Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:09] Speaker B: Welcome to the Clear Impact Podcast, brought to you by Mitre Brands University. Thanks for joining us today. My name is Sheri Conner and I am your host.
[00:00:19] Speaker A: The sensors are becoming more reliable. There seems to be a greater understanding of what we can do with that technology. So I think from a control standpoint, we might see some pretty big advances and that will drive, I think, machine reliability.
So the uptime should be greater and the customer's experience should be better.
[00:00:40] Speaker B: All right, so good afternoon. We are here on the Clear Impact podcast and virtually today I have with me Morgan Donahue, the president of Erdman Automation. Welcome.
[00:00:51] Speaker A: Thank you for having me, Sheriff.
[00:00:53] Speaker B: Yeah, thanks for being here. And so today we're gonna really be talking about the power of long term partnerships and how collaboration, innovation and shared problem solving between suppliers and manufacturers really help solve industry challenges and drive continuous improvement. And so before we tackle some of the questions that we wanna get to Morgan, can you share a bit of your background with us?
[00:01:18] Speaker A: Sure. I've been an employee at Erdman automation for over 30 years, and about five years ago I purchased 49% of the company. And then about two years ago I purchased the rest of it. So I'm now the owner of Erdman Automation. And we've got a business that focuses primarily on window and door applications, but specifically in a couple of different areas of expertise. I guess I would say is roughly half of our business is centered around insulating glass fabrication.
Another high percentage is the product production of what I would call custom machinery or sort of one time new developments. And then we also have interest in building flex screen machinery as well. So those are sort of our three branches of automation. And as a particular branch grows or needs more attention, we'll probably continue that progress of adding different specializations.
[00:02:17] Speaker B: Right, well, that makes sense. Right. If you're building equipment, you have to go where the need is.
[00:02:20] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:02:21] Speaker B: That's awesome. And you're located in Minnesota, is that right?
[00:02:24] Speaker A: Yes, we're about an hour and 10 minutes from the Twin Cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul, and maybe an hour and 25 minutes from the airport. Just north and west a little bit.
[00:02:35] Speaker B: Okay. Your company has had a long standing partnership with Mitre Brands and you have equipment in several of our facilities and different brands. You know, between Milgard and MI and PGT and Western and Anlin and Sunrise. You know, I'm sure you're in a smattering of all of those.
From your perspective, what makes a partnership successful over the long term?
[00:02:58] Speaker A: Yeah, thanks for asking that question and recognizing that we have been partners for a long time and with a lot of different organizations in your Mitre brand group. And, you know, each relationship is a little bit different, certainly, but I think when both parties approach it as a collaboration, that isn't necessarily only transactional in the sense that, you know, what do I get out of it? In other words, I try to make sure, I guess, at least from my part. I think the leadership at MITRE is similar, that we both want to gain something from it so that we recognize that it's, you know, and it's kind of tried, I guess, to say win, win, but it is truly the right approach in the sense that if you are more interested really in the other's gain or improvement or what makes them feel that it's a benefit to be in that relationship, then you have the start of, I think, can be very successful. And the leadership, as I mentioned earlier, at Mitre is very much focused, in my opinion, not just on their own gain, but rather the interests of their partners as well. And it's not just lip service. It's truly the way of approaching their business, and it comes out in every aspect of what they do. So I think the most successful partnerships are really, truly focused on that in terms of helping the other. And if you have that, then you have a chance of making it successful over the long term.
[00:04:24] Speaker B: Oh, well said. I agree.
We do have guiding principles, and one of those is profitable partnerships. And so glad to know that that is actually playing out in the real world. Right?
[00:04:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:37] Speaker B: So before we had a chance to chat today, I did a little bit of research on Erdman and watched a few of your videos on YouTube. And I noticed that on some of the more recent equipment that you've developed, the focus is really on innovation and efficiency. And I'm wondering how has the customer feedback influenced the evolution of the technology that you're using now?
[00:05:02] Speaker A: Yeah, I think each development always has its own sort of personality and path. Some come out of the box quite, I guess, what I would say, refined or finished. And then others, they take a little while to figure out how to fix all of the challenges that you have along the way. And every development has its own sort of, like I said, personality, just to speak, I guess, on FlexScreen, because we talked about that briefly before we started. And I know you're having Joe Altieri on the podcast and, you know, he had a product that had been pretty well developed in the sense that it was being made and being done in a certain manner more manually. And then when you just really focus on not really a change in the product or having to modify that at all, but rather just looking at the process of assembly that gives you a leg up on getting what's successful right out of the gate. So that in and of itself has kind of a different flavor to the development than coming up with something that's never been done or that's, you know, more significantly requiring a development. And that might be something like the cohesive bond method that we have developed recently that takes a TPS or thermoplastic spacer and, and it applies the thermoplastic spacer to both sides and all of the different benefits that cascade from that. That development was born from a conversation with Mike DeSoto and specifically around some pain points. That technology that when you do it in a traditional bond manner, in other words, just putting that spacer on a single piece of glass, there's a few challenges with that. Speed and application of grid and the use of more material and the airspace thickness. These are all things that are specific to so each innovation and concentration efficiency influenced in different manners with the different technologies that we've gone. Sometimes it's driven by a customer, sometimes it's driven by a process, sometimes it's a hurdle that is required in order to make it more market friendly or more cost effective. So there's always a little bit of a learning curve and the maturity of the product is sometimes a benefit to getting to that efficiency more rapidly.
