Career

Nearly fifty years in manufacturing, finishing, process engineering, and figuring out how to make things work a little better.

Jeffrey P. Routzahn

I've spent most of my adult life working in manufacturing. I started in 1978, and somehow a job in quality control turned into a career that has lasted nearly fifty years.

Most of that career has revolved around finishing — paint, pretreatment, electro-deposition, powder coating, liquid paint, process control, environmental requirements, and all the headaches that come with keeping a production line running the way it's supposed to.

I certainly didn't have all of that planned when I started.

I was born in Connersville, Indiana. I attended Indiana University in Richmond and graduated in 1978 with an Associate Degree in Business Management. Later, I earned a Bachelor of Science in Management from California Coast University.

It started with dishwashers

In 1978, I went to work for Design and Manufacturing Corporation in my hometown of Connersville. D&M manufactured dishwashers, and my first job was in quality control.

In 1980, I moved into an electro-deposition technician position. That was really the beginning of the career I would spend the next several decades building.

What started with learning one paint process eventually grew into learning the entire finishing operation — pretreatment, electro-deposition, powder and liquid paint, process controls, troubleshooting, environmental compliance, and everything else that has to work together to put a durable finish on a manufactured product.

D&M was eventually purchased by Frigidaire, so although the company name changed, I continued working in the dishwasher business. Over the years, I moved through engineering and paint-related responsibilities and had the opportunity to work on improving and upgrading finishing operations.

Building a career in finishing

In 1988, I became Division Finishing Engineer for York Products.

I returned to the Frigidaire/D&M operation in 1990, working in process engineering and later paint supervision. By then, finishing wasn't just something I worked around. It had become my specialty.

In 1995, I joined Greene Manufacturing in Connersville as Manager of E-Coat Operations.

A couple of years later, I moved a few miles down the road to Cambridge City, Indiana, where I became Manager of Paint Operations for Steelworks MEG Division. Steelworks manufactured retail gondola shelving — the metal shelving and display systems commonly used in stores.

By that point, I'd gone from inspecting products in a quality-control position to engineering, troubleshooting and managing the processes used to finish them.

The Hayes Lemmerz years

In 1998, I joined Hayes Lemmerz International in Huntington, Indiana, as a manufacturing engineer.

Hayes manufactured aluminum wheels for the automotive industry, and it became a major chapter of my career. Automotive manufacturing brought a different scale and a different set of demands, but the basic challenge was familiar: understand the process, find out what's going wrong, and make it better.

While at Hayes, I became heavily involved in Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma. In 2003, I completed Six Sigma Greenbelt training and certification through Hayes Lemmerz, and those tools became an important part of the way I approached manufacturing problems.

I especially enjoyed leading Manage by Fact and Kaizen teams. They brought people from different parts of an operation together to solve real problems. The goal wasn't just to improve a product — it was to improve the way an entire operation worked, and to give people the tools to keep it improving long after the team broke up.

The Power Partners years

When Hayes closed the last of its American cast-aluminum plants in February 2009, I wasn't done with the paint line yet. In 2010, I went to work for Power Partners in Athens, Georgia, as a senior process engineer — and I'm still there today.

Power Partners was bought out by ERMCO, and these days the plant builds electrical transformers. The product is a long way from dishwashers and aluminum wheels, but the challenge is the same one I've chased since 1980: the finish still has to be right. I still run the paint process — pretreatment, electro-deposition, powder and liquid paint.

We live in Cumming, Georgia, and I make the drive over to Athens and back. After nearly fifty years of making things look right and hold up, I'm hoping to hang up my hat next year and enjoy the next chapter of life — family, hobbies, and time for the good things.