E10: Johnny Smith Jr. - PackIQ

Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Industrial Movement. Joining us in conversation today is Johnny Smith Jr, plant manager of PackIQ, who believes, above all else, that manufacturing is where it’s at! Tune in to hear why Johnny believes that manufacturing makes a country great and strong, and why he is proud to be a manufacturer. We discuss what manufacturing environments look today in comparison to the past, and what some of the biggest challenges are in the industry. Johnny believes in the power of building a strong team and shares his thoughts on leading not from the back, or the front, but the middle. Listeners will learn the story of the biggest professional challenge Johnny has faced and how it shapes his work today. We talk about what a typical day looks like at his facility, what the packaging
design process involves, and much more! We hope you take the time to learn from this inspiring leader today.

Transcript

EPISODE 10

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:03.3] MH: You’re listening to The Industrial Movement, where we discuss the people, the processes and the equipment that drives American manufacturing. If this is your first time listening, then thanks for coming. The Industrial Movement Podcast is produced every week for your enjoyment and a show notes can be found in our website at www.theindustrialmovement.com. 

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[INTERVIEW]

[0:00:40.7] MH: Hi folks, welcome to The Industrial Movement, this is Morty Hodge and with me as always is my trusty sidekick, Greg Smith.

[0:00:48.3] GS: Hello everyone, welcome to the show.

[0:00:50.9] MH: Today, we are honored to speak with Johnny Smith Jr. of packIQ. Johnny, welcome to the show.

[0:00:59.6] JS: Thank you, it’s a pleasure to meet both of you.

[0:01:01.6] MH: Fantastic. Johnny, if you don’t mind, start off by telling us a little bit about packIQ and then transition into your story.

[0:01:09.9] JS: PackIQ is, we design and build reusable steel ranking, primarily for the automotive industry but also heavy truck, the fence, heavy equipment, those type of things. We provide a solution to transport material from tier two suppliers to tier one suppliers. You know, everybody knows that there’s an engine in our car but they don’t really realize, “Well, how does it get from one plant to another.” We build and develop solutions to do that.

[0:01:44.6] MH: Fantastic, how long has packIQ been around?

[0:01:47.8] JS: packIQ in its initial form started at around the year 2000. A lot of the early days, they were in more of pallets and shipping containers, plastic containers and kind of migrated over the years, saw an opportunity to get into the more durable metal racking and made that transition probably open this facility about nine years ago.

[0:02:17.3] MH: Your facility is in the Anderson South Carolina facility, correct?

[0:02:23.5] JS: That is correct.

[0:02:22.8] MH: I see that you guys have facilities in Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Venezuela, Canada, is that right?

[0:02:31.3] JS: A lot of those are satellite or sister companies but yes, we do support operations over most of North, South America and some in Europe as well.

[0:02:42.8] MH: Tell us a little bit about your story, how did you get involved in manufacturing.

[0:02:47.9] JS: It’s kind of a long story, you know? Way back when, in high school, I wanted to be an auto mechanic. This is early 80s, you could work on a car then, shortly after that, you needed a PHD to be able to work on a car, so I kind of changed career paths and got into manufacturing, which led me into wielding and sheet metal fabrication.

Got into it, really fell in love with it, I stayed in it a number of years, made a transition out for a short period of time and then got back into manufacturing and pretty much, for the last 35 years, that’s where I’ve been. A lot of several different places, a lot of different kinds of product but the biggest portion of it has been in some kind of metal fabrication.

It's always been my belief that manufacturing is what makes a country great and makes a country strong, that’s where my life blood’s been. I love building things and I love to see people build things and take pride in building those things.

[0:03:54.9] GS: When you look at manufacturing in the US right now, how do you feel about the state of that?

[0:04:00.1] JS: It is kind of concerning. One of the things that greatly concerns me is that we seem to not be driving in our country trade schools, learning how to be an electricians, learning how to be wielders, learning how to be carpenters. We’ve kind of taken it the work manufacturing is a, you know, that’s a second-class top of career.

