. So that's, that's part of what I do. Right.
[00:02:36] Speaker A: Okay. And so where do you live?
[00:02:38] Speaker B: I live in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
[00:02:40] Speaker A: Okay. The Gettysburg.
[00:02:42] Speaker B: The Gettysburg. 1863. July 1st through July 3rd.
[00:02:46] Speaker A: Okay, nice.
[00:02:48] Speaker B: Most. Most American soldiers were lost in that battle than any other battle over three days, 60,000 casualties.
Anyway. Sorry.
[00:02:55] Speaker A: Okay, well, I haven't been there, but I'm planning a trip, and so I'm very excited to visit some of the other facilities.
[00:03:01] Speaker B: When you're In Harrisburg, you're 50 minutes, 5. 0. 50 minutes away from Gettysburg.
[00:03:06] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:03:06] Speaker B: Very historical area.
[00:03:07] Speaker A: All right, Well, I love history, so I'll make a plan for that. So, in terms of manufacturing, so we've been integrating for about a year. How's it going?
[00:03:18] Speaker B: I think it's going incredibly well. And. And I'll tell you, one of the. Maybe for listeners, one of the most important things to either take away or contemplate is about three years ago, after the acquisition of Milgard, some time and effort was put into creating what we call today the Miter Wave operations.
[00:03:37] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:03:38] Speaker B: It was kind of a child of Mike DeSoto's originally, original vision that was articulated as operational excellence.
Sherry. And what was important about that was it really tried to capture what was the secret sauce. We've used that term. A lot of people do, but it's. What's the magic behind the success that MI has had for decades?
And Mike's vision was this model for operational excellence. And then that was translated after the acquisition of the Milgard companies.
It was translated by a group of operations team members to articulate in five different. What we call cogs today.
[00:04:19] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:04:20] Speaker B: So the notion was, how do we capture in words the culture as they relate to five specific elements within our culture, starting with safety, quality, delivery, cost, and then all those cogs around people.
And each leader in those five areas articulated what, in words, how they would describe the culture of success that we've had over decades here at Legacy mi.
And we have used that as we developed it after the acquisition of Milgard. And then we've really applied it even prior to the acquisition of pgti. And so we really started to hone this thing down as a mechanism to assess our individual facilities not against each other, Sherry, but against the goal. You know, a goal that we'll never achieve, but we're always on this journey to really, really, really leverage the elements of each of those cogs that have created a competitive advantage in the marketplace. And we hope, we're confident that if we move forward with those pursuits, we'll continue to maintain a competitive advantage in the marketplace. And what's really, really key, as I said, it's not about assessing your plant to my plant. It's individually, whatever our starting points are, assessing our individual journeys towards the goals that are in aspirations that are part of the definition of the MITER way of operations.
[00:05:49] Speaker A: Okay. And so, so your scope includes us right into all of our operations. So Anlin, Western Wind or glass, everybody. Is it just assembly or is it glass too?
[00:06:01] Speaker B: It's everything.
[00:06:02] Speaker A: Everything, Everything.
[00:06:03] Speaker B: Any of our facilities, ultimately, someday I really do believe, develop assessments. And we don't call them audits because audits come with baggage and good answers and bad answers and all the pressure that comes with those. These are just assessments. These are. Here's where any aspect of our business is today relative to the goals of the Mitre way of operations.
And how do we as a team help get whatever that particular capability in the organization is? How do we get them further down the journey of excellence? That support, by the way.
[00:06:34] Speaker A: Right.
[00:06:34] Speaker B: Our vision, our common purpose and our quality pillars.
[00:06:38] Speaker A: Right.
And it all revolves around people. Right?
[00:06:41] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:06:42] Speaker A: Because even if you have automation, let's say the line is 100% automated, which none of them, I don't think any of them are, you still have a person involved who reviews it, looks at it, puts a label on it. I mean, maybe there's labeling machines, I don't know, I haven't been to plants that have that. But there's still the human element. And so then it becomes, it becomes more subjective.
Right. So is this good enough?
Is this a problem?
And so you have to have, you have to have a goal.
[00:07:14] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:07:15] Speaker A: And then know what that, know what is an acceptable level.
[00:07:19] Speaker B: Right.
[00:07:19] Speaker A: And if, if the level is zero, like we're not accepting anything that isn't perfect, you know, that becomes, that can be a very big challenge.
And so. But it starts with the culture, it starts with the people, Right?
[00:07:32] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:07:32] Speaker A: Is what we were talking about earlier.
[00:07:34] Speaker B: Yeah. Sheri, that's a great segue into what we've taken on as an organizational challenge in quality specifically. And it's this notion of the pursuit of zero defects.
Okay. And we're gonna get to there in a minute.
[00:07:47] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:07:47] Speaker B: But I have to go back to something you said that I think is very insightful in my now 87 years of my career.
[00:07:55] Speaker A: Wow, you look great for an 87 year old career guy.
[00:07:58] Speaker B: I feel great. It's not always how you look, it's how you.
The other way around.
[00:08:02] Speaker A: Yeah. I don't know. I've always heard it's the mileage, not the age.
