Tag: experience

15 Years – Comfort Crisis or Continued Challenge?

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According to the Department of Labor, the average tenure for an employee in manufacturing is currently at 4.9 years. This number has consistently declined since 2014 as seen in the image below. This is not new information. I still remember when I was interviewing at EXAIR, the next tenure Application Engineer had been here for 12 years. That was in 2010. That made me believe that EXAIR treats its employees well and that people are happy to stay. I was drawn to this because I came from a family where my parents both worked for the same Steel Mill for over 35 years. Seeing a company that had an average tenure in the department I was going to join, sitting at 15 years, was at the top of my list.

1 – Median Employee Tenure Within Industries

At the same time, I was leaving a job I had been in for 5 years and was still learning consistently, just the economy was dropping out, and the industry was struggling. Would I be happy working in an office with this crew? I wasn’t afraid of being a young person and not knowing anything, I was confident I could learn. Well, flash forward through several years of constant learning, and now I am the most experienced Application Engineer. We have had some retirements and then lots of promotions leading up to this point. The one constant has been that I have always had new products, processes, or aspects of EXAIR and the compressed air industry to learn.

I mentioned the comfort crisis in the title because a lot of people I talk to ask me if I stay at EXAIR because I am comfortable. In all honesty, there has been a constant source of growth since I started. Whether it be our continuous product expansions forcing me to learn new materials. Obtaining my MBA from NKU to better understand the business side of EXAIR over the technical side of our products. Taking on different roles or contributing to new processes. Even up to the latest partnership with BETE Fog Nozzles, nowhere in the 15 years has there been a full month of pure comfort.

No one knows where the future will take us. All I can say is that I have been very blessed to make it this far and the future is looking even more exciting than the past. So tune in and stay with me, no matter where you go, let’s see where this ride goes.

Brian Farno, MBA – CCASS Application Engineer

BrianFarno@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_BF

1 – Median Employee Tenure Within Industries – US Bureau of Labor Statistics – Retrieved from https://www.bls.gov/news.release/tenure.t05.htm

Basketball Season Has Come To An End

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This past weekend was one filled with many emotions in the Farno household. It was the tournament weekend for my youngest daughter’s basketball team, which I was the assistant coach for. This was our second season as a team, and we still had to learn a new dynamic this season because we added a player, and we were bumped up in our league after a strong performance in the tournament last year.

With that, came a season that did not have as many wins when you look at our record. You wouldn’t know it because of how these girls played for the full season though. Not once did we have a girl want to quit or mention that they weren’t good because we were losing. This is due to the families of our teams believing in them and our coaching position and style. Our head coach continually pushed these girls that wins and losses happen. Is it fun to win? Yes, is it fun to lose? No. What can we do about it when we lose? We can evaluate what went well, what didn’t and did we improve over the last time we stepped on the court. We didn’t sugarcoat every loss, we also didn’t tear down and focus only on the negative. Instead, we worked on skills and then we worked on their mental perseverance. When they would get out hustled or when fouls didn’t seem to get evenly called, we would remind them and ourselves that there are only two things they can control. Their attitude and their effort.

The standings shown here won’t matter past this weekend and that is something that is hard to convey to a 10-year-old.

When a player was getting upset, whether based on their mistakes or another factor, like an aggressive player on the other team, we simply reminded them of the tools they are equipped with and that all they can change is their attitude and effort on the matter. We would point out these skills they had forgotten they had in the moment. This wasn’t always easy, and we weren’t always perfect at doing it by any means. At one point in the season, we had a therapy session during practice and went through each player to tell them how we have seen them grow this year and what they should be proud of. This was just as much for their self-confidence as it was for our own.