People kind of look at it like, “Well, you know, you work with your hands.” Yeah, I work with my hands, I’m proud of it because that car you drive or that house you live in was built by people that enjoy manufacturing. So, I’m hoping that at some point in time, we’ll make a transition and start bringing back more and more manufacturing into the US.

I think COVID inadvertently has shown where we have a lot of shortfalls in our manufacturing in this country. We are far too dependent on outside sources to provide the products that we use daily and we’ve got to get back to where we’re more self-sufficient for a lack of a better word, you know? We can’t rely on someone on the other side of the world because things can happen that cut us off from that.

[0:05:22.3] MH: You were bringing up people’s perception of manufacturing as a whole, manufacturing over the years has changed. Back in 1920s, early 1900s, you were looking at dirty factories, a lot of grease, a lot of dust, a lot of unsafe environments, tell us a little bit about the modern day manufacturing plant, what type of environment is it?

[0:05:45.2] JS: A lot of it is cleaner than your house. People want to live in a clean environment, they don’t want to go to a dirty, dark facility. In the last six months, I just had all new lighting put in our facility because our lighting was getting kind of – some age on it. It wasn’t sufficient, so we up-fitted and replaced all the lights once our facility with high bay LED’s. Just that changes people perception. You know, when you start cleaning things up and you start organizing things and I had a president of a company one time tell me, “The first thing that a customer looks at when he walks in the door is the floor.”

Now, if the floor is dirty, that’s his first opinion of your company, “This company is dirty” if they don’t take pride in their facility, how are they going to take pride in the product they’re producing for me? At any given moment in a day, messes happen but we’re trying to keep things clean and keep things organized and we want to create a good environment for my employees to work in.

[0:06:55.0] MH: Absolutely. What are some of the biggest challenges that your industry is facing today?

[0:07:00.9] JS: There really are two huge factors right now. One is available labor. I talk to a lot of people and everybody’s struggling with the same thing, we all need more people. We’re having a hard time finding good qualified or competent labor to help support our operations. The other thing is, material availability. It’s getting where parts that I once could get tomorrow is taking me a week now to get. 

I’ve got some items that they went on from two-week lead times to six- and eight-week lead times. A lot of that again is tied back to the current health situation in our country. A lot of it is the logistic situation in our country, so there are a lot of things coming ahead but our current labor who in this reason, I know, because we’ve had such substantial growth in the recent years, the labor pool is very small. Every company is jockeying for the same person.

[0:08:06.6] MH: Looking down the road 10 years from now, do you think it will be the same challenges or do you foresee any future challenges down the line?

[0:08:15.5] JS: I actually think some of the challenges may still be the same. I think labor is going to be kind of this – it’s kind of one of these cycles. You have a good labor pull for a few years and then you don’t have a labor pull for a few years, so it kind of goes back and forth. Material availability and those constraints are pretty much the same but I do see that getting worse over time because they’re just, there are more companies that come into the market and using up more raw materials so it's going to start stretching those lead times out more and more as time goes by.

We like to think we live in a world with unlimited resources but the reality is, we have very limited resources all around that can be utilized at any given time. Just trying to manage those things and making sure we’re communicating with customers that, “Okay, this is what our supply chain is able to do to support us and our ability to support you.”

[0:09:19.4] GS: What advice would you give someone that’s wanting to get into the manufacturing industry?

[0:09:22.6] JS: You know, a lot of it is, do your homework. If you’re trying to break into manufacturing, you’ve got to look at what are the available resources that you're going to need, what’s the labor pool going to be like, you know, I’ve talked with a lot of – I didn’t go straight out of high school int college. I went to work and supported a family, raised a family and then later in life was, I had the opportunity to go back to college to finish my college education, which has helped me move up in the organization. 

