What
image does your mind conjure up when I tell you a finishing system
was homegrown?
What
if I were to tell you this homegrown system I saw was in the South?
What
if I were to tell you I had to go to Gainesville, GA (we're talking
the Deep South here) to see it?
If
you're not from the South and your mind works like mine, then
you probably have already formed some negative connotation or
stereotype. When I think of a homegrown system and the Deep South,
my mind begins to picture a rickety old moonshine still tucked
in a corner of the barn.
But,
if you read this month's feature, "A
Homegrown Painting System," you'll find out that's not
what homegrown means at all. According to Tommy Lee (no he isn't
the drummer for Mötley Crüe, and no he wasn't married
to Pamela Anderson), director of maintenance services at Indalex,
homegrown means tailored to his plant's needs.
After
touring the plant with Mr. Lee and Jeff Rider, finishing manager
at Indalex, I came to find out that homegrown means significantly
more than tailored. To have a homegrown system requires that you
learn more about your process, your customers, your parts and
your employees every day.
Then
you have to figure out how to apply that knowledge to your system
to make it run more efficiently or produce higher quality parts.
So, homegrown, a description that, at first blush, invoked images
of simplicity, upon further inspection, came to mean customized,
highly engineered and unique.
Some
of the homegrown quality of Indalex' paint line is due to the
ingenuity of the company's employees and their ability to think
outside of the box and derive new ways to solve old problems.
Unique loading and unloading stations and a control system tied
to a database of every order painted at Indalex are just two of
the things that make this system homegrown.
But,
an equal part of that homegrown quality is due to Indalex' suppliers.
They're the ones that have taken the ideas and transformed them
into tangible, functioning systems. Ideas such as changing from
a conventional filter bank to a single filter bank in the vertical
cylindrical spray booths.
If
you ask Tommy Lee how to create a homegrown system, he'll tell
you it helps to have a supplier that asks "What do you need?"
instead of one that tells you "Here's what I've got."