[00:08:05] Speaker B: Oh, I like that. I do like that. But go back to that idea that no matter how much automation and do we want automation to make jobs easier for people, less risk of injury and repetitiveness and those kinds of things? Absolutely, we want to do that. But I have yet to be in any industry, in any type of manufacturing environment where. And I think you could extend this to any other industry out there. At some level, eventually it comes down to people. It may only be five people where 20 years ago it was 50 people.
But at some level, your people and the culture that they live out day in and day out, that's what's going to make your company successful. It's going to, as I say, I use the term competitive advantage. It's going to come down to people and the culture that you embrace and the culture that you encourage and that you motivate people towards and that ultimately, you know, you incentivize them, whatever that might be. Incentives, very different things.
[00:09:01] Speaker A: We are sharing our expertise around all topics relating to the window and door 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.
Yeah, it's very similar to what Mike Troutman shared when we talked about the VPP program with osha.
[00:09:26] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:09:27] Speaker A: In terms of you create that culture of we're going to be safe today and everything we do is going to not put us at risk for injury.
And I saw his report. I think it was yesterday or the day before for I don't know if it was a year or just a month or whatever the timeframe was. But across the board, all the different facilities, our injury rate is half the norm across the industry and the standards are really high.
[00:09:54] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:09:55] Speaker A: And so that's so comforting.
Like, if I were first of all, I wouldn't last a second on the manufacturing floor. I built a window. I built a window one time just for funsies, to see what it was like. And I was like, I'd be fired in three minutes.
It was hard physically. It was hard to hold the, you know, the impact gun and actually screw the aluminum to the aluminum and then drop this really piece of heavy glass. Even though it was small, it was still heavy. And then I was like, what? Like, oh my gosh, I'm so thankful that that is not my job.
But with automation, you take out that heavy burden and you take off some of those more daunting elements. But you still have to have a standard and you still have to have someone. You can have light boards and you can have computer programs and you can have all those Things to assess quality. But you still have to say that's a scratch and that's not acceptable.
[00:10:48] Speaker B: Exactly.
So again, another good segue. So what Mike Troutman talked about, right. And that you just quoted, the incident rates that we have are less than half of what the industry standard is. Right. And how do we get there? We get there by continually reinforcing a culture of safety is important. It's important to you, it's important to the business, it's important to a lot of people, family included. Right. Sherry? And so we get to this notion of culture. So if we continue to reinforce a culture that we want you to be safe, if you see some unsafe act, raise your hand, guard, guard, equipment, get somebody involved, whatever it might be. Right.
That's how you attain those kinds of things. So the reason I said segue again was you talked about this notion of zero defects. Right. And it's the same kind of thing that we're approaching now with this same assessment tool, and that's this idea of zero defect. And how do we get there?
There's all kinds of technology, vision systems and automated this and automated that.
But at the end of the day, again, it comes down to we do, we manufacture products. You know, you said of Mitre, the very first letter is M for manufacturing. And as you know, we manufacture hundreds of thousands of windows every single week, every single month, every single year. Right? Yeah. And we do that. Our goal is to always look for opportunities to take less of that physical burden off our team members. And we have thousands of team members out there doing that every day. The idea then, that same notion that we apply to safety can be applied to quality. And in this regard, and I'm going to quote not verbatim, but I'll give you the three bullets underneath the quality cog in the assessment tool that we use that I just mentioned. So the first one is exceed our customer expectations.
Okay.
[00:12:37] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:12:37] Speaker B: And I'm going to take on a little bit of a journey here. Right.
[00:12:40] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:12:40] Speaker B: Imagine a world where every single team member, whether you are a receptionist, whether you are in inside sales or service or manufacturing or shipping or sales, whatever it is. Imagine if we really, really understood what our customers expectations were. And each one of us, we understood those, and we were absolutely bound and determined to exceed those. Okay? That's the first bullet. The second bullet is do not accept, do not make and do or do not pass along anything that does not meet those expectations. Again, regardless of what your role is, right. You know what the expectations are and you have, you're Encouraged in an environment and supported in an environment where if it doesn't meet those requirements and those expectations. And by the way, customer can be an internal customer or an external customer. Customer is just defined as kind of who's the next in the step of whatever you do to support the business.
[00:13:36] Speaker A: Right.
[00:13:37] Speaker B: So imagine step one is understand those expectations.
Number two, create an environment where people can identify it and say, nope, it's not going to go any further than here.
And then the third one is this notion of taking pride in whatever that is you're going to pass along to the next customer that if it's a label, the label is straight. If it's packaging, the packaging is great. If it's a weld, that weld is going to look and be cleaned as, I mean, just something you would put in your own home. Right, right.
That's the third. So this notion of pride and pass along something that you would be proud of. Right. And imagine if we could accomplish those three things day in, day out. Assembly, part assembly, you know, part in, part out and take care of our customers that way. Wouldn't be, wouldn't we really be well, on a journey of zero defects in an industry, by the way, that most people would say, yeah, that's a pipe dream. That's a pipe dream. We don't make, you know, we're not precision machinists and all these other things that.
[00:14:35] Speaker A: Right. This isn't life and death, this is a window.