Now with that, it’s given me a greater appreciation of what it takes to build things because I have done what my people on the floor do now, I’ve done that and so I understand that everything doesn’t always go perfectly. You always overpromise and under deliver these days but we try to under promise and overdeliver is what we want to do.

I try to explain to people, study people, learn from people, watch people, learn their mannerisms, learn how they interact, what their triggers are and get you a good team to work with you because I do not try to know everything but I want to try to know the people that I can ask when there are things that I don’t know.

[0:10:46.2] MH: As a manufacturing leader, what do you think are some of the best resources or books or other things you’ve utilized along the way that you think would be good to pass along to other manufacturing leaders?

[0:10:58.8] JS: You know, there was a book that I always turn on to several years back on and it’s actually called, The Goal, which is an outstanding book. It gets in the theory of constraints and it teaches managers to kind of look outside the box to see where things are going on. The name of it is, The Goal: The process of ongoing improvement. It is a very useful, you know, I ask people when you try to get into things, “Where’s the leader in a group?” and people always say, “Well, they’re in front of the line” and I say, “I tend to disagree.”

The leader is neither at the front nor the back but somewhere in the middle because one, they’re trying to keep people from running away but they’re also trying to keep people pulled along. Often now, I see a lot of young managers, they want to take off in the front and take off running and they leave their teams behind and then they wonder why they weren’t necessarily effective and it’s not that you weren’t so effective, you just left your team behind so you could get it done.

Automotive industry, if you’ve ever dealt much with them, it’s all about what did you do, what have you done and what most of it, I had a really good plant manager one time and one of them is in automotive. He said, “We want to be able to tell our story, tell our story well but tell the story what we did, what we accomplished as a group and as a team” and that I think is one thing that young managers especially need to learn. They need all the support they can get from the people that have done these things and try to learn from that.

[0:12:43.4] GS: What was the biggest obstacle that you faced and how did you overcome it?

[0:12:47.6] JS: The biggest obstacle I’ve ever faced I guess, let me put it like this, the hardest obstacle I’ve every faced in my career was back in 2002. I was filling the role as general manager and technical inside manager for a fabricator in Charlotte North Carolina and unfortunately, I found out in about August that the company was going to file bankruptcy and then it went on and it turned into going from a bankruptcy to actually was going to turn into a shutdown situation and that is probably for any manager is the hardest thing to try to do is you go into work every day because I was not at liberty to share that information at that time. 

But you try to put on an exit phase and you’re game face and you are communicating with people, knowing that in a couple of short months that you’re going to completely turn your world upside down because what they think how they provide for their families is going to be gone and it was a very eye opening experience for me and a very hard experience for me because I was a lot younger at that time and you know, I made a promise to myself then that that would never happen again if there was anything that I could do about it. 

So now, I teach my supervisors and the people that I work with, we’re always going to be good stewards of our business, we’re going to take care of our business and in doing so, we’re taking care of each other.

[0:14:28.5] MH: Tell us a little bit about the processes and what a typical day-to-day looks like at your facility? 

[0:14:34.9] JS: In essence, we’re a contract manufacturer for structural fabricated metal, so we have a, what we call a material conversion department, which takes raw material and processes into some of the usable form where that’s a plasma cut piece of sheet metal in its form or a 20-foot lamp of tube is cut down to make cut lamp pieces. We kick off in the morning, my material conversion department, then we have full welding departments. 

We have a full assembly, we do powder coat and then final assembly and then ship the product. I come in the morning first thing, you know, first thing you have to do is go through all emails to see what went wrong during the night, you know, what did the gremlins do while you were asleep and then kick off and see again what must be provided and say, “Okay, is everyone here?” where we’re at and make a round through the plant. 

Then at 8:30 in the morning, I call, everybody comes to my office, all my functional supervisors and my maintenance guy and we sit down. We do a 15 to 20 minute meeting. We go over objectives of the day. We go over what kind of constraints do we have to meeting those objectives, what kind of support, additional support may an area need, are there any material issues or are there any maintenance issues. 