As the assistant coach of the team, I really try to run support for the head coach and make sure our subs are ready. If a player during the game has a question or issue, I try to handle it. During practices, I would act as a defender, or just support whatever the coach was trying to teach. I distributed a lot of band-aids and several instant ice packs. I also tried to always encourage them on the wins that I saw while they were on the court. The fact of the matter was, I was there as support for the entire team and I would always try to look forward to seeing what was going to be needed and anticipating what I would need to do, whether it was a parent volunteer for a scorekeeper, a concussion check for the girl that just got hip-checked to the floor, or a high five for the girl that just made her first shot of the game, or the one that missed hers. No matter what, I tried to be prepared and anticipate what was coming. Sometimes this worked, other times it didn’t. How does this connect to EXAIR?

Early one morning, I got to use a ride-on floor scrubber to try and mop the gym. The sun coming in, and the peaceful situation really made me appreciate my situation.

Well, I do the same thing in my role as an Application Engineer. When someone contacts us with a blowoff need or a static electricity issue in their process, I immediately go to work trying to connect the dots in my wild mind to what they need and how fast can we get this obstacle conquered together. If a customer has a product that isn’t quite working right, I start the process of what could have gone wrong, and I try to be methodical in my process of troubleshooting. This all comes from experience and I have been doing this for 15 years now. I never thought I would be an assistant basketball coach since the last time I played was in 6th grade. Well, I also never thought I would be a Certified Compressed Air System Specialist, yet here I am, because there was a need and I filled the need that was presented to me, just like the girls on this basketball team did.

By no means do I get every single product selection, or assistant coaching task right. By no means am I perfect, and I don’t claim to be. I do, however, try to make sure my attitude is focused on achieving the task at hand, whether it be helping a player set a good pick or a customer select the right vacuum, then I make sure I exert the effort needed to get the answers and solutions that both sides need.

Brian Farno, MBA – CCASS Application Engineer

BrianFarno@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_BF

Downtime: It Isn’t Always BAD

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When you say Downtime in an industrial or manufacturing setting, it may easily carry a negative connotation. This means that the output of production is not happening and input to production has halted as well. If this is not planned, it is absolutely a worst-case scenario. In our personal lives, though, downtime generally doesn’t have a negative meaning behind it. That’s the time to disconnect and recharge to maximize your output after you return to production and that is exactly what I had the luxury to do recently. This is also a message I received from a person I look up to and trust in their experiences. Vacation time can be looked at similar to a preventative and planned downtime of equipment. Without it we just wear down and eventually productivity grinds to a halt. While hanging out at a lake with my daughters this past week, I helped them hone their fishing skills. They each baited their own hooks with worms and chose their spots. We completely slayed some bluegills, and released every single one of them.

The calm of a storm rolling in when you have nothing to do is serene.

Prescribed maintenance, preventative maintenance, vacations all help to build back into the production of whatever good or service the company provides. The entire production of a facility all starts with the utilities, energy, water, compressed air, steam, other compressed gases, and the personnel. If your power input isn’t maintained, monitoring connections and disconnects, you can find yourself with a lack of service, resulting in dangerous situations. City water is often required for processes or for the facility to function properly, even an office building needs it for plumbing, fire suppression, and drinking. Steam, compressed gases and compressed air may all be required by the processes.

Servicing the compressed air where it starts is one of the most critical steps in operating a compressed air system. Making sure that your compressor has the minimum downtime, all starts with the preventative and prescriptive maintenance. One of the first tasks should always be changing and monitoring the intake air filter. Like Russ Bowman said a while back in his blog, take a deep breath, if you sneeze or smell something that is from the intake air your nose just took in from the surrounding area. That’s even after your nose hair has already partially filtered air intake. Your compressor is no different. If you let it suck up debris, dust, and pollen, then it is eventually going to have a failure. Instead of sneezing, it may burn up a vane, valve, scroll or screw. That is going to be a considerably higher cost and longer downtime than just performing the manufacturer’s listed items to maintain optimal performance.