[00:14:38] Speaker B: Exactly right. And it's a window with a lot of manual steps.
[00:14:41] Speaker A: Right.
[00:14:41] Speaker B: And a lot of pieces and parts. And it's, by the way, it's going into an end use of people that have spent a lot of money putting in what they hope to be a quality product that guess what, meets their expectations.
[00:14:52] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:14:53] Speaker B: So it's a challenge. But I really do believe that that kind of culture is the next horizon for where we will go with our quality systems.
[00:15:01] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:15:01] Speaker B: Because we've got great quality system in place and they, the quality system elements that we have would meet the requirements of third party auditors like they always do. But at the end of the day, zero defects comes from those three elements. And I think they were articulated incredibly well three years ago. And that's what we're dedicated to as an organization now, to really, really dive into and invest in those kinds of education and support of our team members.
[00:15:23] Speaker A: Yeah, I love that. And our customers are going to love that too.
[00:15:27] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:15:28] Speaker A: Yeah. And the homeowners are going to love that because there's, there's nothing fun about Having to call and say, oh, there's some, I have a, a scratch. There's a whatever.
Like nobody wants any of that hassle, like ever with anything. Like we just don't want it. And so if we can, if we can eliminate that, minimize it as much as we can, then we have happier customers and we're not having to send people out afterwards. And the sales team isn't getting the calls or whoever gets the calls, customer care, whoever just makes it for a much happier experience all the way around.
[00:16:03] Speaker B: Absolutely. And if you think about it, Sherry, any for those of us who've been in the field and been with customers and 99 of 100 times, it's, we're not there to take a customer to lunch and you know, have a good time and call it a day. We're there because there's, there's something has not met their expectation. Expectation is a key word in this whole thing. Right?
[00:16:21] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:16:22] Speaker B: And we've all been there and we've all heard, how could this possibly get out of your factory like this? Right. And, and the reality of that is you don't really ever have a good reason for that. You could go and say, well, I can tell you where that happened and I can tell you this, that and the other, and why it might have been missed. And yeah, at the end of the day, none of those things are important to our customers.
[00:16:39] Speaker A: Right.
[00:16:40] Speaker B: But the fact does remain that it did happen somewhere. And more than likely one person or maybe multiple people after it did occur, had an opportunity to say, wait a minute, this doesn't meet those expectations. Or they might have said, you know what, I think that's okay. And maybe that was the right decision at the time. But our objective is to capture and as best we can and articulate and communicate what our customers expectations are so then we can set the stage for exceeding them.
[00:17:05] Speaker A: Right. That's excellent. I love that.
All right, so I have one last question.
And because we're the education team, I still wanted to have something tied to learning as part of the podcast. And so what is something. And this can be silly, this can be work related, this can be whatever. What is something interesting that you're learning lately?
[00:17:28] Speaker B: I'm going to give you one that I'm learning lately, but I've learned it pretty much my whole career, maybe, if not my whole career, my whole life. Okay. And Sherry, it's. This is that relationships are incredibly important.
And too often we don't take time to develop the relationship first because everything else will follow after that. I mean, you can dictate to people to get things done and certain leaders have certain styles and all this stuff. But if you reflect again, I'm going to go back to.
And I'm not gonna have. I won't quote. I can.
Our vision, common purpose and what our quality pillars are, embedded in all those is this notion of spending time in relationship to people so that you can, you can better communicate, you can rely on them. You can, if there's, if there are issues, there's transparency.
Expectations, in my opinion, are all about communication. And how often do we not meet someone's expectation in any aspect of life?
[00:18:24] Speaker A: Right.
[00:18:25] Speaker B: Because we really haven't taken time to really understand what those expectations are through a relationship. So I'll say it served me incredibly well in my life, it served me well in my career. And I would just encourage everybody to. Sometimes it's like I don't have time for that. You know, I don't have time to develop that relationship or I don't have time to invest in it in this moment. And that those things are, you know, they're reasonable. But for the most part, I continue to learn every single day how important the relationship is first, because so much can be, so much can be accomplished thereafter, whether it's fixing a wrong or it's making something better than it is today. It's all about relationships and the communication within those relationships. And they have to be genuine. Right. They can't be.
Yeah, just leave it at that. They have to be genuine because most people can sniff out relationships that aren't that way.
[00:19:16] Speaker A: Right.
[00:19:16] Speaker B: And that can be just as difficult to deal with.
[00:19:20] Speaker A: Agreed. That's awesome. I love that.
[00:19:22] Speaker B: I don't know if that's what you wanted to do.
[00:19:23] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I mean, that's, you know, that's part of what makes successful people successful is that they're always learning, they're always evaluating and, you know, whether it's a new book or a new habit or, you know, something that you've learned. So I. It's a very open ended question.
[00:19:41] Speaker B: All right, thanks, Sherry.
[00:19:42] Speaker A: Dave, this has been a pleasure. Appreciate your time. Thank you.
[00:19:45] Speaker B: Thank you, Sherry.
[00:19:45] Speaker A: All right, take care.
The Clear Impact podcast is brought to you by PGTI University. We are a part of my 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 and door products.
[00:20:22] Speaker B: RA.