We hash those down as quickly as possible and then we go back to it, then throughout the course of the day, I’ll make probably six to eight laps around the plant and check in to see how we’re doing and is everything going well. Is there anything I can do and you know, I can help you as much as I can help you but I don’t want to hinder you and then we’ll go from there and then towards the end of the day, we’ll make a final lap around. 

We will see what got finished up, what we got completed, did we meet our targets for the day and everyone in the plant at 4:30 will head home. I will typically be here another 15 minutes to an hour, finishing up the emails that you have to do at the end of the day, reporting down informations to the people I answer to, answering questions from sales or customers and then finally, able to shut it down for the night and be ready to start back first thing the next morning. 

[0:17:02.0] GS: I was just curious, a customer comes to you, they say, “All right, I got to ship 10,000 of these widgets. Here is the size and dimensions” and then you go and you make the – creating whatever is necessary on your end and then you ship and then you ship those to the customer or do they send you the products and you package it. How does that work? 

[0:17:21.0] JS: We don’t do any internal packaging at this facility but our facility is the only manufacturing facility at packIQ out. Sales we’ll get with our engineering because the customer has made an inquiry. We’ll do a concept drawing of a packaging rack, they will submit that to the customer, we’ll go through a whole design process. We use solid works here, they’ll send us all the mapped data. 

We will make sure the rack has both the size that they want and have the potential part density they want. Then typically it’s kicked off, we’ll build a prototype rack. When we do a prototype rack, the customer would typically send us a quantity of parts. We’ll test fit those in the rack, more often than not, we’ll leave most of them in the rack and ship the rack to them because they want to see how the parts ride in transit. 

They’ll inspect the rack once they get it in their facility, there is a whole design review to see if everything worked right, if everything fits right. It may come back and go through some of the additional redesign and get back through our prototype department for some adjustments. This may go on for two or three weeks, this back and forth before they’ll finally kick off a – if it automotive with truck and bus, they’ll do a preproduction run. 

We may build a small quantity of racks, we’ll ship to them to our customers, they will test and they will transport it back and forth between tier twos and tier ones to make sure everything – they’ll review them on the shop floor with their operators that are actually using them and then if everything goes well, they’ll kick off a fleet. A fleet of racks could be anywhere from 50 racks to 2,500 racks. It just depends on what the size of the part is a lot of times. 

[0:19:26.7] MH: Johnny, tell us about the equipment that you guys use at your facility? 

[0:19:29.9] JS: We use a lot of stuff that a lot of smaller jobs officer do. We have a five by ten high depth plasma. We also have a ten-foot 80-ton press break. We do a little bit of in milling here, we have an in-mill at bridge port, which we primarily use for whole layout in tubes. We have one robotic welder, which is a large footprint and a large dual-sided rotary table robotic welder. I have about 14 welding machines currently on the production side. 

We have a hot mech auto saw, so we have the capability to cut production tube in here and then, you know, we go through the weld process. We have a powder coat booth, which is about a 12 by 20 by 12 foot high and then a powder coat oven, which is approximately the same size and then we have a general assembly area, which uses small hand tools. We use a lot of Dewalt hand tools because they’re very versatile for doing light assembly work. 

[0:20:40.6] GS: What is the biggest challenge to keep production running when you have issues with your equipment? 

[0:20:45.8] JS: One of the biggest issues I’ve had here of recent unfortunately is my maintenance personnel left the organization about three months ago, so it’s been kind of a struggle to keep things going. Luckily, I just hired a maintenance guy today so I am very – it is a good day. 

[0:21:03.7] GS: Oh, that’s awesome. 

