Jeff, could you please tell me a bit about yourself.
My name is Jeff Perkins.
I’m the Product Manager for composites manufacturing work cells at Radius engineering. I’ve been here about 10 years.
And on a personal level?
I like outdoor recreation.
That’s part of the reason I live here in beautiful Salt Lake City, UTah. Skiing, Snowboarding, mountain biking, things like that for fun.
And then here at work – as a product manager.
I try to guide the development of product features; to deliver customer satisfaction for our equipment.
That’s really my main goal in this role.
What we try to do is deliver manufacturing capability to our customers so they can be successful for the production of high rate, high quality composites manufacturing, for the aerospace market primarily.
I lead a team of engineers to design and build and support equipment for the life of production programs.
What do you love the most about your work?
What I love here at Radius is that we care about our people here.
We’re a fairly small company, but we get to deliver exciting technology and capability to our customers and our culture is built around really constant innovation.
And I really love that part of what we do as well. But it’s really the talented people that come to work here.
I am excited about what we do that are the source of all of that success and I feel like most of the people here feel valued in their professional contributions, but also who they are as an individual with their families and their personal lives as well, which is I think fairly unique about Radius.
And what do you find is a main challenge at Radius and how does it impact your role?
I think probably the biggest challenges are related to the cyclical and sometimes volatile nature of the aerospace market that we’re primarily focused on.
This has really been a big challenge for us and most of our customers and most of the people in industry the last few years.
Of course the pandemic’s impact on the commercial aerospace sector particularly as well as major OEM program difficulties, I think has somewhat stunted the growth trajectory for new technologies to be implemented at US manufacturers in particular.
And so one of our biggest challenges today, I think is to mature our technologies for the production of net-shape composite structures, so that more manufacturers are able to seize the opportunity for a step change in their operations.
When that opportunity comes.
We may see this opportunity, I think with, you know either new markets like AAM or potentially next generation aircraft. But right now, we really need to focus on helping our customers build a foundation of good processes that will serve as their launching pad, so to speak, for future success.
And that’s really why we’ve been interested in working with Plataine to help improve the digitalization of the resin transfer molding process in particular, which is an area of our focus.
We’re really happy to collaborate on this together, since it’s also one of our goals to help customers to transform their businesses digitally to improve their efficiency or course.
Is sustainability, recycling or circular manufacturing something that you deal with right now, is it part of the company agenda?
I think we’re not as focused on recycling and the circular economy from a sustainability standpoint, we’re really more focused on how to eliminate waste initially.
And that can come, you know, from just better processing to eliminate scrap and also reduction of energy consumption throughout of autoclave processes.
What will be your best tip for digital net transformation, which we discussed earlier?
I think the biggest thing that I try to talk about with our customers is to think about how to do things right from the beginning and build quality into the process right from the get go.
Too often I see manufacturers that are boxed in by short term decisions that are based off of cost and lead time and then they don’t have a means to change that operating paradigm for really sustainable operations in the future.
And again, sustainability in this context for us is mostly around achieving efficient processes through high first pass yield that then also lead to on time delivery and ultimately need to be profitable for the manufacturers and provide value for OEMs.
So you’re actually focusing on strategizing and the plan like working, focusing on the strategy and then ultimately it will affect the bottom line.
Absolutely, yeah. What’s the approach to manufacturing and how do you implement processes that are robust and repeatable to deliver the quality of the part the first time through?
There’s obviously a lot of waste if people are scrapping parts, if they’re having to rework parts, there’s tremendous opportunity there to reduce energy consumption and improve profit overall, by following that operating model.
On a personal note, I would like to ask you if you weren’t a product Product Manager for Radius, what would you like to be doing, what would be your wish?Skiing and biking around?
I would do that more often, certainly.
Yeah, I would spend as much time outside enjoying the recreation that I like as much as possible, but I I’m definitely the type of person.to want to be busy and look for goals to accomplish.
Very engineering minded, I’d say throughout my career and even in my younger years, so I probably would still be involved in engineering in some capacity.
But of course, you know spending more time recreating would be would be nice as well.
Great. And Jeff, I would like to thank you for this insightful interview for ‘Crazy for Composites’
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