[00:07:15] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I mean, you're designing and building machines that serve your customers, so I would imagine the feedback would be pretty critical. So that makes a lot of sense.
[00:07:25] Speaker A: It is, it's paramount to have your customers understanding and to have them as part of the, let's say, collaborative effort, not just the initial development, but how do you flush out how well it produces over time and what are the improvements that can be made moving forward?
[00:07:44] Speaker B: Yeah, that actually is a nice segue into the next question that I have for you, which is around balancing innovation with reliability. Like how do you find a balance in those two spaces?
[00:07:57] Speaker A: Yeah, it's I guess, having the experience of having built machinery for 30 plus years. And really when you look at a collective group at Erdman of 200 plus employees and the people that are doing the invention or the heavy lifting when it comes to the design work, they have a lot of very valuable experience. So you come with a pretty good guess as to what that reliability might look like based on your past experience.
But certainly once you start to, you know, put something into production, the things can change sometimes. Let's Say you do things theoretically and then when you actually get to making product, heat can build up or surfaces wear differently than you expect, whatever the case may be.
So the reliability is very helpful to have, again, that feedback loop coming from the customer to say this, this is a challenge for us in this area because of whatever it is. And so the balance is maybe first born from having experience. And then the real world kind of teaches you what you really maybe couldn't know theoretically. One of the things that I think we do a very good job of is continuing to support new developments and, you know, making sure that we get it right in the long term, not just making a guess and leaving it at that.
[00:09:09] Speaker B: Yeah, cross your fingers and hope it works.
Don't do it.
[00:09:13] Speaker A: Feels like that sometimes, right?
[00:09:17] Speaker B: 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.
Well, and I'm sure you know we have customers on at least on the PGT side that are willing to try new products when we're tinkering with new design ideas and new applications in the window and door space. And so I'm sure you have customers that are willing to say, oh, this is a new iteration.
Yeah, we'll try it, we'll take it. Let's give it a go and see how it works and provide that feedback. Although that's a much larger scale for you.
[00:10:00] Speaker A: Yeah, I suppose maybe everybody has their own path in terms of the new developments, but it's been successful to this point, that's for sure.
[00:10:08] Speaker B: That's awesome. And so the best partnerships, and Joe had very similar answers to you about partnerships, but the best partnerships often go beyond just the transaction.
And so how do you foster relationships that are really, truly collaborative?
[00:10:24] Speaker A: It seems to me that it kind of goes back to the original question and that interest in the other's best interest.
And if you do that and continue to do it, and then you have success, you know, I mean, success has to be part of that ongoing transaction. If you don't have success, regardless of the challenges that you face during that, I think everybody can understand that there's going to be challenges in every transaction, relationship, partnership, whatever it is, you're going to have some challenges. And I think getting through those, and sometimes maybe the most difficult ones are even better because you realize that the commitment to each other is even that much greater and you get the sense of well, we've made it through that. We can make it through another one, right?
[00:11:11] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:11] Speaker A: So there's certainly a building and a foundation that has to get developed and then maybe fostering might be the wrong like sort of way of thinking about it. In my opinion, it might be just really remaining focused on the success together and then the rest kind of takes care of itself. I was reading something today actually on Mr. Rogers. You know, one of my childhood TV go to with the Mr. Rogers neighborhood, sir. He was just saying like his focus was always on kindness.
[00:11:38] Speaker B: Right.
[00:11:39] Speaker A: As you can imagine. But he's kind of wrapped up in a similar concept which is if you have the right base focus, the rest sort of takes care of itself.
[00:11:48] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:48] Speaker A: And you know, I might use a different word than kindness, but I understand what he's saying also looking out for the other's best interests. Really.
[00:11:55] Speaker B: Yeah. He was an absolute role model, wasn't he? Fred Rogers? Just amazing.
Yeah. So when you think about where the industry is headed in the next few years, and I'm keeping in mind the term innovation, but what excites you the most about where you see things going in the next few few years?
[00:12:13] Speaker A: Okay. I think when I think about innovation and where our industry may be headed, I don't really know. Seems to me like in my past the bigger advances, the more opportunity is created when there's a need for greater volume or for some problem to be solved. And generally speaking it kind of seems to float around, the need for volume or for production increases, you know. So I think over the next few years feels like the volume might not necessarily be being generated. However, the advent or the possibility of utilizing more and more automated functionality and I guess what I mean by that is we have a pretty good foundation now of machine learning in not just in like robotics, but in monitoring machine functionality.
The sensors are becoming more reliable. There seems to be a greater understanding of what we can do with that technology. So I think from a control standpoint we might see some pretty big advances and that will drive I think machine reliability.