[0:21:04.6] JS: Good well-rounded maintenance guys are hard to find. You’ve got a lot of specialized maintenance guys out there now but having a good well-rounded one is a rarity apparently. Other than that, you know, every day brings a new challenge. We were building a rack today and the [dunish 0:21:23.5] didn’t fit correctly. I said, “Okay, what do we need to do? What kind of modification do we need to make to make everything work?” 

You know, I look at every day has a new and exciting challenge, a new exciting opportunity for a solution and we just have to figure out that solution sometime. 

[0:21:42.1] GS: Yeah, you had mentioned earlier that you guys put in some LED lighting. Do you guys have any other energy initiatives or things that you are working on right now? 

[0:21:49.3] JS: We are working on, you know, one of the things that I am trying to do, I’ve been waiting on is to get my maintenance guy re-staffed. We’re going to do a complete layout change for the plant. We had started in 2021 and got side tracked there again because of COVID, so I couldn’t bring outside contractors in. We’re going to do an actual complete re-layout to try to improve the efficiency of our product lines. 

We currently run two weld lines that are run at one direction in our plant. We are actually going to turn those in a 90 degree direction orientation on what they currently are and shorten them to try to increase the efficiency of those lines. We’re constantly looking for ways to improve the efficiency of what we currently have. It’s a challenge like everything else. You know, a lot of people just want to come to work, do their job and go home. 

To get people thinking about ways to improve our operation, improve our process is difficult sometime to get the additional support because everybody comes from somewhere and everybody has seen something that worked really good here at one place or another and what I need people to do is bring those ideas forward and let’s see if we can incorporate those to increase our efficiency and increase our productivity and help us be a stronger organization overall. 

[0:23:24.0] MH: Very good. Well Johnny, thank you so much for joining us today. If some of our listeners want to connect with you online, what is the best way for them to get a hold of you? 

[0:23:33.5] JS: Sending me a message through LinkedIn or they can email me direct, johnny.g.smith.jr@gmail.com. 

[0:23:46.3] MH: Perfect, thank you so much Johnny. We appreciate you joining us today. We enjoyed learning about packIQ and your journey. 

[0:23:54.3] JS: It’s been my pleasure gentleman.

[0:23:56.1] GS: Thank you so much. 

[0:23:57.1] JS: I have enjoyed listening to some of your podcasts, you know? I think personally manufacturing is where it’s at. 

[0:24:04.4] MH: Amen, we agree a 100%. 

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[0:24:06.3] MH: Hi folks, this is Morty. I just wanted to put a special announcement at the end of this episode. We’re so grateful to Johnny Smith Jr. joining us from packIQ. He’s a plant manager that has many years of experience in this industry and it’s great to listen to everyone’s golden nuggets of information, solutions, issues that they deal with because we’re all in this together and so, a lot of other manufacturing leaders have reached out to me and asked how they could be a guest on the show and it’s real simple: Send me an email at morty@theindustrialmovement.com. 

Mostly who we’ve been speaking to are plant managers, operations managers, we’ve had a few maintenance managers on. We’d love to make that even broader, human resources, purchasing, safety, any aspect of manufacturing, we’d like to delve in and learn more about it. We think that we’d love to have all types of leaders on the show to help us get a broader view of how manufacturing operates in the United States. If you are interested, email me at morty@theindustrialmovement.com. Once I receive your email, we can begin a dialogue and start to discuss what are some things that you can share with the show and some value you can bring to our listeners.

Thank you so much for listening. 

[OUTRO]

[0:25:35.6] MH: Well folks, that’s it for this week’s episode. Be sure to visit our website, www.theindustrialmovement.com, to view today’s shownotes and get more golden nuggets of value that we have collected from manufacturing and industrial professionals in our achieved episodes. On our website, you can also sign up for our newsletter and find links to join The Industrial Movement community on Facebook. 

The Industrial Movement Podcast is where we discuss the people, the process and the equipment that drives American manufacturing. I’m your host, Morty Hodge, wishing you great success. 

[END]