The compressor shown above according to the caretaker receives a regular change on the airfilter every month. This is just before the cleaning and changeover. Not only do they change the filter, they make sure to clean the entire housing inside and out. That’s one of the ways this compressor has lasted with minimal downtime over the past 20 years.

If you want to learn more about other key maintenance items in your compressed air system, please contact an Application Engineer today.

Brian Farno, MBA – CCASS Application Engineer

BrianFarno@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_BF

The Value of Going Back to Where it All Began

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This past week I was able to take part in one of the many incentives EXAIR offers to all of our team members, a volunteer day. EXAIR gives each employee the choice to go out into our community and choose an organization they connect with to volunteer for either a single 8-hour day or two 4-hour shifts. The past couple of years, I have reconnected with the director of the Mechanical Engineering Technology department at the University of Cincinnati where I received an undergraduate degree from to find out how I can get involved with the program and help the department that gave me the knowledge and understanding I use in my career. Much to my surprise, the first thing that came to mind for him was to be a judge at the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences Senior Tech Expo. This expo is where each student will showcase their Senior Design Project which they must complete in order to graduate. The judges are all alumni of their given programs and the students can elect to have their project be judged for various prizes that are donated by local companies and alumni. This was my third year judging for the MET department and there have been several of us that have networked and really get reminded of exactly where we were when we graduated and the amount of experience we lacked at the time.

There were 11 projects total in the MET discipline that were elected to be judged this year. We had 12 judges show up, so we broke into 4 teams. Three teams judged three projects while the remaining judged two larger scale projects. We judge the individuals/teams on different criteria like, communication skills, technical knowledge, presentation, complexity, marketability, and innovation. The projects my team evaluated were a hybrid system that would bolt onto an early 2000s Nissan Frontier and increase the vehicles’ efficiency, a team from the UC Battle Robotics Club, and a company-backed project to increase efficiency on vegetation mitigation equipment to better sustain power within the new equipment designs.

Each of these projects had great goals, highs, lows, oversights, learning points, and yet it was very great to see how truly vested each of these students had become in this project. They knew their subject inside and out and even when they had a pitfall come. This did not derail them, this took me back to when the team I was part of built a Basic Utility Vehicle as our project. We competed in a national competition with a vehicle which was fully funded by sponsorship we obtained and poured hours upon hours of work and sweat into it. The drivetrain which I designed did experience two different failures during our competition. Rather than loading up and taking a loss, we pushed through as a team, we made a new chain tensioner with parts from a hardware store, and found a judge with a welder nearby which permitted us to weld a broken attachment point back on. Ultimately, we took second place. A team of 4 students was only beaten by a team of 12 from Wisconsin. The experience I learned in that process and time during the competition truly taught me that if you are passionate about something you will make it happen. That’s the same level of passion I saw in each of the students that I interviewed during the judging cycle.

In the end, it really builds one of my favorite sayings, “You can’t teach experience.” Each of these students has experienced a lot, and yet they still have so much to learn. Without the volunteer program here at EXAIR, I may not have gotten to go back to my alma mater and participate as a judge for the Tech Expo. That’s an experience I have gained a lot from. Mainly, instead of asking judgmental questions, ask curiously. This often means asking open-ended questions that aren’t so pointed. This generally brings out more reasoning and explanation than one could expect and leads to a more comfortable discussion. These students all helped me to see that, and it let their passions shine straight through. Once the interviews were done, all the judges came together and dispersed $12,000 in prizes for various awards to these 11 projects within the Mechanical Engineering Technology Department. The passion I had for learning and projects still lives to this day. I still keep a list of ideas for EXAIR products that I am saving for rainy days or for the right time to test.

If you have a problem you can’t get past, need a curious question answered or need someone to share in your passion that involves industrial compressed air, moving, cleaning, cooling, coating, eliminating static, spraying, or conserving a resource, share it with us, we’ll be genuinely curious.

Brian Farno, MBA – CCASS Application Engineer

BrianFarno@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_BF