So the uptime should be greater and the customer's experience should be better. We should be able to be more predictive with our repairs over time. So I think there's going to be kind of a leveling out or and I shouldn't say a leveling out maybe, but more like a more predictive outcome on customers floor. And over the past 20 years there's been a want to get more predictive and more steady outcome. I think it's a very challenging thing to do with special machines. Like for example, if you take your own experience with a vehicle, if you were to have a vehicle for the first time without ever really knowing what might go wrong with that vehicle, you might be surprised that you have to do a brake job. You know, when you do. So when would you know to do that brake job? Well, you would know when you start hearing noises or you know, if you didn't see something happening or know that the drive belt was needing to be replaced, it would break and then you'd have a greater issue and downtime and et cetera, that kind of thing. So those are things that will become more and more predictable with the use of more monitoring. That's becoming more available and almost like an embedded feature into some of the new equipment. And that's a really good thing for special machine builders because special machine builders like us are challenged all the time. When you come up with a new design of some sort, you're really kind of at the mercy of an educated guess, which is good. It's educated, but it's not very robust. So that's, I guess what would be. I would say it really excites me. I'm kind of looking forward to that, I guess I should say.
[00:15:02] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, I did notice on one of your videos when you were talk about how you had built a certain machine and then you found out that they lasted a really long time and they never broke and so you had to think of new machines to build.
So the reliability can sometimes obviously people want to buy equipment that's going to hold up and last and drive the value out of that piece of machinery. But then, hey, it's good for 20 years. What am I going to do in the meantime?
You got to have some way of improving.
[00:15:34] Speaker A: You got to keep coming up with something new.
[00:15:36] Speaker B: Yeah, that's good. So one last question. And so how do innovation and partnership ultimately create value for the end customer? And I think that would be the dealer partners and, or the homeowners.
[00:15:48] Speaker A: So when I think about innovation being something truly unique or say creative and problem solving, there's problems that you know you or there's challenges and problems that you know you have and then there's ones that you don't even know you have because it's just the best way to do things until you figure out something better. Right. And I think that the constant, let's say drive to make things better is always just going to result in a creation for positive value for the end customer. What I mean by that is again, and hit back on this reliability thing. But, for example, on our most recent development that we're moving forward with the Mitre group on cohesive bond with the thermoplastic spacer, you have this challenge of placing grids in the product properly. And any variation from that obviously gives your end customer a bit of a compromised product, potentially. Not always, but it may be that you create a quality concern.
So the more robust we can make that, the simpler we can make it. The faster we can make it, the better the chances of it coming out correctly and having fewer issues.
So if you can make something simpler, you ultimately end up with something that's better for the end customer, just because of the fact that it's going to be less expensive and more robust. So those are, for the most part, the most fun to work on, is to try to figure out a way to do something unique, different than others have done, and do it in a way that's simpler.
And generally speaking, it seems like those are the ones that drive the most value, but they also happen to be the ones that are probably, in the end, most likely to be successful, too. The simplicity in design is very challenging. It was one of the things that I remember specifically having a conversation with the founder of our company, Rod Erdman, early on in my career, probably before the year 2000.
He was talking about design and how it's easy to make something complicated. It's hard to make it simple.
[00:17:49] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:17:49] Speaker A: And I thought at the time when he first said it, I thought, well, that doesn't really seem like it makes a lot of sense to me. It would make more sense, you know, to make something simple. But what he was talking about specifically is to solve multiple problems with one thing versus a problem with multiple things, I guess, you know, because it's like we have to add this, this, and this so that we can get this job done, rather than actually if we just take this away. And that allows us to do something a little bit differently. And that way the machine becomes simpler, fewer moving parts, the process becomes simpler. Whatever the case may be, that's a lot of times the more challenging of the two is actually to do more with less. So that's the end goal, or has been the end goal for a long time for me, anyway, to try to make things simpler and yet more effective.
[00:18:36] Speaker B: Right. Yeah. I think Steve Jobs said something very similar, like, stream it down, make it less. We don't need a giant thing and another giant thing and another giant thing. Yeah, he shared that similar sentiment around. It takes more work to make it simple. But yeah, for sure. Well, I know that, you know, in the past I helped lead plant tours here at PGT and walked through the glass plant many times. And people are always so impressed and amazed by the equipment and the automation that is involved in building windows and doors. And, you know, I think it's amazing and also very cool that you have a long standing relationship with the leadership here and have been able to supply so much of the equipment that keeps us running and makes us successful in what we're doing. So I really appreciate your time today. Did we leave anything out?
[00:19:25] Speaker A: I don't think so. We likewise appreciate you as a customer. Without the support of your organization, our jobs would be impossible. We wouldn't be able to do them. And so we're looking forward to more and more collaborative efforts. And thank you for having me.
[00:19:40] Speaker B: Yeah, I appreciate your time today. Thank you.
[00:19:42] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:19:44] Speaker B: The Clear Impact podcast is brought to you by Mitre Brands 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%. At Mitre Brands, our common purpose is to deliver value by manufacturing the finest products, services and customer experience every day, everywhere. Our window and door brands deliver regionalized expertise, products and services, all backed by a national company.
Mitre Brands University is here to educate you, our listener, so that you can be a more informed consumer of window and door products.
