Hi, my name is Sam Pugliese, operations manager at Anchor Bay Powder Coat, and our plant runs on Steelhead. My role here is to pretty much ensure the day-to-day operations, making sure all my employees have what they need to do their job accurately and precisely, ensuring the quality of all of our customers' work, and making sure they get the best work possible. I've been here going on nine years. When I was here, I think we had 12 guys in the shop, and now we're up to upwards of 50 employees, so we've definitely grown a lot in that nine years. I started as just an unloader, general labor, and I've kind of just worked my way up the ladder. Pretty much, I've worked every position here. We have a lot more specific processes. We just know what we need to get done, especially for more of the military work that we've grown into. That needs to be precise, and we need to have this collected data in one spot, and the paper just wasn't viable.
It just didn’t make sense after a while because there was too much of it—all the certs, all the prints, all the masking instructions, all this stuff. You’d have just a packet of paper, and then all of a sudden one guy loses it, or it ends up in a burn-off. For people, we make mistakes, and it gets burned off. Next thing you know, “Oh, that was the original copy of the print,” and then someone didn't take a picture of it or it's not in the system. So it's like, well, now we have to call the customer and chase down more prints, and that’s days you're losing on a part, and then you're late, and your customer is mad.
But going digital, you know, you just scan it, and everything's there—the original received order, the prints, the masking instructions, where it’s at in the shop. It’s just in the palm of your hands. I don’t know what you can ask to be better. The certifications are just so easy now. Now that all of our guys have the processes down, we're doing all the right stuff—the water breaking, the anchor profile, all the stuff for the military work that needs to get done. It’s all getting entered in, so making a cert is literally just button clicking, and it’s made.
You’re making sure you’re inventorying all your powders, making sure you're choosing your powder on which work orders. All that stuff is so simple. It's just clicks of buttons that start auto-generating. You sign it on the screen, and you send it to your customer. It streamlines it so fast.
One of the biggest things is the support they give. It’s top-notch. Like, I really, it’s one of my favorite things for sure, and the potential that comes with that support. We’re going to have weekly meetings. You can have daily meetings. I can call them three times a day, and they’re going to pick up the phone, they’re going to answer, and they’re going to help me solve the problems. If I have a problem, “Hey, this isn’t scanning right,” boom, there’s a text message, and someone’s on it. It’s just ridiculously fast support, so that’s huge because it’s worth its weight in gold right there.
You know, if you're sitting there and you don't have a problem with, and you can't move a part forward, and you don't get that day support, well, then that part has to stay there. It can't move forward. But if you get support in five to ten minutes, I mean, that's perfect because then those parts aren’t going to be stuck in limbo; they're going to be able to move through your shop and out the door, and your customer is not going to feel that at all. I mean, it’s saving me hours a day just, and it saves other people hours a day. It’s not just me. It’s everyone saving labor. I mean, in every area, just because it’s just so easy.