On a recent trip to Dallas, I arrived at the customer’s business
on a Monday morning. They’d been down in production for more than a day the
week before. As I walked in, everyone in the shop looked relieved; their
shoulders relaxing. They were a smaller shop that depended on their processor
for making blanks to run their plasma tables and to make rectangular duct. So,
the entire shop was out of commission while that necessary machine was down and
essentially inoperable.
I quickly connected with my laptop and let them run the
machine for a couple of hours off that. They were elated to learn that this was
an available service option. Within just a couple of hours they’d built up
enough blanks and ran enough duct to get the rest of the shop back up and
running and profitable again.
Those were hardworking people. They were on the floor
busting their butts every day in a hot dirty duct shop suffering the elements
and rewarded with reduced hours. Not a ballistic owner present voicing concern
over profit margins, but real people who share in those ventures. In fact, the
operator’s wife was pregnant and actually went into labor towards the end of my
trip and he couldn’t make it in that last day. The magnitude of lost work falls
to those that are the most vulnerable; the family.
So, on this trip I gained a better perspective of just how
important our machinery, controls, and software are, both personally and
professionally. I saw a dozen lives with families and mortgages and car
payments tightly tied to our ability to provide quality equipment and expedient
service.
I used this as a wake-up call for myself and I put together
documentation while waiting for my flight back. I wanted to make sure that no
one ever has to be affected like this again because of a lack of insight. A
point in fact, this document proved immediately helpful with another customer
having a similar problem but then being able to function from their own laptop
thanks to that document.
I’m sharing these notes to encourage each and every one of
us to keep the thousands of lives that depend on us each day in mind. It’s more
than just those of us here at the factory and our lives and families. We have
many hundreds of installations which multiply that demand on us to continually
look for better ways to communicate to one another and make sure there are no
roadblocks to continuously improving our products, services, and customer
experience.
Best Regards,
John Welty
